The Holy Father’s ideas concerning Catholic Action have not always been fully understood or exactly interpreted. This is especially true with regard to the relations between Catholic Action, as he envisages it, and the Catholic Social Movement which traces its origin to Leo XIII. It has even been asserted that there is a difference, not to say divergence, between the thought of the two Popes, and that Catholic Action is to supersede the Catholic workers’ organizations, which, it is maintained, have become infected with the materialism they set out to combat, and have, although rejecting class war, brought into the Catholic community a principle of class division inimical to unity among Catholics. On this view, Catholic Action, universal and spiritual, comes as a happy substitute for the social movement inaugurated by Leo XIII.

Others, themselves involved in the workers’ organizations, are apt to consider social action as the highest if not the only form of Catholic Action, forgetting that the term has been given by Pius XI a specific technical meaning which, if not entirely new, conveys a new significance—’ the participation of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church.'

If we seek for the origins of the term ‘Catholic Action,’ it cannot be denied that there is continuity between the thought of the last five Popes. Pius IX on various occasions called for action from Catholics; Leo XIII exhorted at once to Christian social democratic action and to Catholic action;