How much do you need to live? Can you have too much? How much is too little? It's a question with a history, and Catholics had their own way of answering it back in the early twentieth century. Prompted by the increasingly obvious gulf that developed between the richest and poorest Americans in the wake of the dramatic industrial change, Catholic University's Professor Father John A. Ryan, an economist, theologian, and politically - connected Washingtonian addressed the question of what constituted a living wage from a Catholic perspective.