The following study exacmines the social, cultural and political history of Catholic workers in the city of Cologne and its environs from 1885 to 1912. Specifically, it treats the methods employed by the Catholic Church to isolate its working class members from Marxist Social Democracy by enclosing them within a clerically constructed and controlled social-cultural miliue, explores the beliefs and behaviors inculcated in this confessional envrironment, and explains the causes of the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) conquest of Cologne in the 1912 Reichstag election.