The land question is one of those distinctly “modern” phenomena that defined and oriented 20th-century politics across space and time, from scientists’ anxieties over soil erosion after the Dust Bowl to the rise of agrarian movements demanding a more equitable distribution of wealth and property.

In 1968, Dr. Sicco I. Mansholt, vice president of the European Economic Community, unveiled his plan for the future of European agriculture. The Mansholt Plan called for farmers to cut loose from the agricultural sector and enter the industrial workforce so that they might enjoy “a four-day week and four weeks’ holiday per year.” Mansholt thought this schedule would offer a reprieve from the existing pace of life of the farmer who had to work straight through—all seven days of the week, pinned to the needs of the hypothetical cow. By condensing small family farms into larger units, the plan proposed to shrink the European agricultural labor force by organizing farms according to the precepts and principles of a modern factory.¹ Mansholt framed the report as socially progressive, but fallout from its publication followed quickly. One of the most critical responses came from the economist E.F. Schumacher, now known for his bestseller Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973). The Mansholt Plan prompted Schumacher to reflect upon the meaning of agriculture and life itself. Farming was not only an industry, he mused, but something “metaphysical—or meta-economic.”² Agriculture dealt with life—the cow, yes, but also “the milliards of living organisms within the soil.” Industry, on the other hand, relied upon man-devised materials to “eliminate the living factor”; in his view, industry dealt with death.³

Three years after the introduction of the Mansholt Plan, Schumacher was received into the Catholic Church. And this kind of argument—about the primary nature of agriculture and its association with a meaningful life—had been made repeatedly by Catholics throughout the 20th century, not only by those in the Church’s hierarchy but also by members of the laity. Still, despite historians’ renewed interest both in rural history and in the Catholic Church’s encounter with modernity, these threads remain fundamentally unconnected. But the land question, to use a shorthand, is one of those distinctly “modern” phenomena that defined and oriented 20th-century politics across space and time, from scientists’ anxieties over soil erosion after the Dust Bowl to the rise of agrarian movements demanding a more equitable distribution of wealth and property. And so, suitably, land has endured as a central pillar of Catholic social thought and action since the publication of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum in May 1891. In part, the persistence of a rural critique owed to a transnational network of English-speaking intellectuals who seized upon peasant proprietorship as a panacea, one which contained within it an indictment of the present and a promise to remake the future in the image of an idealized past.

Land, Work, and Human Dignity

Twentieth-century thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who synthesized ideas about Catholic peasant agriculture under the banner of “distributism,” are well known. Still, their emphasis on the “dignity” of rural work is relatively absent from recent histories on the Church’s engagement with secular modernity. The separation of these literatures is stark, seeing as scholars have traced how Catholics participated “in the birth of individualism, consumer media, scientific rationality, nationalism,” and a handful of other trends that one might imagine as constitutive of the modern world.⁴ Catholic rural movements appear only briefly in this picture, in part because these communities have typically been deemed thoroughly backward-looking and, above all, a failure, even by their most enthusiastic proponents.⁵

Distributism shapeshifted from a reactionary and anti-modern set of economic prescriptions toward a form of ecological critique which, in the hands of E.F. Schumacher, diagnosed the environmental crisis with attention to religious pluralism in a globalizing and unequal world.

Yet contrary to this narrative of failure, Catholic thinkers’ embrace of rural life and land did not simply disappear or fail per se but instead changed over the 20th century, alongside transformations in other forms of Catholic associationism. Distributism shapeshifted from a reactionary and anti-modern set of economic prescriptions toward a form of ecological critique which, in the hands of E.F. Schumacher, diagnosed the environmental crisis with attention to religious pluralism in a globalizing and unequal world. As such, piecing together this genealogy reveals not only how one variant of Catholic social thought evolved but also how such ideas have, in turn, influenced popular consciousness on the ethics of environmental collapse. Just as a conservative conception of “dignity” remade the discourse of human rights after World War II, Catholic neo-Thomists participated in the elaboration of post-war environmental ethics, too.⁶

Intellectual historians’ revived interest in 20th-century religiosity has produced a body of literature concerned, above all, with how the challenge of totalitarianism scrambled European Christian communities, creating almost insurmountable splits between those who rejected fascist regimes and those who backed them.⁷ In this context, the Vatican launched an “anti-Communist cultural crusade” and sought to forge a “Catholic International” that competed directly with other forms of interwar internationalism.⁸ The rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s divided Catholics along anti-fascist and anti-communist lines and led politicians and intellectuals to renegotiate the Church’s relationship with secular modernity in the post-war period. Ideas about the essential dignity of the person were foundational not just to the reconstitution of Christian democratic political parties after WWII, but also to the development of human rights discourse, codified in the 1948 Universal Declaration.⁹ In these ways, the dignity of the human person, a foundational principle of Catholic social teaching since the publication of Rerum Novarum, became a guiding political and legal watchword in the heady days of post-war reconstruction.

Broadly, the notion of “human dignity” was entrenched among English-speaking Catholics in two ways at mid-century: as a pillar of “religious constitutionalism” and as a central theme of the Catholic rural movement.¹⁰ The late 1930s proved significant for both branches. In 1936, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day acquired a farm in Easton, Pennsylvania, the site of the Catholic Worker’s first “Agronomic University.” Meanwhile, the Irish President Eamon de Valera was scrapping the constitution of the Irish Free State and writing a new one grounded in the principles of social Catholicism, which he published in April of 1937.¹¹ In some ways, these were two sides of the same coin, two different ways of embracing Thomistic political philosophy at a time when the Second World War was upending established forms of corporate organization.

Though the political narrative has been the focus of much new work, a parallel transformation in economic ideas in the same period provides an illustrative optic for understanding how Catholic and environmental thought overlapped and touched in the 20th century. That said, Catholicism has had multiple “environmental” histories. Early ecological texts, such as Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” (1967), held the Bible and the Christian churches liable for encouraging a human-centered approach that promoted man’s complete dominion over nature.¹² Other histories addressing the relationship between Catholicism and the environment have focused on isolated instances or narratives of failure and “diffusion,” charging Catholic thinkers with remaining resolutely anthropocentric even as environmental politics took center stage in the 1970s.¹³ These framings overlook the extent to which proponents of Catholic social thought began to pitch their arguments about humans’ relationship with the land in novel ways for larger audiences. Alongside the birth of post-war human rights discourse, the dignity of the human person—particularly the dignity of the worker on the land—was one way in which neo-Thomism entered environmental thinking in the post-war years.

To understand these developments, whether led by the taoiseach in Ireland or the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) in the American Midwest, one must return to their shared foundation in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, which presented a solution to the “social question” that was rooted in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. As the Catholic Church’s first official response to the “conflict now raging—the Industrial Revolution,” Rerum Novarum called upon Catholics worldwide to address the “condition of the working classes” and advocated for the widespread distribution of private property to workers. The encyclical suggested that by cultivating the soil, working people would create abundance while developing a rooted connection to the land, family, and nation. Rerum Novarum was not an ur-text of the green movement by any means, but it positioned human relationships with the land as a central feature of Catholic social politics, a principle that would endure and remain relevant throughout the 20th century.

Rerum Novarum itself had a much longer history and genealogy rooted in the late 19th-century European “land question,” often framed as a contest between the English and French models of land tenure.¹⁴ Continental thinkers set France’s “equitable system of peasant proprietorship” against the outsized power of English aristocratic landowners, who controlled much of the nation’s land and leased it to tenant farmers. The English system “prioritized productivity over employment and concentrated land ownership,” while the French model of widely distributed plots slowed growth and the accumulation of capital but “gave more of the population their own means of subsistence through peasant proprietorship.”¹⁵ Perceived differences between the French and English systems of land tenure led English Catholics to advocate for peasant proprietorship on the French model (seen as Catholic) as a solution to inequalities brought about by the advent of the industrial order.

These debates would be summarized and elaborated upon in the writings of the English distributists. In the manifesto of that movement, The Servile State (1912), the writer and historian Hilaire Belloc claimed that the rise of capitalism in England was the result of a deliberate effort by a minority of oligarchic, liberal lords, but that it was inherently unstable because it strained theories of natural right by providing a reality that was in actual fact exploitative. Through enclosure, which dispossessed the laborer from the land, the English system rendered workers unable to provide for themselves. In France, by contrast, these same years “led to the rise of the peasant and the decay of the lord.”¹⁶

If Belloc wrote the movement’s founding text, G.K. Chesterton, one of the most celebrated British journalists of the interwar years, became the group’s primary spokesperson. His political philosophy stressed the establishment of limits.¹⁷ These were not environmental limits, to be sure, but he believed that “real universality is to be reached . . . by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings.”¹⁸ The defense of limits, combined with his embrace of 19th-century British liberalism, led him to advocate for the principle of subsidiarity in the form of democratically run corporate communities. At the same time as he embraced a kind of popular democracy (for men), he also rejected notions of progress, science, and efficiency, opposing big shops, big businesses, and big landowners. The resultant vision was a massive redistribution of land to peasant smallholders, which would democratize the means of subsistence. Those small landowners would live in communion with nature, grow their own food, and thereby regain their individual “dignity” by creating a life grounded in the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church.

Distributism from Ditchling to Maryfarm

Chesterton and Belloc at first had hopes that they might express these views in Parliament, but their failure to find a foothold in British politics, despite Belloc’s spirited and short-lived effort in 1906–1910, led them away from state-based solutions toward a rejection of established democratic institutions. This relative exclusion from politics was, paradoxically, crucial to the dissemination of distributism abroad. What Chesterton and Belloc did that was unique was to argue that an abstracted notion of peasant proprietorship—and the rural family economy that accompanied it—could be fathomable in the heartlands of the industrial revolution and, by extension, almost anywhere.

The first “anywhere” was close to home. In 1907, the controversial sculptor Eric Gill and his wife Mary (née Ethel) moved onto a farm at Ditchling in Sussex. From 1913, after the publication ofThe Servile State, the growing community sought to live according to the decentralist precepts articulated by Belloc and Chesterton.¹⁹ A few years later, in 1921, with other distributists, the Gills established the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, forming a movement that viewed itself as a “living demonstration of the Catholic version of ‘three acres and a cow.’”²⁰ Distributist communities looked much like English Arts and Crafts communities, but their commitment to Catholicism, belief in agricultural self-sufficiency, and disdain for the state set them apart. In this spirit, Ditchling’s new residents mowed the hay with a scythe and cut corn with a swap hook, threshed barley with a flail, and cooked food over an open fire.

Inhabitants at Ditchling translated significant texts, such as Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920), using medieval printing presses; Fr. Vincent McNabb published an anthology on the land question, The Church and the Land (1934).²¹ Many members felt their community was a “gesture of defiance against the town-centered industrial system and mass production.”²² As with other pre-war Catholic institutions, Ditchling fractured with the rise of totalitarianism, as English Catholics took sides. Some, such as the fervently anti-Semitic Belloc, embraced Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini. Yet the ideas that underwrote the experiment at Ditchling traveled in a set of transatlantic networks populated by intellectuals and activists seemingly unconcerned by these flirtations with fascism, which often conflicted with their personal views.

In 1936, for instance, Dorothy Day welcomed Belloc to New York with open arms at the height of his most feverish support for European fascism.²³ Meanwhile, in these same years, American Catholics who embraced distributism started calling for a “green revolution,” placing ecology at the center of social politics well before environmental issues became a central concern in American life. The most vocal advocate of a green revolution was Peter Maurin, a former member of Marc Sangnier’s Le Sillon in France and a translator of Emmanuel Mounier. Maurin called for the creation of “agronomic universities” as part of his vision for the Catholic Worker with Day.²⁴ Though Day was comparatively uninterested in agrarian experiments, she and Maurin set up a Catholic Worker farm commune in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1936, which they dubbed Maryfarm.²⁵ The three precepts guiding the pastoral vision were “cult, culture, and cultivation,” which signaled the prevailing confluence between religion, communal society, and agriculture. Soon enough, many urban dwellers involved with the Catholic Worker in New York City’s Lower East Side had moved onto the farm in an endeavor to form a “sustainable human society,” which served the dual ends of reconnecting adherents with nature and enhancing their religious commitments through work and retreat. Residents at Maryfarm practiced sustainable mixed farming and rejected the monocrop, which caused soil erosion, while reviving medieval farming practices such as gleaning, long out of use because of its impracticality and inefficiency.

Meanwhile, the NCRLC, which had been dreamed up by Edwin O’Hara (1881–1956) in 1923, extended its reach across the Midwest and elsewhere, creating an archipelago of Catholic communities in the American countryside.²⁶ Eventually, the Conference sent a lobbyist to Washington.²⁷ By 1944, the NCRLC had 60 schools across the United States offering courses to a total of 1,700 priests, 9,000 sisters, and 12,000 laypeople.²⁸ It published a periodical, the Christian Farmer, which taught “Catholic rural philosophy” while offering practical tips for sustainable development. Like Maurin, the Conference’s leaders spoke in favor of a “green revolution” that would cohere around a rural movement combining the principles of Catholic social teaching with a “return” to Christian values.

Although these back-to-the-land movements in England and America cropped up in vastly different national contexts, defined by divergent ecologies and agricultural sectors, the core ideological impetus remained remarkably stable. Rural Roads to Security (1944), published by the NCRLC founders, paraphrased Chesterton in associating essential human experience with work on the land: “For the man who plants, and waters, and watches things grow, nature unfolds her secrets and the great fundamental truths of life and death, toil and pain, time and eternity, and God take on a new meaning. The man’s character develops, expands, and matures with the plants and animals he tends so carefully.”²⁹ Human dignity was “the most important farm product.”³⁰ Although these ideas became increasingly “diffuse” during the war and after, theories about the relationship between land and dignity did not disappear.³¹ As with other forms of Catholic social action, they re-entered the public square in new ways.

Toward a People-Centered Economics

If there is an uneasy tension between the Catholic rural movements of the 1930s and Schumacher’s elaboration of small-scale economics in Small is Beautiful (1973), this partly owes to the author’s intellectual trajectory. Whereas Catholics in the 1930s had forged relatively insular communities, Schumacher was a convert who spent much of his life studying development projects in decolonizing South Asia and Africa. When he converted to Catholicism in 1971, he was nearing the end of his career. This career was defined by an attempt to find solutions to global issues that looked much different than the problems plaguing the homogenous national units that concerned Chesterton and Belloc. In this sense, a great deal of Schumacher’s work was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s ethical and political teachings. Historians interested in Schumacher’s life tend to focus primarily on the way these post-imperial genealogies shaped his ideas, positioning him as a theorist of people-centered economics, a figure of inspiration to international non-governmental organizations, and a popularizer of “ethical” consumer capitalism.³² Yet, though scholars rarely stress the place of Christianity in his work, Schumacher’s ideas remained fundamentally rooted in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and grounded in arguments about the essential dignity of the person, which he conceived of as an ineffable spiritual being, far more than merely homo economicus.

Indeed, Schumacher, born in 1911 in Germany, is best known now as a founding figure in the early environmental movement. At age 19, he moved to England, where he trained in economics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. A protégé of John Maynard Keynes, Schumacher served as chief economic advisor for Britain’s National Coal Board (NCB) from 1950 until his retirement in 1971. At the NCB, he opposed Britain’s careless management of non-renewable resources and the country’s increasing reliance on the importation of foreign oil, which he condemned as extractive and politically unsound. When he left his post in the early 1970s, he accepted a position as president of the Soil Association, an organization founded in 1946 by Lady Eve Balfour, doyenne of the U.K.’s organic farming movement.

In 1954, during his time at the Coal Board, Schumacher traveled to Burma as a United Nations consultant to assess the implementation of an American proposal for development through agricultural modernization.³³ Schumacher found the proposal entirely at odds with his perception of Burmese society, and the trip sparked a new interest in the conflict between modern improvement schemes and spiritual traditions. He revised his observations from Burma into a chapter on “Buddhist economics,” published in Small is Beautiful, which probed the conflict between market-based rapacity and economic sufficiency in general terms. G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Jacques Maritain also influenced him. Indeed, his conversion to Catholicism in 1971, two years before the publication of Small is Beautiful, capped a long and sustained period of traveling and reading, which ranged widely but included Rerum Novarum and another social encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (1931).

Schumacher believed that land was a “priceless asset” of incalculable value, not merely a material resource but a wellspring of beauty and permanence as well.

Schumacher believed that land was a “priceless asset” of incalculable value, not merely a material resource but a wellspring of beauty and permanence as well. Work on the land differed from other kinds of labor because it provided a refuge from the breakdown of metropolitan life and an opportunity for people to engage in meaningful labor with their hands. Like other distributists before him, he advocated for a decentralized third-way that challenged “gigantism” and posited that “any activity which fails to recognize a self-limiting principle is of the devil.”³⁴ He was especially critical of the “profit-oriented, market-based economic stream” for its neglect of the person’s “essential dignity.” He was also skeptical of progress, though his more measured embrace of “intermediate technology” did not entail a return to the swap hook and the sickle. Instead, Schumacher called for “technology with a human face” to replace the system of mass production, which he saw as “inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.”³⁵

Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful combined the principle of subsidiarity and the “dignity” of the human person into a best-selling popular economics book, which sold over a million copies. Through his work, distributism shed its associations with fascism, though he called for essentially the same vision as his predecessors, updated to address the problems of economics on a planetary scale in a world divided between North and South. In 1995, the Times Literary Supplement called Small is Beautiful one of the 100 most influential books published since the Second World War, and during his life, Schumacher augmented its significance, giving lectures to new age retreats in California and becoming an early icon of the green and degrowth movements. Various societies devoted to regenerative economics, such as the Massachusetts-based Schumacher Center, continue to work toward decentralism along the lines he outlined. More broadly, the book influenced how environmental activists in the 1970s conceived of consumer responsibility in the face of environmental problems, responding to ecological questions with moral solutions.

Small is Beautiful is an early example of the way that Catholic social teaching met the environmental and ecological crisis, but later documents published by bishops and popes entrenched the connection, making the environment a key priority among proponents of Catholic social thought. Such ideas were elaborated in “Renewing the Earth,” for instance, a 1991 publication released by American Catholic bishops that argued in favor of “authentic development, which offers direction for progress that respects human dignity and the limits of material growth.” The document suggested that Catholic social doctrine might “serve as the basis for Catholic engagement and dialogue with science, the environmental movement, and other communities of faith and good will.” Enduring efforts to defend the dignity and rights “of the poor and of workers” were, in this understanding, “clearly linked to efforts to preserve and sustain the earth.”³⁶

Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ was a momentous effort to unite Catholic social thought and ecological critique. Much like earlier attempts to parse out the connection, the 2015 encyclical revisited the tension between Catholicism and modern economics while endorsing “small-scale food production” and the dignity of work through labor on the land. Such ideas about the relationship between human dignity and work on the land were not entirely new among advocates of Catholic social thought. They appeared in embryonic form in Rerum Novarum, received a title in the hands of Belloc and Chesterton, and provided the intellectual kernel of Peter Maurin’s “green revolution.” Schumacher repackaged them once again, laying the foundation for a “people-centered economics” that became a guiding principle for many charitable organizations and NGOs that wanted to make capitalism “ethical” through organizations like Oxfam.³⁷ These charitable endeavors advocated decentralization, championing private individuals and entrepreneurs as the standard bearers of a “third-way” approach to global development and environmental injustice. Braiding these two discrete moments together reveals the endurance of land in the genealogy of Catholic social thought while reminding us of the continued significance of religious ideas to economic practices often described in exclusively secular terms.

Alice Gorton is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University writing a dissertation on global agriculture and the grain industry in the British empire during the nineteenth century. In 2021, she received a Cushwa Center Research Travel Grant to study the influence and uses of Rerum Novarum over the course of the 20th century.

This article appears in the fall 2024 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.

Feature image: Peter Maurin in the center of a group including Ade Bethune during a retreat in 1939 at the Catholic Worker farm in Easton, Pennsylvania. Used with permission of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.

Notes

1 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Harper & Row, 1973), 70.

2 Ibid., 70.

3 Ibid.

4 James Chappel, Catholic Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2.

5 On failure: Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 13. Christopher Hamlin and John T. McGreevy, “The Greening of America,” Catholic Style, 1930–1950,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 (2006): 466; Francis Sicius, “Peter Maurin’s Green Revolution,” U.S. Catholic Historian 26, no. 3 (2008): 12.

6 Sam Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Sarah Shortall and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, eds., Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

7 Chappel, Catholic Modern, 13.

8 Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 5.

9 Moyn, Human Rights, 36. According to Moyn, “Jacques Maritain, chief theoretician of civil society Catholicism and later premier interpreter of the Universal Declaration, did not connect dignity to ‘human rights’ until 1942 at the earliest.”

10 Ibid., 21.

11 Ibid., 29.

12 Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science (1967): 1203–7.

13 Patrick Allitt, “American Catholics and the Environment, 1960–1995,” The Catholic Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1998): 277.

14 These positions were understood as broadly Catholic and Protestant. See Hilaire Belloc, “Thoughts about Modern Thought,” New Age 2, no. 6 (1907): 108.

15 James Stafford, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire, and the European Order, 1750–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 211.

16 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (London: T.N. Foulis, 1912), 61.

17 Julia Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism, and Nation: The England of G.K. Chesterton (Lexington Books, 2009).

18 G.K. Chesterton, “The Patriotic Idea,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 597.

19 Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 155–56.

20 Ibid., 157.

21 Vincent McNabb, The Church and the Land (London: Burnes, Oates, & Washmore, Ltd., 1926).

22 MacCarthy, Eric Gill, 97.

23 John Loughery and Blythe Randolph, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century (Simon and Schuster, 2020), 155.

24 Anthony Novitsky, “Peter Maurin’s Green Revolution: The Radical Implications of Reactionary Social Catholicism,” Review of Politics (1975) 37, no. 1, 83; Sicius, “Revolution,” 133.

25 Maryfarm came to an “ignominious end” 11 years later. Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day, 231.

26 Hamlin and McGreevy, “Greening,” 466. The NCRLC has been comprehensively studied in David Bovee, The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–2007 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010). In the late 1960s, it became explicitly involved in the environmental movement.

27 Hamlin and McGreevy, “Greening,” 467.

28 Ibid., 469.

29 Luigi Ligutti and John C. Rawe, Rural Roads to Security: America’s Third Struggle for Freedom (The Bruce Publishing Company, 1940), 301. Quoted in Hamlin and McGreevy, “Greening,” 472; G.K. Chesterton, “Straws in the Wind. Profit-Sharing and Proportion,” G.K.’s Weekly (Feb. 11, 1928), 961.

30 Ibid., 472.

31 Hamlin and McGreevy, “Greening,” 486.

32 Tehila Sasson, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).

33 Ibid., 43.

34 Schumacher, Small, 144.

35 Ibid., 143.

36 “Renewing the Earth: An Invitation to Reflection and Action on Environment in Light of Catholic Social Teaching” (statement of the United States Catholic Conference, November 14, 1991), https://www.usccb.org/resources/renewing-earth.

37 Sasson, Solidarity.

Originally published by Alice Gorton at cushwa.nd.edu on October 23, 2024.