DISCORSO DI SUA SANTITÀ PIO PP. XII
AD UN GRUPPO DI INDUSTRIALI DELLE FONDERIE*

Lunedì, 5 ottobre 1953

You have come, gentlemen, from your International Foundry Congress in Paris, and We are happy to express a word of welcome to you, a word too of encouragement. It is gratifying to observe that the delicate but critical problem of human relations in factory, foundry and office is coming to occupy the attention it merits in your meetings with your fellow-foundrymen abroad. These increasingly frequent and cordial contacts between the representatives of medium and small private business, beset the world over with common problems at the human, especially the family level, cannot but make for improved techniques of production and distribution.

On one controlling condition, however, that you put first things first at the office as you do at home. Some years ago Our Predecessor of happy memory had to express the bitter lament, that « matter comes out of the factory ennobled, and men too often debased » (Quadragesimo Anno). No, the factory, before it is a moulder of metal, is like every human association a moulder of men. To animate the industrial group or unit there lies the soul of the worker, employer as well as employee, with all its human hopes and fears, its noble destiny, its inalienable prerogatives. Security and efficiency in a business are the return paid on a sense of justice and amity that reigns among those who unite their human effort — often their heroic courage — to build it and keep it what you Americans call «a going concern ». Need We remind you once more that profit margins, wages and production schedules are all a function of the human activity, the human rights and sensibilities involved, not the other way round.

We trust that you will have been heartened to find your European colleagues at one with you in their determination to resist valiantly that depersonalizing process — a barbarous word for a barbarous reality — which threatens today much more than merely economic values.

May the blessing of the Lord of life and love, which We gladly impart to you, as to your working-staffs and dear ones, enlighten your minds and steel the resolution of your hearts and hands for that glorious human venture ahead, the reconstruction of a Christian social order for your generation and that of your children.

*Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio XII, XV,
 Quindicesimo anno di Pontificato, 2 marzo 1953 - 1° marzo 1954, pp. 363 - 364
 Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana