http://www.catholicscholarsforjustice.org

The group and the site are new, and their stated mission is “to promote Catholic Social Teaching on the rights of workers and the indispensible role that unions play in securing justice (1) for workers and their families, (2) in the workplace, and (3) for the universal common good.”  According to its stated purpose, CSWJ members are trying to bring the strong knowledge of Catholic social justice teachings to bear on public perceptions of those teachings and to actually apply it in real world situations involving union organizing and labor disputes.

This brings to mind individuals like George Higgins and John A. Ryan (whose papers we have here at the archives), two scholarly priests who spent their lives trying to apply Catholic teachings as expressed Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, as well as the U.S. Bishops’ teachings on economic justice.   Both Ryan and Higgins, in fact, headed the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and their opinions were highly respected by Catholic and non-Catholic leaders alike.  We are still working on processing Monsignor Higgins’ papers, but our websites feature lots of materials that anyone who wants to educate themselves on matters of Catholic social justice.  In addition to the site on the Bishops’ Program, we have a site on Catholic responses to industrialization, which focuses on three different approaches to problems of social justice precipitated by industrial change.  You can find that one here:

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/industrial/cri_wel.html

Another one that focuses wholly on the question of the living wage—How Much Is Enough?  Can be found here: 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/howmuch/hm_wel.html

This last site addresses many issues that continue to be relevant, such as the role of advertising in creating need, and a Catholic perspective on when consumption shades into excess.  This 1999 OSV article suggests the continuing relevance of the question: 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/howmuch/osv.pdf

While the comment form requires an email address, we will not make it public. This is just one way to combat spam. We will also review comments before they appear on the site to make sure nothing inappropriate gets posted.

Please communicate with us! We want to know what you think. Other ways to converse include our Facebook page, group and the suggestion box in the Mullen lobby. There are also a number of ways to contact a librarian directly.

We look forward to hearing from you!

http://www.osjspm.org/majordoc_us_bishops_statements_program_of_social_reconstruction.aspx

This Social Justice site offers great teaching resources that can be used in tandem with the primary document .pdfs and images on our own.

Clearly, getting the site up this late in the school year isn’t ideal for attracting educators and their students to use it, but this particular site will also be useful for researchers, since so many of the documents are unavailable elsewhere on the Web.  I’ll direct you to a real gem: here is a scrapbook depicting the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s founding years, (when it was still called the National Catholic War Council).  The album is a chronicle of the earliest organized activities of the War Council and offers a window on organized American Catholic life ca. 1919.  Sorry there are no captions, we know little about the activities depicted in most of the images. 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/bishops/slideshow.html

Your comments on the images, the new site, how it might be used in the classroom or conducting research, as well as on any of our American Catholic History Classroom sites are welcome!