CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - On April 29, 2012, at a ceremony at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, the Catholic Church beatified Giuseppe Toniolo (1845-1918).  Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo has the unusual accolade of being the first economist in the history of the Church to have received the honor of beatification.  We might also call him the patron beatus of Catholic Social Doctrine.

Giuseppe Toniolo, the first of four children, was born in 1845 in the town of Treviso to a middle class family with solid religious grounding.  As a young lad, Toniolo studied at St. Catherine's School (later known as the Foscarini) in Venice.  Later, Toniolo studied jurisprudence at the University of Padua. 

After obtaining his degrees in Civil and Canon Law from the University of Padua in 1867, he continued his studies in political economy, which studies were briefly interrupted by the untimely death of his father.  The studies were resumed and, in 1873, he was graduated from the University of Padua.

In 1876 he left Padua to accept a professorship in political economy in at the University of Venice, and in 1878, he left Venice to teach the same subject matter at the University of Modena.  From the University of Modena, he went to the University of Pisa in 1882, and was there a Professor until his death in 1918.

Toniolo took his duties as a professor seriously.  He saw his students as an extended family.  As he expressed it in a diary entry, he saw them as a sacred deposit, as friends of his heart to guide in the ways of the Lord.

As a Professor of political economy, Toniolo wrote many books and articles.  He was unashamed of the God question which he answered ebulliently in the affirmative.  "The economy," he wrote, "is an integral part of the operative design of God, to the extent that. understood properly, participation in it ought to be considered a religious obligation, an obligation of justice and charity to one's neighbor and to one's self."

Toniolo was an early proponent of Catholic social teaching at a time when the Industrial Revolution had ushered in all sorts of social problems.  The Church was confronting these "new things" in the light of the Gospel, and Toniolo contributed his prodigious intellectual talents in arriving at well-founded solutions to those social problems that fit with the Church's understanding of man and of society. 

As one of the vanguard of social justice and an expert in socio-economic problems, Toniolo helped set the framework for social teaching that eventually would become formalized in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum, the foundational document of Catholic Social Doctrine. 

Toniolo espoused all the social doctrine principles we take for granted today. 

For example, recognizing the problems arising between the relationship of capital and labor, he advocated labor unions as a means to equalize the relationship.  But as an early Catholic voice in support of labor unions, he resisted the Marxist-Socialist inspired "red" unions, instead advocating "white" unions that rejected aberrant Marxist and Socialist social principles. 

Toniolo also fought against such social evils like the exploitation of workers and child labor.  He insisted that employers pay their workers just wages, that they limit work hours, and that they provide mandatory days for rest.  He also advanced agricultural reforms, promoting dairy cooperatives in northern Italy. 

He was also an advocate of what today we know as subsidiarity.  In Toniolo's day, the principle was known as "corporatism," but the concept was essentially the same.  The principle of corporatism-like the principle of subsidiarity-provided that in social matters a higher corporate body should not interfere in the internal life of lower order corporate body, thereby depriving the latter of its functions.  Rather, the higher order should only support the lower order in case of need and help to coordinate its activity within the activities of the rest of society, and always with a view to the common good.  The same is true with respect to the individual, in that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what the individual can accomplish by his or her own enterprise or industry.

One of Toniolo's distinctive characteristic was his partisan independence.  He transcended left and right.  He saw clearer than the liberals who based their teachings on Freemasonry, and he saw further than the Traditionalists who simply refused to budge from sclerotic formulas of another time. 

He neither advocated the laissez faire capitalism of Adam Smith nor the statism and socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  Steering between these two false philosophies-one ...