It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.

Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.

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