ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how a quiet respect for liberal institutions has been slowly developing within the body of Catholic social thought in its most authoritative exponents, the popes. The effective intellectual boundaries of official Catholic social thought until about thirty years ago seemed to be limited to the quadrant formed by Rome, Munich, Brussels, and Paris. In earlier generations the American Catholic bishops made modest attempts to show that American institutions were compatible with Catholic ideals. Most Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States desperately poor. The Figures on poverty in the United States derived annually by the Census Bureau are based upon a strictly monetary calculation. One of the constraints the Catholic bishops will face is a need to seem "progressive", in part for their own most ardent activists, in part for the sake of a favorable press. Catholic habits since medieval times used to prefer the stationary to the dynamic society.
