Monsignor John A. Ryan: An Historical Appreciation

Abstract

When Monsignor John A. Ryan died in late summer, millions of people in America and elsewhere mourned the passing of the most creative moral theologian in the present age. Here was a man who nearly a half century ago set himself a highly beneficent and constructive task; here was a man who by continuous, grinding effort reached the journey's end with the great task largely completed. Such success comes to few men, whatever their fields of interest; in the field of labor and industrial ethics only Monsignor Ryan can be said to have measurably attained it. Although by no means the first in the modern world to urge the primacy of Christian ethics in industry and trade— in fact he was a late comer—he excelled all his predecessors and contemporaries in one vital respect: the ability to combine economics and ethics into a virtually new science of social justice.