Background
John Augustine Ryan grew up in an atmosphere richly Irish and Catholic. His father, William Ryan, born in County Tipperary, went to Minneapolis after an unsuccessful fling in the California gold rush and there married Maria Elizabeth Luby, a refugee from the Irish potato famine. The couple farmed 160 (later 393) acres in Vermillion, a township eight miles south of St. Paul that was a colony of Irish "exiles. " There, without much cash, they reared their family of six boys and four girls. Two of the boys became priests, two of the girls nuns. John--christened Michael John--was the eldest child.
Education
After attending a local ungraded school until he was sixteen, he went on for two years (1885 - 87) to the Cretin School, run by the Christian Brothers in St. Paul. Sensing that he had a vocation to the priesthood, he then switched to St. Thomas Seminary (called after 1893 St. Paul Seminary), taking first a five-year "classical" course, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1892, and then the "clerical" course, two years of philosophy and four years of theology, plus a generous slice of economics, sociology, English, German, and laboratory sciences. He was ordained to the priesthood on June 4, 1898. That fall Ryan began graduate work in theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. , working primarily with Father Thomas J. Bouquillon, an exacting teacher and theologian already noted for his liberal social ideas and for his empirical rather than deductive approach to ethical questions. At the end of one year, Ryan received his degree as S. T. B. (bachelor in sacred theology); at the end of two (1900), he won his licentiate in sacred theology (S. T. L. ), a canonical license to teach sacred sciences in Catholic institutions, maxima cum laude. He stayed on in Washington for two more years to work on his doctorate. He received his doctorate in sacred theology (S. T. D. ) from Catholic University in 1906.
Career
During his work on doctorate, Ryan taught moral theology at St. Paul Seminary. In 1906 his thesis, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects, was published by the Macmillan Company, with an introduction by the economist Richard T. Ely. A Living Wage contained the central economic and moral ideas in Ryan's public career: that every man, "endowed by nature, or rather, by God, with the rights that are requisite to a reasonable development of his personality, " has a right to share in the bounty of the earth's products; that this right, in an industrial society, takes the form of a living wage, enough to provide a "decent livelihood" worthy of a man's dignity; that the state has "both the right and the duty to compel" employers, if necessary, to pay a fair wage.
Ryan drew on traditional theological manuals and, more proximately, on Rerum novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII's social encyclical. Though Leo stressed the inviolability of private property and the dangers of socialism, he also spoke unequivocally of the laborer's right to "reasonable and frugal comfort, " and he applauded public intervention to protect the weak.
Ryan also drew heavily on the "underconsumption theory" of the English economist John A. Hobson, who argued that a nation prospered only when workers received enough wages to purchase as consumers the goods that the economy produced.
For thirteen years (1902 - 15), Father Ryan taught at St. Paul Seminary. In class he was an intense no-nonsense monologist, speaking hurriedly with a sense of urgency, and students, even those who were enthusiastic about his ideas, found him a dull teacher. Like his mother, he hated shams, and he punctured pomposity with a sharp wit. He was just under medium height, and he grew stocky whenever he did not watch his eating and keep up his exercise. His rumpled clothes were something of a legend among his acquaintances, and his earthy wit was a delight to his male friends.
During vacations, Ryan lectured elsewhere in the country to any group of laymen or priests that would invite him. At a time when raucous denunciations of socialism generally served as a total social philosophy for American Catholics, Ryan's criticism of Catholic inaction ran the danger of stirring up nests of hornets, both lay and clerical, especially since his progressivism was very much in the outspoken tradition of Henry Demarest Lloyd.
In 1909 he put together (and published in the Catholic World) a full program of reform: a legal minimum wage; the eight-hour working day; protective laws for women and children; protection of peaceful picketing and boycotting; employment bureaus; insurance against unemployment, accidents, illness, and old age; municipal housing; public ownership of public utilities and of mines and forests; control of monopolies; progressive income and inheritance taxes; taxation on the future increase in land values (an idea he owed to Henry George); an end to speculation on the stock and commodity exchanges.
Working with the National Consumers' League, he helped lobby minimum-wage bills for women and children through the legislatures of Wisconsin and Minnesota in 1913. Many felt that Ryan's activities flirted with socialism; yet Ryan blandly insisted that he was merely applying orthodox Catholic theology to the needs of an industrial society. Dealing with his critics, Ryan armed himself with prudence; he never went looking for an abrasive confrontation with anyone. He allied himself with other individuals and groups doing the same kind of work--groups like the National Conference of Catholic Charities within the Church and the National Conference of Charities and Correction outside. And he exploited ecclesiastical support fully: the fortuitous support of Archbishop John Ireland and his successors, who, though conservative themselves, never interfered with Ryan's public stands; and the unassailable support of Rome itself speaking through Leo XIII's Rerum novarum.
Ryan transferred in 1915 to Catholic University, at first as associate professor of political science, then successively as associate professor of theology (1916), professor of theology (1917), and dean of the School of Sacred Sciences (1919), the last a position he held at irregular intervals during the next fifteen years.
Just after his arrival in Washington he published Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth (1916), a closely reasoned study of the relative claims of landowner, capitalist, entrepreneur, and worker to the finished products of industry. This book was Ryan's last substantial scholarly contribution to the field shared by ethics and economics.
Soon after his arrival at Catholic University he began teaching economics and political science at neighboring Trinity College, and later he lectured regularly at the National Catholic School of Social Service. In 1917 he founded the Catholic Charities Review, and for five years served as its editor, business manager, and principal contributor. In Washington, Ryan became more a public figure than a productive scholar.
In 1919 the four-member Administrative Committee of the National Catholic War Council, an assembly of the American bishops, issued the "Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction, " the most forward-looking document issued by the Church in America up to that time. It was, in fact, a memorandum hastily written by Ryan out of his stock of familiar ideas. When the bishops set up the National Catholic Welfare Council (later Conference) in 1919, Ryan was the obvious man to serve as the Washington director of its Social Action Department, created in 1920.
Continuing at Catholic University and at all his other teaching posts, Ryan now divided his time between the classroom and the public forum. With an official podium to speak from, he found that his fame and his impact grew even in the conservative decade of the 1920's. He worked with Roger Baldwin in the American Civil Liberties Union as a member of its national board, with Senator Thomas J. Walsh in support of the proposed federal child labor amendment, with Felix Frankfurter on a minimum-wage law for the District of Columbia, with Sidney L. Gulick of the Federal Council of Churches on a gamut of social projects, with Senator George Norris on public power, with Carlton J. H. Hayes and James T. Shotwell on international peace. He came to oppose prohibition as unenforceable and undesirable, delighting even H, L. Mencken with the tone and force of his attack.
Working with people of other faiths or of no religious faith, Ryan always tried to concentrate on conditions in need of reform rather than on differences in ideas. He was not always successful, and on some issues--artificial contraception, for one example, and the Mexican government's attack on the Catholic Church for another--he and his liberal allies simply agreed to disagree, sometimes quite acridly. On one issue, the relation between church and state, Ryan achieved an unwanted fame.
In 1922, as co-author of the book The State and the Church, he published an extended commentary on Leo XIII's encyclical letter of 1885, Immortale Dei, on the political order and constitution of states. Ryan, as orthodox in interpreting this encyclical as he had been with Rerum novarum, propounded as Catholic teaching that the state had an obligation to recognize the Catholic religion as the religion of the commonwealth. In a completely Catholic state, Ryan said, constitutions could be changed; "non-Catholic sects may decline to such a point that the political proscription of them may become feasible and expedient. " Although Ryan believed that this teaching, however sound in theory, had no relation to the United States, which was not a Catholic state and would probably never become one, his statement was nevertheless used in the election campaign of 1928 to challenge the presidential candidacy of Alfred E. Smith. Ryan bitterly resented the misunderstanding of his argument and, indeed, the whole anti-Catholic mood revealed in the campaign.
Nevertheless, when he published the revised edition of The State and the Church under a new title, Catholic Principles of Politics (1940), the offending passage remained essentially unchanged. Hardly a warm partisan of Herbert Hoover, especially after the bitterness of the 1928 campaign, Ryan welcomed the New Deal as the triumphant realization of his lifetime struggle for social justice. The National Industrial Recovery Act impressed him as an imaginative fulfillment of Pope Pius XI's plan for industrial reorganization expressed in Quadragesimo anno (1931), and Ryan--now Monsignor Ryan after Pope Pius named him a domestic prelate in 1933--was happy to serve on the Industrial Appeals Board of the National Recovery Administration (July 1934 - May 1935) and to advise various other New Deal agencies.
He defended President Franklin D. Roosevelt against the radio attacks of Father Charles E. Coughlin in 1936; as a token of appreciation, Roosevelt named him to give the benediction at the inauguration in 1937. Ryan never regretted his open support of Roosevelt, for he believed that the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act "have done more to promote social justice than all the other federal legislation enacted since the adoption of the Constitution. "
Just before his seventieth birthday the Catholic University trustees made seventy the mandatory retirement age, and although Ryan hoped for a suspension of the rule in his case, no exception was made. He left the university with some bitterness in 1939 but stayed on at the National Catholic Welfare Council until his death.
As the war approached America, he actively supported American aid to Britain and France, at the same time resenting the foot-dragging that he detected among his fellow Irish-Americans. He hoped for a major reconstruction of the American economy in the postwar years, but deteriorating health prevented his making any real contribution to planning for the future. In 1945 he again gave the benediction at Roosevelt's inaugural. Later that year he died of a lingering urological infection at St. Joseph's Hospital, St. Paul, Minn. He was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Paul.
