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John A. Ryan was said to look less than he was. Scruffy, cranky and always half away in whichever book he was reading at the time. He was born the first of eleven children and educated sporadically in a one room schoolhouse. After working on the family farm to keep his mother and younger siblings afloat, at the earliest opportunity John chose the priesthood as his occupation.
After graduate study Ryan began to lobby for social change. Concerns that still rattle around our halls of assembly and power. He wanted a living wage, a shorter work week and protection for women and children enforced by the law. Father Ryan was instrumental in his contribution to the cause of installing a minimum wage across several states, laying the groundwork for millions to benefit in the future. The basis of Ryan's theory was a belief in the god given rights of every person which according to his rationale imposed on the state, the moral responsibility to take redistributive action to relieve suffering.
His book is in many respects as radical today as it was in his heyday. Whilst not all readers will share the Catholic faith, his lateral reasoning is impeccable and his conclusions are socially compassionate. He argues that our economic reasoning has become artificially detached from our ethics, and that an urgent reassessment is needed. Whether one comes to agree or not, 'The State and the Church' provokes each of us to reassess the relationship between pragmatic reasoning and moral thought.
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