FREDERIC OZANAM AND CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING
Our new Pope Leo IVX has chosen an auspicious name. The last Leo – the XIII – is known for promulgating the first great social encyclical of the modern age – Rerum Novarum, published in 1891 – dealing with the effects of industrialisation, with workers’ rights and with social justice. It critiques both socialism and capitalism, prioritises the needs of the poor, and reaffirms the Catholic Church’s determination to ensure the dignity of every human person.
Rerum Novarum is considered the beginning of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) as we know it today.
This Teaching, as members of the SSVP know, is one of the main doctrines of the Catholic Church. It deals with the church’s response to the problems facing the society in which we live. Rooted in Scripture, it provides assistance and guidance on how to tackle the problems – social, political, economic – we face in our everyday lives.
But Rerum Novarum– ground breaking though it was – has its antecedents and its inspiration in writings of many social thinkers who came before. One of these thinkers was Frederic Ozanam.
The main aim of the Society which Ozanam founded in Paris in 1833 was to give practical assistance – financial and material – to the poor and disadvantaged the city. By the time Ozanam was living there in the 1830s, the population, like other urban centres, was on the increase. In the years between 1801 and 1850, it had doubled from just over 500,000 to well over a million. Poor, hungry, homeless, victimised, the plight of ‘Les Miserables’, as Victor Hugo called them, distressed Ozanam a great deal. He did not believe that Christians could stand idly by and watch human suffering on such a scale. The immediate relief of poverty as demonstrated by the foundation and work of SSVP represented efforts to overcome this.
But Ozanam went a little further. He did not believe that a faith founded on love could be complicit in the creation and maintenance of such poverty and misery, and thus he became concerned with the unjust systems and structures which created and perpetuated it. His social analysis contains many elements of what we now refer to as Catholic Social Teaching and it remarkable how much of what Ozanam was writing and saying in the mid nineteenth century later became part of that teaching.
For Ozanam, the main problems facing Society were unemployment, poverty, and insufficient wages for the working poor. He wrote extensively on the ‘natural’ wage as a possible solution to poverty. This, a precursor of what we would now term the ‘living wage’, was the view that a worker was entitled to wages sufficient not just to provide the necessities of life, but also for other things such as the education of children, recreation and security in old age. He also supported the right of workers to organise into unions, the dignity of work and the legitimacy of private property. Many of these issues ultimately became central concerns of Rerum Novarum and subsequent Catholic Social Teaching.
One of the main principles of CST is that of the common good. This means working towards the greatest good for all persons, not the greatest good for the greatest number. In 1836, when Ozanam was only 23, he had demonstrated a grasp of this principle. He wrote to a friend:
The question which divides men today is no longer a political question, it is a social question; it is to know whether the spirit of egoism or the spirit of sacrifice will prevail, whether Society will be one gigantic exploitation for the benefit of the strongest or a consecration of each for the good of all, and above all for the protection of the weak. [1]
In his homily at Ozanam’s beatification in 1997, Pope St. John Paul II referred to these two strands of Ozanam’s thinking, the need for relief of poverty and the need to examine structures that cause it:
He observed the real situation of the poor and sought to be more and more effective in helping them in their human development. He understood that charity must lead to efforts to remedy injustice. Charity and justice go together. He had the clear-sighted courage to seek a front-line social and political commitment in a troubled time in the life of his country, for no society can accept indigence as if it were a simple fatality without damaging its honour. So it is that we can see in him a precursor of the social doctrine of the Church which Pope Leo XIII would develop some years later in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. [2]
[1] Langdale, J. (1953). “Frederick Ozanam, Christian and Democrat.” New Blackfriars 34(404): 477-482.
[2] John Paul II. Beatification of Frédéric Ozanam. Notre-Dame de Paris Friday, 22 August 1997. Retrieved from: https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19970822_paris-ozanam.html, 31st May, 2024.
