Decisively shaped by the turbulent atmosphere of war, occupation and resistance, the years 1943-1955 gave rise to a most unusual flowering of progressive initiatives in Catholic politics, theology and apostolic missions. Though suffering severe setbacks in the deep freeze of the Cold War politics, mid-Century European Left Catholicism was not without influence in the subsequent emergence of Latin American Liberation Theology and the deliberations of the Vatican II. This volume constitutes the first attempt to analyse the phenomenon of Western European Left Catholicism from a comparative and transnational perspective.

In Poland in the 1940s and '50s, a new kind of Catholic intended to remake European social and political life--not with guns, but French philosophy This collective intellectual biography examines generations of deeply religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojtyła, future Pope John Paul II, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the future prime minister who would dismantle Poland's Communist regime. Seeking to change the way we understand the Catholic Church, World War II, the Cold War, and communism, this study centers on the idea of "revolution." It examines two crucial countries, France and Poland, while challenging conventional wisdom among historians and introducing innovations in periodization, geography, and methodology. Why has much of Eastern Europe gone back down the road of exclusionary nationalism and religious prejudice since the end of the Cold War? Piotr H. Kosicki helps to understand the crises of contemporary Europe by examining the intellectual world of Roman Catholicism in Poland and France between the Church's declaration of war on socialism in 1891 and the demise of Stalinism in 1956.

An Avant-garde Theological Generation examines the Fourvière Jesuits and Le Saulchoir Dominicans, theologians and philosophers who comprised the influential reform movement the nouvelle théologie. Led by Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu, the movement flourished from the 1930s until its suppression in 1950. It aims to remedy certain historical deficiencies by constructing a history both sensitive to the wider intellectual, political, economic, and cultural milieu of the French interwar crisis, and that establishes continuity with the Modernist crisis and the First World War. Chapter One examines the modern French avant-garde generations that have shaped intellectual and political thought in France, providing context for a historical narrative of the nouvelle théologie. Chapters Two and Three examine the influential older generations that flourished from 1893 to 1914, such as the Dreyfus generation, the generation of Catholic Modernists, and two generations of older Jesuits and Dominicans, which were instrumental in the Fourvière Jesuits' development. Chapter Four explores the influence of the First World War and the years of the 1920s, during which the Jesuits and Dominicans were in religious and intellectual formation, relying heavily on unpublished letters and documents from the Jesuits archives in Paris (Vanves). Chapter Five analyses the crises of the interwar period and the emergence of the wider generation of 1930-to which the nouveaux théologiens belonged-and its intellectual thirst for revolution. Chapter Six examines the emergence of the ressourcement thinkers during the tumultuous years of the 1930s. The decade of the 1940s, explored in Chapter Seven, saw the rise to prominence of the members of the generation of 1930, who, thanks to their participation in the resistance, emerged from the Second World War, with significant influence on the postwar French intellectual milieu. Finally, the monograph concludes in Chapter Eight with an examination of the triumph of French Left Catholicism and the nouvelle théologie during the 1960s at the Second Vatican Council. .

Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France examines the emergence of a citizen consumer role for women during postwar modernization and reconstruction in France, integrating the history of economic modernization with that of women and the family. This role both celebrated the power of the woman consumer and created a gendered form of citizenship that did not disrupt the sexual hierarchy of home, polity and marketplace. Redefining needs and renegotiating concepts of taste, value and thrift, women and their families drove mass consumer society through their demands and purchases at the same time that their very need to consume came to define them.

A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

Catholic Labor Movements in Europe narrates the history of industrial labor movements of Catholic inspiration in the period from the onset of World War I to the reconstruction after World War II. The stated goal of concerned Catholics in the 1920s and 1930s was to "rechristianize society." But dominant labor movements in many countries during this period consisted of socialist elements that viewed religion as an obstacle to social progress. It was a daunting challenge to build robust organizations of Catholics who identified themselves with the working classes and their struggles.

In light of this research work, the Vatican II Council remains a landmark, and its document Apostolicam Actuositatem (what we decided to call a 'Text of witness of actions' for the Catholic Laity), the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, inter alia Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes, that border on the mission of the Catholic Laity in the human society, is a great achievement. After the Vatican II Council the Church saw the need to enhance and harness the witnessing message of the Council for the Catholic Laity mission in the Church and in the world. In the light of the foregoing this work is part of these efforts. We developed a 'hermeneutical model' via the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz in the light of the Vatican II Council message that becomes a challenge for concrete action of the Nigerian Catholic Laity in the existential socio-political situation of Nigeria.