Catholic Labor Education and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists: Instructing Workers to Christianize the

This article analyzes the effect of the American Catholic Church, through its pro-gram of specialized labor education, on the growth and development of organized labor in the twentieth century. With the proclamation of Pope Pius XI’s encycli-cal Quadragesimo Anno (1931), he requested that the Church complete the work began by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 with his landmark social encyclical Rerum No-varum. However, the American interpretation and utilization of the social encyclicals var