A History of the Catholic Civil Service Guild 1933 - 2005

Introduction 

Writing in the national bulletin of the Civil Service Catholic Guild in 1978 after the election of Pope John Paul II, an employee of the Department for Employment posed a pointed question: “Are we Civil Servants who happen to be Catholics, or Catholics who are also Civil Servants?” (3)

The question was a faint echo of the more dramatic words uttered centuries earlier by the Guild’s Patron, St. Thomas More: “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first”. And it was a question to which the Civil Service Catholic Guild attempted to be a living response. The Guild was established in 1933 to make Catholic Civil Servants better servants and better Catholics. The Guild was active for nearly sixty years, then lingered in “retirement” from 1992 until as late as 2005, just sixteen years before the current Catholic Group – part of the Christians in Government network - was established in 2021. Drawing on the Guild’s publications, correspondence and press reports, this article explores this rich yet little-known history, the Guild’s aims and activities, its growth and decline, what it achieved and what lessons it can offer Catholic Civil Servants today. 

The Three Objectives

“The basic reason for the existence of any Guild or other large society in the Church is to enable its members to be effective in the lay apostolate”. (4) 

So declared Monsignor Derek Warlock - a rising star in the Church during the Second Vatican Council, and later Archbishop of Liverpool. Guild leaders had approached Monsignor Warlock for advice on renewal in the 1960s, and his statement of its fundamental aim was considered “entirely consistent with” the three objectives of the Guild that headlined all its publications: “Founded in 1933 to promote among its members their spiritual welfare, an enlightened Catholic outlook on the problems of public administration, and Christian fellowship” In its early, pre-War years, the Guild saw its primary aim as the spiritual welfare of its members, followed by fellowship. With most adult Catholics practising their faith in the 1930s, the priority was to bring many of those in under the umbrella of “Catholic Action”, 

and at the same time, shore up the faith and identity of Catholics, especially younger ones, amid a growing materialistic culture outside. The name of “Guild” denoted a model and ethos that looked unapologetically backwards. In its own words of 1947, the Guild was “founded in 1933 by a group of officers who felt that an association was needed which would unite all Catholic Civil Servants for their spiritual, moral and social welfare in a manner similar to that which marked the Guilds of the Middle Ages.”5 As a “Guild”, headed by a “Grand Master”, it joined a growing array of Catholic professional guilds that had emerged, including those for Printers, Police, Transport, Post Office, Doctors, Nurses, Stage, Musicians, Artists, Opticians, Chemists, Teachers, Journalists and Warehousemen and Clerks. Yet the Guild was never intended as merely a mutual aid society, but an example of St. John Henry Newman’s vision for an educated and confident Catholic laity that could better witness to and articulate their faith. In 1935, its leaders observed: Unlike many other bodies which have formed Guilds, the Civil Service is a National organisation comprising upwards of 300,000 State Servants of the non-industrial classes, and without unduly stressing the point, the qualifications looked for are such as to recruit to the service an educated body of men and women, drawn in the main from Secondary Schools, High Schools, Public Schools and the Universities … A unique opportunity presents itself by reason of the facilities afforded by the organisation of the Service, to draw from it, under the auspices of a Guild, a body of educated men and women capable of realising and appreciating the Catholic standpoint. The Council feel that the blessed gifts of intelligence and understanding based on a sound Catholic education, which are given by God, should be used to carry the Catholic outlook into the daily lives of Civil Servants, in the defence of Catholic principles, and in the spread of the faith.6 In 1947, and prompted by the advent of the new post-War welfare state that expanded the reach and size of government and Civil Service, the Guild explicitly adopted a new object: “to develop among the members an enlightened Catholic outlook on the problems of public administration”. For this was seen as a second age of “Rerum Novarum” 7 – “of new things”: of new social and economic questions, new public policy responsibilities, technological and institutional innovation, and new threats. “Catholics who were also Civil Servants” needed instruction in how to comprehend and contribute to these “new things”, what they could assimilate and what they must resist. Post-War bulletins testified to these new things, with articles on, amongst other topics of the day, the new National Health Service, strikes, and law and order. In particular, in the years following the Second World War, growing fears of communism within Civil Service trade unions became a central preoccupation of the Guild. Catholics 5 Paper published by the National Council 1947, Birmingham (Diocesan) archives, AP C19 6 National Council paper, 26 April 1935, Southwark (Diocesan) archives. 7 Rerum Novarum was the seminal encyclical of Pope Leo XIII promulgated in 1891 that set out the Catholic Church’s response to the “new” problems of industrialisation and class conflict. were encouraged to join their unions and staff associations in order to preserve the integrity of the Civil Service against communist infiltration. We don’t know to what extent individual Catholic officials addressed their new responsibilities in a distinctively “Catholic” way, but the Guild was there to support them. Emphases changed over the decades, as we shall see below.