In Italy, the nineteenth century had been particularly difficult for the Catholic Church: The Italian unification had swept away the temporal rule of the popes. For centuries, the city of Rome and the Lazio region had remained a small theocracy, a relic of ancient times, located right in the middle of the peninsula. But with Garibaldi's victorious march north in 1860, the papal rule was shattered and reduced to the sole city of Rome. Ten years later, the Italian government sent the Bersaglieri troops to conquer Rome, leaving the popes with only a tiny area of territory. At the same time, the government confiscated the Catholic Church's possessions throughout the peninsula, something that other European governments had already done long before. Without their possessions and sources of income, priests and monks began to be seen as useless parasites, with their ridiculous black clothes, their Latin that no one understood anymore, and their dusty rosaries and prayers. They had become completely obsolete in the new industrial world.

The agrarian world of the countryside was static, hierarchical, and strictly regulated. The industrial world of the cities was dynamic, divided into classes, and fiercely competitive. In the Middle Ages, the Church could own land, give work to peasants, and manage agricultural production. With the industrial revolution, the Church could not, or would not, build factories, give work to workers, or manage production. The Church never found a role for itself in factories; it simply did not exist there. Thus, for most of the 19th century, the Church found no remedy for the rising tide of new ideas other than to entrench itself behind dogma and tradition. The popes published lists of errors that believers had to guard against and forbade them from actively engaging in politics until, in 1870, the popes reacted to the loss of temporal power by declaring themselves “infallible.”

Against this backdrop of fierce conservatism, new ideas emerged that drew on the ancient Christian tradition of fighting oppression and sought to apply it to the new times. Christianity, which had once emerged as a revolutionary movement opposed to an authoritarian empire, still had the internal strength to react to the new world that was being created. It took almost the entire 19th century for these ideas to emerge, but in the end, they began to be heard, and it was precisely the rebirth of the social ideas of the Church that the young Armando Vacca would make his own and interpret throughout his short career.

The Church's first official statement on the new times was Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter “Rerum Novarum” (On the New Things) of 1891. It spoke in terms and thoughts that would have seemed unthinkable before and echoed the great themes of the workers' struggle of the time, such as workers' rights, their dignity, and exploitation by the rich. It was the beginning of what would be called the reformist movement of the Church, which aimed at the emancipation of workers based on Christian ideals.

To understand this current of thought, it may be worth quoting here the words of Henri Lorin, a French Catholic who founded the “social weeks,” an association that still exists today. The following text was written in 1903 and is still perfectly relevant today: we find in it implied disapproval of the massacre of Italian workers in Milan in 1898, when Armando Vacca was 10 years old. These facts cannot be ignored when one is with those on the wrong side of the gun barrel. (from “La Gazzetta di Bergamo” - May 14, 1903). (from “La Gazzetta di Bergamo” - May 14, 1903).

For them (the conservatives), order was not an empirical idea at all, but rather a brutally fatal fact; more than an idea, it was the unquestionable maintenance of a state of affairs in which force replaced justice and the glitter of money prevailed over the law. Order was the ratification and prolongation of a constraint under which the undeserved misery of the proletariat bowed their heads quietly and silently. As justification for this order, they could only cite the circumstances that had arisen and the facts that had been accomplished: it was order because it was a fact. This materialistic conception of order cannot stand up to the teachings of the popes. The only social order that deserves the beautiful name of order is that in which all men are able to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, in which no creature, because of its extreme material poverty, is made almost incapable of exercising moral virtues, in which society, concerned for the good of all souls, guarantees to all bodies that minimum of material goods necessary, according to the words of St. Thomas, to exercise the good, the ultimate end of man.

(...)

And Leo XIII reminded them (the liberals) that above the freedom of contract, which usually makes the will of the strongest prevail and which is nothing more than the imprisonment of unarmed freedom by armed freedom, there are and always will be inviolable, imprescriptible, higher precepts of morality: he reminded them that it is unjust to enter into a contract whereby a man renounces serving God on the days consecrated to him, reserving the time necessary to fulfill his family duties, and respecting the rules of hygiene indispensable for physical life.