Little known dimensions of the teaching of Bl. Frederic Ozanam

Frederic propounded the workers’ right to form voluntary unions, and he saw the natural wage as an important instrument to combat poverty. He counseled priests to devote themselves to the poor.

The following quotes can be found in an article by David Gregory, Professor, St. John’s University school of Law “Ozanam: Building the Good Society reprinted with permission of the author and the St. Thomas School of Law, Minnesota.

“In his essays in the wake of the Revolution of 1848, Ozanam chastised the middle class for abandoning and betraying the working class in the Revolution of 1830, which he believed led inexorably to the renewed warfare of 1848.[118] Ozanam described himself in 1850, at age thirty-seven, as “worn out in the service of my faith.[119]”

“He propounded the workers’ right to form voluntary unions, and he saw the natural wage as an important instrument to combat poverty. “The workingman, he believed, was by nature entitled, at a minimum, to a wage sufficient to provide for the necessities of life, the education of his children, and for the support of his old age.[123] Opposed to free-market laissez faire, Ozanam’s advocacy of the natural wage for workers became a cornerstone of liberal, social Catholicism.”

“His concept of the natural wage was a precursor to the minimum wage movement during the New Deal, and has a continuing legacy in the contemporary living wage initiatives successfully implemented in many municipalities throughout the United States.”

“[B]usy yourselves always with the servants as well as with masters, and with workers as well as the rich; it is henceforth the only way of salvation for the Church in France. It is necessary that pastors give up their little bourgeois parishes, flocks of the elite in the midst of an immense population which they do not know.[174]”
“He also wrote, in 1848, “If more Christians and especially the clergy had been concerned with the problems of the workers for the past ten years, we would be more certain of the future.”[175]”