Economic Soul/8 - From the moral ruins of war comes an irreversible turning point: Catholicism reinterprets the past and opens up a dialogue with modernity
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/03/2026
After two world wars, fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust, Europe's modern trajectory came to an abrupt halt. With 1945, something truly new began for the world, and also for the Catholic Church. That immense pain, the many millions of deaths, the dictatorships and the civil disaster that followed, fratricide among Christian peoples, were such a shock (including a religious one) that it changed everything forever: things were truly new. Nothing would ever be the same again. Vatican II was also a flower of evil, a white rose blooming from a blood-soaked earth. That earth did not cover the blood of millions of Job's people - “O earth, cover not my blood, and let not my cry cease” (Job 16:18) - it did not silence their cry. The wars and dictatorships that grew in the homelands of Kant and Manzoni, Luther, Erasmus, and St. Francis were a cry so powerful and piercing that it tore through the sky and the walls of everyone. “What God after Auschwitz?” became not only the great theme of the Jewish people and theology; it was necessarily also the theme of Christians. It was no longer possible to continue to conceive of Christianity, faith, and God as if nothing, or little, had happened. Something important had to change, and immediately, if we did not want to leave the center of history and become definitively people of another time: "‘In my day!’ Isn't this our time? There is nothing worse than being stepchildren of one's own time. There is no worse fate than living in a time that is not your own" (V. Grossman, Life and Fate, 12). The Church knew that there were many reasons behind that great failure. Some Christian intellectuals and theologians even wrote that it was the result of the perverse seeds of modernity. But the deeper meaning of faith said something different: that the Church also had to change, that it had waited too long to engage in real and profound dialogue with its ‘difficult child’, modern man, and had not devoted enough attention to him - ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’: Simone Weil, letter, 1942. And so some Catholics sensed that this fratricide of colossal proportions, this grief that could not be processed because it was too great, could, must be a kairos with a decisive message to be deciphered (think of the ‘Code of Camaldoli’ of the summer of 1943).
And so it was. And then came John XXIII, Paul VI, and their Council with its documents and constitutions, which were no longer those of yesterday's ‘restoration of order’ but, after centuries of almost parallel existence, inaugurated a new encounter with the modern world, which was nothing more than the medieval child that had grown up. And so they began to look differently at the work of their predecessors, at their nostalgia for the Middle Ages, at their fears and struggles with modernity and modernism, at the Syllabi, at corporatism. Those new Christians did not erase the past; they looked it in the eye, suffered greatly when they understood it, and then received the gift of a different and new reading. It was a time of enormous collective grace.
We cannot understand the miracle of Vatican II, Populorum Progressio, and finally Francis without taking very seriously the Church's profound pain over what happened in Europe between 1914 and 1945. It was an immense purification. Because after what happened on that Friday almost two thousand years ago, it is no longer possible to imagine any true resurrection without a true Golgotha. Those who today are afraid to face the anachronisms and errors of the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation, and therefore of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cannot enter into the novelty of Mater et Magistra, Vatican II, and the Social Doctrine that flourished from that ‘uncovered blood’; because the Social Doctrine of the Church after John XXIII is not what it was before. While maintaining a certain continuity with tradition, in fundamental dimensions (its view of the contemporary world) the Council created a real discontinuity with the previous Catholic spirit, even if we have not always managed to live up to the theological and ethical standards achieved by the Council. ‘What is the point of devoting all this space to the events of the Church and the popes of the last century?’, a colleague asked me a few days ago, commenting on my articles. ‘To be able to write this long introduction to No. 8 of the series’, I will tell him.
Let us consider, for example, the cooperative movement. Leo XIII and Pius XI did not mention the words ‘cooperative’ or ‘cooperativism’ in Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno; instead, they encouraged ‘corporations’, i.e., the restoration and updating of the medieval economic model. Instead, on the seventieth anniversary of that first social encyclical, in Pope John's Mater et Magistra in 1961, we read: “In harmony with the common good and within the limits of technical possibilities, craft enterprises, family-sized agricultural enterprises, and cooperative enterprises, even as an integration of the two former, must be preserved and promoted” (72).
Cooperation had secular and socialist origins. In France, around the middle of the 19th century, cooperatives were seen as a way of bringing the values of ‘equality, liberty, fraternity’ into businesses and then into all areas of economic life (consumption, savings, insurance, agriculture, etc.). In Italy, there was also the cumbersome and uncomfortable figure of Giuseppe Mazzini, apostle of his own civil and anti-clerical version of religion, and one of the protagonists of the Roman Republic of 1849. In his ethical and political manifesto, I doveri dell'uomo (The Duties of Man) (1860), he already outlined the ethical and institutional principles that still form the basis of the cooperative tradition and culture today: “Freedom to withdraw without harming the association; equality of members in the election of administrators for a fixed term or, better still, subject to revocation; admission after the foundation, indivisibility, perpetuity of collective capital, remuneration for all equal to the necessities of life...” Still linked to Mazzini was the widespread use of the term ‘brotherhood or fraternity’ (terms always used by everyone as synonyms), and the various ‘brotherhood pacts’. From the end of the 19th century, cooperatives were also encouraged by the Church, but only ‘among Catholics’, under the guidance of pastors: ‘The warning given by the Holy Father Leo XIII to Catholics not to join associations in which religion has no place’ (Toniolo, L'avvenire della cooperazione cristiana, Paris, 1900).
This lack of enthusiasm on the part of the magisterium for early cooperation can be found in documents at least until the end of the Second World War. The difficulties between the hierarchy and cooperativism are a clear expression of the complex attitude of the Church at the time towards democracy. In 1917, in the Code of Canon Law desired by Pius X and promulgated by Benedict XV, the Church defined itself as an unequal society: “By divine institution, there are clerics distinct from lay people in the Church” (code 107), a religious, ontological, and therefore hierarchical distinction. And in his Christmas radio message of 1944, Pius XII devoted many words to the “problem of democracy.” The same pope, in his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi the year before, had reiterated that the Church was a “body composed ‘organically’ and ‘hierarchically’” (Part One). Until then, when popes looked at modern democracy, they could only find it unsatisfactory—because, at least since Hobbes, modern sociality arose precisely from the rejection of that hierarchical and organicist vision. The version of democracy accepted, at a certain point and not soon, by the Catholic Church was different from that of liberalism and socialism. Modern democracy, built on the principle of equality among all human beings, had to be integrated with the hierarchical principle and the defense of “all inequalities, deriving not from arbitrariness but from the very nature of things, inequalities of culture, wealth, and social position,” in order to avoid “monochromatic uniformity” (Pius XII, Radio Message, Christmas 1944). These principles were non-negotiable for the Church. It was only with the Council that the Church began to distinguish its own internal nature from its judgment on the democracy of peoples—who knows, some might ask, if Jesus really wanted a church as an unequal and hierarchical society?
In the postwar period, therefore, something really changed. Pope John explicitly encouraged the creation of cooperatives and their economic democracy, without distinguishing between those among Christians and those with everyone: “We invite our dearest children, artisans and cooperators scattered throughout the world, to be aware of the nobility of their profession and their valuable contribution to keeping alive the sense of responsibility and spirit of collaboration in national communities” (MM, 77). Cooperators are now called children.
But he does not stop there. Listening to the wise advice of Monsignor Pietro Pavan, to whom we will return, he ventures into participatory terrain that, many years later, remains as prophetic as ever: “We believe that it is legitimate for workers to aspire to participate actively in the life of the enterprises in which they are employed and work” (78). In reality, the content of John XXIII's idea of community enterprise is not so far removed from the old Catholic corporatism, but what happened with fascism (or in Austria) had changed its form and style. He no longer looks back and dialogues with the world (n. 80). We have now reached the eve of the Council, of its theological, social, and economic revolution, which has not yet expressed itself to its full potential.
