As the world compounds horror upon horror, there is growing interest in the startling and unsettling message of a Catholic socialist turned apocalyptic lamenter

“No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.” With these words, Pope Pius XI thought he had settled a vexed question once and for all. In May 1931, after decades of campaigns against the socialist movement, Quadragesimo Anno put it in black and white. Yet one month later Otto Bauer announced that “the encyclical is not yet the final, definitive word of the Church in its encounter with socialism”, and declared his intention to remain a Catholic socialist. Who was Otto Bauer? And did he succeed in carving out a place for socialism in Catholic social thought?

Googling “Otto Bauer” will deluge you with thousands of results for an Austrian politician still feted as a leading theorist of democratic socialism. In contrast, “Little Otto” was a metal worker who edited a journal whose circulation never exceeded a few thousand, founded a Catholic organisation near-universally condemned by the Austrian clergy, and swiftly sank into obscurity after his death in 1986. But “the Church thinks long thoughts, Ireni”, Little Otto confidently told his friend Irene Grant, who had been concerned he would be excommunicated. “It thinks in terms of generations, even centuries … Believe me, they’re going to want me” – 125 years after his birth, it’s an opportune moment to ask whether we do.
Bauer was the illegitimate son of a seamstress and a metal grinder. He grew up in the impoverished environs of Vienna’s working-class Ottakring area distinguished by its overcrowded “basin tenements”: one room per family, and one tap per corridor. At 14, he witnessed the protests against hunger that swept the city. One September day in 1911, Ottakring boys as young as 12 set 10 local schools on fire, throwing out books and ­stationery on to the street and, for good ­measure, burning them too.