American Decades
Ryan, John A. 1865-1945
PRIEST
American Priest.
Father John A. Ryan was America's best-known liberal Catholic cleric in the 1920s. The son of Irish immigrants, he grew up in Minnesota and was deeply affected by the attempts of Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul to acculturate the Roman Catholic Church to America without compromising its essential beliefs and structures. Father Ryan was also touched by the message to the laboring classes expressed in Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum 1891; Of New Things, which warned of the dangers of socialism but also condemned the excesses of capitalism.
Academic Career.
Ryan earned a Ph.D. at the Catholic University. His dissertation, published in 1906 as The Living Wage, presented his belief that American capitalism could and should be reformed according to Christian principles. Christianity offered more hope to the workingman, he said, than any form of socialism. It also offered a...
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1920's Religion
