ABSTRACT
CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY is an idea, a movement, and the product of a process of history reaching far back through the centuries. This book is concerned with all three aspects. Writing in 1901 in his
Encyclical Graves de Communi, Leo XIII defined Christian Democracy in terms of ideas and aims. It was:
concerned primarily, though not exclusively, with the problems of the working class. aimed at so improving the conditions of life as to allow people to 'feel themselves to be men, not mere animals; Christian men and not pagans'. a means, in these ways, of enabling people 'to strive with more facility and earnestness to attain that one thing needful, that final good for which we came into the world'.
