ABSTRACT
The political entrenchment of Catholicism before the Second World War was greatly facilitated by the intimate links between the parties and the Catholic social organisations. Independent Catholic unions
started to organise in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy (Fogarty 1957:186-90). These efforts to organise the Catholic workers within their own cultural environment, however, were hampered by a set of simultaneous obstacles and led to different levels of integration and political unity. The socialist unionists viewed the initiatives of Catholic working-class mobilisation with suspicious eyes, since denominational unionism potentially dealt a deathblow to workingclass unity and solidarity. The socialists essentially saw the Catholic unionists as traitors of the working class. The Catholic unionists, therefore, first of all faced the difficulty of having to define precisely what made them so different from their socialist counterparts. Antisocialism was simply not strong enough an incentive for non-socialist working-class mobilisation. The solution consisted of an emphasis on industrial workers’ participation as an alternative for what they saw as the essence of the socialist threat: nationalisation of the means of production and extensive state intervention. The Catholic unions stressed co-operation between classes and the propitious effects of class reconciliation. In addition, the struggle for social justice became a struggle for the improvement of the material conditions of the working class, without neglecting religious and cultural responsibilities (Fogarty 1957:191).
