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The Late Fr. Raymond McGowan: A Man Ahead of His Time By Msgr. George G. Higgins The Yardstick January 29, 2001     My recent move to a retirement residence for priests about a mile from my former residence prompted me to sift through some old and long-forgotten files on the history of the Catholic social action movement and some of its leading figures, especially those I had the good fortune to know personally.     This little exercise in nostalgia brought back happy memories but also one major disappointment. I found that little has been written and little survives in the archives about the late Father Raymond McGowan, assistant director of the social action department of the old National Catholic Welfare Conference, now to be known as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Father McGowan served in the NCWC from 1919 until his 1954 retirement and was my mentor during my first 10 years at the conference.     In the early winter of 1923, Father McGowan was invited to consult with a grand old man rapidly approaching the end of his distinguished career as dean of the American labor movement. Father McGowan, only recently appointed assistant director of the NCWC social action department, had been summoned to meet with the executive council of the then American Federation of Labor by Samuel Gompers, founder and first president of the AFL.     Father McGowan had just established the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems. A garbled news release on its first meeting in Chicago disturbed Gompers a little. He was under the mistaken impression that the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems was to be a separate Catholic union or federation of Catholic unions competing with AFL affiliates for the loyalty of Catholic workers. After Father McGowan cleared up this unfortunate misunderstanding, he explained that the new organization's long-range program was an organized system of cooperation by labor, management and government in American economic life. Almost a decade before Pius XI's encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno,'' Father McGowan was advocating the encyclical program.     Gompers was sympathetic with the idea, but unfortunately he died before he was able to do anything about it in a practical way.     Within this column's limitations, it is impossible even to list the many contributions Father McGowan made to the social-justice cause at home and abroad. I only hope the foregoing story illustrates a few of the distinctive qualities which consistently characterized his work.     From the beginning, Father McGowan proved himself a man of extraordinary vision. Surely it required unusual vision to establish a Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems in the “golden” 1920s, and even greater vision to establish a few years later a Catholic Association for International Peace.     Both organizations and several others concerned with the problems of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens and U.S.-Latin American economic problems -- organizations which owed their existence to his initiative -- were started at a time when few Americans were even remotely interested in the application of ethical principles to domestic economic life and international relations.     During his years at NCWC, Father McGowan was interested, of course, in social legislation, but only as a secondary method of social reform. Temperamentally, as well as intellectually, he was primarily interested in organization. Thus, it was appropriate that even as a very young priest he should have been consulted by the elders of the AFL. His meeting with Gompers in the early 1920s was to be the first of literally hundreds of formal and informal conversations with representatives not only of labor organizations but employers' organizations as well.     The greater part of his time and energy was devoted over a period of 35 years to a patient effort to persuade these organizations of the importance and necessity of working together to solve their common problems. Papal Social EncyclicalsOther Catholic Social TeachingsGeneral Articles of InterestCatholic Worker Connection Msgr. George HigginsHome Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre