ABSTRACT
Roger Griffin has famously defined the essence of inter-war European fascisms as 'a form of palingenetic, populist ultra-nationalism'. The origins of Catholic corporatist ideas are to be found in counter-revolutionary thought as it developed in Catholic circles in Austria in the mid to late nineteenth century. The critical milestone in the development of Catholic social theory and activism was the publication of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum. Rerum Novarum was heavily dependent upon a neo-Thomist philosophical frame, which Leo promoted throughout his reign as the Catholic philosophy par excellence. The papal silence on the question of corporatism did not, however, prevent it from becoming a topic of discussion in the Catholic political parties that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War. The chief author of Quadragesimo Anno, Fr Nell-Breuning was critical of the 'authoritarian, Christian state with a corporatist base' which Dollfuss established in Austria in the wake of the civil war with the Viennese Socialists.
