"The Catholic Land Movement," explains Dr. Tobias Lanz, professor of Politics at the University of South Carolina, in the introduction to Flee To The Fields, "was formed in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1929 by clergy and laymen to re-establish an agrarian social economy that count counter the prevailing industrial regime....It sought to demonstrate that there was a workable alternative to Capitalism and Socialism, both of which were highly dependent on industrialization and massive urban populations for their survival.

"The industrial regime, as Hilaire Belloc noted in the original preface to this book, has but one goal, and that is the accuмulation of material wealth. To the orthodox Catholic, this all-consuming desire wrought terrible social consequences. Industrialism centralized production and thereby created a monopolistic economy under which millions of people had been forced (or seduced) from farm and village, to take up a barrack-like existence in burgeoning cities. The loss of property subsequently reduced most Englishmen to a state of economic servility, in which they were wholly dependent on industry for survival. Likewise, this impoverished proletariat could be easily manipulated through elaborate social programs enacted by a government that was firmly under the control of the new industrial ruling class. But perhaps the most troubling consequence of industrialization was that it created conditions under which a healthy religious culture could no longer flourish. For, by severing human beings from family, community, and nature, industrialization had effectively dissolved the primordial bonds that made religion tangible, and hence believable.

"In countering industrialism, the Catholic Land Movement did not attempt to create an agrarian utopia, nor was it a Luddite rejection of technology. Rather, it was a prudent approach to economic life that was based on small-scale agriculture, craft-making, and retailing. It grew out of the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), both of which exhorted Catholics to combat modernity in general, and the destructive social consequences of industrialism in particular.....

"The relationship between a healthy rural economy and a healthy religion was explicit. Both rely on the most basic social unit, the family; for it is here that the principles of social subsidiarity are most fully implemented. Historically, the family farm has always relied on the simplest form of technology (or technique), and energy, which is the human being and his labor. Organized through the structure of the household, human labor can provide for the basic human needs of food, clothing, shelter and reproduction. In addition to these material requirements, the family performs an even more important role as the building block of religion. For it is at the family level that the active ingredients of religion faith - the feelings of trust, obedience, discipline and fidelity - are cultivated. The family nurtures and sustains these bonds of love, which hold Christian society together. Moreover, the household plays the pivotal role in cultural reproduction by passing on customs, mores and beliefs. But once the family begins to disintegrate, its ability to pass on a culture's traditions diminishes. As this dynamic recedes, a culture begins to atrophy....

"As we enter the 21st century, the industrial juggernaut seems everywhere ascendant. Through the language of triumphalism and inevitability, it has now imprinted itself on the minds of political leaders, policy makers, and intellectuals the world over - it is claimed there is no alternative. Yet the problems that pervasive and excessive industrialization has created have grown as rapidly as its purported benefits. From massive environmental destruction and the growth of sprawling cities that fester with crime, property and sɛҳuąƖ dysfunction, to widespread psychological maladies that afflict ever-larger members of urban society, the negative effects of the industrial culture can be seen everywhere.

"These problems, which secular universities, think tanks, governments and corporations allocate billions of dollars to 'solve,' have been exacerbated by the very absence of what was lost with the industrialization of the world - the loss of intimate human relationships with other humans, nature, and God...."

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