 Charles
Edward Coughlin, 1891-1979, (pronounced coglin) was born the only child
of
third-generation Irish immigrants to the North America on October 25,
1891, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Upon being graduated from St
Michael's College at the University of Toronto, Coughlin went on to
study at the St Basil's Seminary in Toronto, where he was ordained into
the Catholic priesthood in 1916. Near the end teaching stint at
Assumption College (of Ontario) between the years of 1916 and 1923, Father
Coughlin met Bishop Michael Gallagher. Their relationship began while
sharing a train ride to Detroit, but it would last a lifetime. The
Bishop, eager to start a church in the Detroit area in homage to Saint
Therese of Lisieux (known as "the Little Flower," and canonized in
1926), announced in April, 1926 that Father Coughlin would open the
Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan (Warren 8-17).
 When Father Coughlin hit the radio
airwaves as a part of the Shrine's ministry in October, 1926, his
message was Catholic in nature and
intended for children. By the early
1930s, Coughlin saw much joblessness and insecurity in the
Detroit area and, thus, his radio messages and public
speaking became adult-oriented and focused on social
reform, with an emphasis on
the distribution of wealth in the nation.
His ideas on the distribution of wealth, or rather the re-distribution
of wealth, were
heavily influenced by the social
reforms suggested by the encyclical
of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum
Novarum  (1891), and the encyclical of Pope
Pious XI, Quadragesimo
Anno (1931).
Specifically, Pope Leo XIII addressed the distribution of wealth:
 Such
was the ardor of brotherly love among the earliest Christians that
numbers of those who were in better circumstances despoiled themselves
of their possessions in order to relieve their brethren; whence
"'neither was there any one needy among them.'"[quotation from Acts
4:34] (Vatican 2)
And, in 1931, Pope Pius XI expanded on Leo's point:
 To
each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the
distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person knows,
is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge disparity
between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless, must
be effectively called back to and brought into conformity with the
norms of the common good, that is, social justice (Vatican 1).
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