When labor unions were first organized, they needed to remain
secretive because the leading industrialists were intent on
destroying them in their crib. The Church had a long dread of
secret societies stemming from the role of the Free Masons and
other European groups that peddled in anti-clericalism. This
concern of the Church almost resulted in a catastrophe for the
Church’s ability to maintain the allegiance of the working
classes, and to defend its emerging social doctrine as the
following episode, record in Msgr. John Tracy Ellis’s “American
Catholicism” relates. “The most famous case of the Church and a
suspect American society involved the Knights of Labor, the
first major American labor organization. In its early years as a
highly secret society, it had aroused the suspicion of a number
of bishops who wished to have it condemned. Fortunately, the
counsels of these prelates did not prevail, for at the head of
the hierarchy at that moment there stood probably the greatest
single figure the Church in the