Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

In 1963 a lengthy historical essay, “The Church and the Social Question,” by Franz H. Mueller, was published in a volume entitled The Challenge of Maier and Magistra (New York: Herder and Herder), edited by Joseph N. Moody and Justus George Lawler. This essay, written by an immigrant to the United States from Nazi Germany and recognized immediately as a minor classic of its sort, has now been reprinted under the original title by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. ($14.95). As Michael Novak suggests in his introduction, Professor Mueller’s book acquires renewed interest from the forthcoming pastoral letter on the U.S. economy, expected this year from the Catholic bishops of the United States, as well as from the prospect that the Vatican Commission on Justice and Peace, and the Holy Father himself, will have much to say in future years on the matter of economic growth in the so-called underdeveloped countries.

The Church and the Social Question is a short history of Catholic social thought and attitudes in confrontation with modernity, or “liberalism.” Mueller himself, a former student of the distinguished economic philosopher Heinrich Pesch, SJ, attained his intellectual maturity in a climate highly critical of liberalism as an ideology; and his book, explicitly not an apologetic exercise, is rather a brilliant summa undertaken to vitiate (if not to still) the charge that the Church, in Mueller’s words, “attempts to substitute sententious normative knowledge for the interpretation of existential experience”—that the Church, for over a century now, has shirked her responsibility to define her position “in regard to the ‘isms’ and errors of modern times.”

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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In 1963 a lengthy historical essay, “The Church and the Social Question,” by Franz H. Mueller, was published in a volume entitled The Challenge of Maier and Magistra (New York: Herder and Herder), edited by Joseph N. Moody and Justus George Lawler. This essay, written by an immigrant to the United States from Nazi Germany and recognized immediately as a minor classic of its sort, has now been reprinted under the original title by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. ($14.95). As Michael Novak suggests in his introduction, Professor Mueller’s book acquires renewed interest from the forthcoming pastoral letter on the U.S. economy, expected this year from the Catholic bishops of the United States, as well as from the prospect that the Vatican Commission on Justice and Peace, and the Holy Father himself, will have much to say in future years on the matter of economic growth in the so-called underdeveloped countries.

The Church and the Social Question is a short history of Catholic social thought and attitudes in confrontation with modernity, or “liberalism.” Mueller himself, a former student of the distinguished economic philosopher Heinrich Pesch, SJ, attained his intellectual maturity in a climate highly critical of liberalism as an ideology; and his book, explicitly not an apologetic exercise, is rather a brilliant summa undertaken to vitiate (if not to still) the charge that the Church, in Mueller’s words, “attempts to substitute sententious normative knowledge for the interpretation of existential experience”—that the Church, for over a century now, has shirked her responsibility to define her position “in regard to the ‘isms’ and errors of modern times.”