Gerd-Rainer Horn offers a most interesting and perceptive book on some antecedents of liberation theology in twentieth-century Western Europe. He shows well how the basic ideas and efforts of many Catholic persons and groups in Europe in the 1920s through the 1950s are basically the same as those of socially conscious Latin American Catholics in more recent decades. The work is quite scholarly, clearly written, consistently insightful, and stimulating.
Catholic groups working for justice in the nineteenth century were very encouraged, Horn notes, when Leo XIII in 1891 in Rerum Novarum strongly endorsed workers' unions and stressed the importance of justice for the moral and spiritual lives of workers. In the 1920s, Catholic groups applying their faith to social questions received another major boost when Pius XI launched Catholic Action, which consisted of many specific branches such the Young Christian Workers. Though Pius XI put Catholic Action under the supervision of the hierarchy, he did this, Horn stresses, for the sake of Catholic unity. Catholic Action, he says, was “the explicit empowerment of the laity” (81). Horn notes that Pius XI consistently fostered lay activities and was “the patron saint of innovative spirits operating in the age of dictatorships” (82).
The persons and groups that Horn describes here consistently combined theological and social concerns. Joseph Cardijn and the Young Christian Workers, Jacques Maritain in his Integral Humanism, Emmanuel Mounier in “Personalism,” Marie-Dominique Chenu on the theology of labor, and Marc Sangnier in the Le Sillon movement are all major examples of this focus on social consequences of faith. Some of these groups, such as Le Sillon, were censured by the Vatican, but, Horn notes, the dynamic continued in other people. Two Italian priests, Primo Mazzollari and Zeno Saltini, are given significant treatment as important popular leaders for social justice whose influence continued after Vatican censures. Horn devotes a whole chapter to the Mouvement Populaire des Familles, a large, vigorous Catholic project beginning during the Nazi occupation of France that eventually became more leftist and secular in the post-war period.
Another major movement starting during the war was the “Mission de France,” inspired by an eloquent book titled La France, Pays de Mission written in 1943 by two priests, Henri Godin and Yves Daniel. Cardinal Suhard of Paris found it so absorbing that he stayed up all night reading it, and gave strong encouragement to this effort to revitalize Catholicism in France, especially in industrial centers. The “worker priests” largely emerged from this effort, though the Vatican, after giving some partial approval, eventually decided in 1959 that priests should not work in factories.
In a brief concluding chapter, Horn very legitimately claims that the people and groups in this book who devoted themselves to putting faith into practice in their time were forerunners of the release of new energies at Vatican II and of Latin American Liberation Theology. Though the latter does have some emphases that differ from the European movements, he thinks that the similarities outweigh the differences. In this conclusion he devotes more attention to Maritain. He says, improbably, that Latin American bishops like those in Chile who remained silent under the Pinochet dictatorship were trapped and paralyzed by Maritain's distinction of the spiritual and temporal realms. But he makes the point that we always need to study people in their historical context if we are to understand their ideas and their efforts. This book does that quite competently.
There are profuse citations to sources in footnotes and a rather brief but interesting eight-page bibliographical essay.
