Archive Article: The Catholic Land Movement. 17th Jan 03
December 27, 2008

70 years ago in Britain, when there was an unemployment crisis, some Catholics began a campaign to find alternative employment opportunities for people. Their work contains some lessons for today.

Dr Valerie Flessati, a writer based in London, has an article in this month’s edition of the British magazine “Catholic Life” on the Catholic Land Movement. 70 years ago Britain had several crises to deal with. One was the Depression, with several million people unemployed. Another was the problem in the countryside, with millions of acres lying derelict and farms abandoned because of the decline in the prices of land and farm produce. The British government decided that a solution to urban unemployment was that more of the population should return to agriculture.

Some British Catholics supported radical plans to achieve justice and self-sufficiency for the poor. Arising out of Catholic social teaching, they decided that there should be support for family farms, co-operative workshops owned by craftspeople who were free agents, retail shops in individual or family ownership, with large scale operations owned collectively by the workers.

They formed an organization: the Catholic Land Association. The aim of the Catholic Land Association was to establish training farms where people could learn agricultural skills and then to set up the trainees in small subsistence farms that they and their families would own and manage. Some church land in England and Scotland was provided to get the schemes going.

The Catholic Land Association set out to prove that people could be taught to make a living from the land. The demonstration succeeded but its potential was stifled. One problem was the lack of funds. Government grants were not available for the kind of family-owned, mixed subsistence farms favoured by the Association.

Another problem came from the church hierarchy. Some thought that the plan was a bit too radical and so there was no national agreement on it. Meanwhile, the bishops refused permission for there to be a national collection to support the movement. They claimed that all the money they were already raising should go on new schools and church buildings.

Thus, the Catholic land movement gradually wound down. It died through a lack of government and Catholic heirarchy support – rather than any downright opposition by any sector of the community.

By 1939, the training farms were all closed. Ironically, the onset of World War II that year meant that the fresh attention to agricultural self-sufficiency once again showed the value of these farms.

Dr Valerie Flessati ends her article with a challenge: she says that the problems addressed so imaginatively by the Catholic land movement in its day have not gone away. How can people earn a living wage and find work that develops their human creatively? How can ordinary citizens gain control of their lives when big business dominates? How can we feed the human family without destroying the earth’s ecology? These questions remain as relevant for today as they did 70 years ago when the Catholic land movement got underway.

Broadcast Friday 17 January 2003 on Radio 2GB’s “Brian Wilshire Programme” at 9pm.