1848–1891

Catholics and the labour question: Ketteler, Manning and the Knights of Labor (1848–1891)

Shelley: in the Catholic world as early as 1848 the German bishop Wilhelm Ketteler (1811–1877) spoke of the problems of factory workers and outlined a “Catholic solution”; in England Cardinal Henry Edward Manning became the workers’ champion, and in the United States the Catholic layman Terence Powderly led the Knights of Labor. Church officials, including the pope, feared trade unions, and only in 1891 did Leo XIII define the Catholic position in the encyclical Rerum Novarum

Key points

• Bishop Ketteler: from 1848 he pointed to the danger of both unrestrained competition and excessive state control
• Bishop Ketteler: he defended workers’ right to associate and urged reforms: profit-sharing, reasonable hours, regulation of labor
• Cardinal Manning: in December 1872 he openly sided with workers, a first for an English Catholic prelate, and asked Gladstone to ban child labor
• Cardinal Manning: in the lecture The Rights and Dignity of Labour (1874) he defended workers’ right to organize and regulated hours
• Knights of Labor: Powderly led the first truly effective U.S. union, open to all faiths though at first heavily Catholic
• Knights of Labor: church authorities feared unions; condemnation was probably avoided thanks to Gibbons’s intercession

People

• Wilhelm Ketteler
• Henry Edward Manning
• Terence Powderly
• James Gibbons

Place

Germany, England, USA