The Catholic group deserves to be considered first, because it intervened in the discussion much sooner than the Evangelical, and because it originated a much more important movement--larger in its dimensions than the other, and invested with additional consequence from the circumstance that being promoted under the countenance of dignitaries, it must be presumed to have received the sanction of the Roman Curia, and may therefore afford an index to the general attitude which the Catholic Church is disposed to assume towards Continental socialism. The socialist agitation had no sooner broken out, in 1863, than Dr. Döllinger, then a pillar of the Church of Rome, strongly recommended the Catholic clubs of Germany to take the question up. These clubs are societies for mutual improvement, recreation, and benefit, and are composed mainly of working men. Father Kölping, himself at the time a working man, had, in 1847, founded an extensive organization of Catholic journeymen, which, in 1872, had a total membership of 70,000, and consisted of an affiliation of small journeyman clubs, with a membership of from 50 to 400 each, in the various towns of Germany. Then there were also Catholic apprentice clubs--in many cases in alliance with those of the journeymen; there were Catholic master clubs, Catholic peasant clubs, Catholic benefit clubs, Catholic young men's clubs, Catholic credit clubs, Catholic book clubs, etc., etc. These clubs naturally afforded an organization ready to hand for any general purpose the members might share in common, and being composed of working men, they seemed reasonably calculated to be of effective service in forwarding the cause of social amelioration. Early in 1864, accordingly, Bishop Ketteler, of Mayence, warmly seconded Döllinger's idea, and at the same time published a remarkable pamphlet on "The Labour Question and Christianity," in which he unfolded his views of the causes and the cure of the existing evils.