Labor Day 2021

Another Labor Day, another end-of-summer holiday weekend, but one whose origin and meaning should not be obscured by our contemporary addiction to individual pursuits and our chronic neglect of the common good. In his message earlier this year to the 109th meeting of the International Labor Organization, Pope Francis posed this challenge:

In our haste to return to greater economic activity, at the end of the Covid-19 threat, let us avoid the past fixations on profit, isolation and nationalism, blind consumerism and denial of the clear evidence that signals discrimination against our “throwaway” brothers and sisters in our society. On the contrary, let us look for solutions that will help us build a new future of work based on decent and dignified working conditions, that originate in collective negotiation, and that promote the common good, a phrase that will make work an essential component of our care for society and Creation. In this sense, work is truly and essentially human. That is what it is about, being human. [June 17, 2021]

Notwithstanding the unholy (and morally and politically disastrous) alliance of many contemporary Catholics with the Republican party, one of the most admirable aspects of the history of the Catholic Church in the United States was the Church's commitment to the dignity of work and workers, and her support for unions and the labor movement. Institutionally this can be traced back explicitly to Cardinal Gibbons' famous February 20, 1887, Memorial to the Holy See supporting the Knights of Labor. 

On that occasion, Cardinal Gibbons spoke frankly of the "grave and threatening social evils, public injustices, which call for strong resistance and legal remedy." He noted "that for the attainment of any public end, association - the organization of all interested persons - is the most efficacious means, a means altogether natural and just ... almost the only means to invite public attention, to give force to the most legitimate resistance, to add weight to the most just demands." To the (then more worrisome) objection that organized labor involved Catholics mixing with non-Catholics, he pointed out the obvious fact that they are mixed "precisely as they are at their work; for in a mixed people like ours, the separation of religious in social affairs is not possible." Gibbons also defended strikes as "a means almost everywhere and always resorted to by employees in our land and elsewhere to protest against what they consider unjust and to demand their rights." He also pointed out how "it is absolutely necessary that religion should continue to hold the affections, and thus rule the conduct of the multitudes," and how supremely important it is "that the Church should always be found on the side of humanity, of justice toward the multitudes who compose the body of the human family." Accordingly, he warned of "the evident danger of the Church's losing in popular estimation her right to be considered the friend of the people" and warned against an alternative policy as a result of which may "of the most devoted children of the Church would believe themselves repulsed by their Mother and would live without practicing their religion." In this, he proved especially prescient!

One result of the 19th-century American hierarchy's courageous openness to organized labor was the 20th century reality in which American Catholics increasingly influenced politics primarily through what Kenneth Woodward called the two mediating structures in which they had come to play a dominant role - the Democratic party and the Labor Movement. Much of the injustice and lack of opportunity which characterizes working class life in our country today, I believe, can clearly be traced to the decline of the Labor Movement and to its estrangement from the Democratic party since at least the 1970s. Perhaps something similar may be suggested regarding the Church's increasing irrelevance in contemporary American culture as she too has seemed more and more estranged from those two mediating structures.

Of course, there have been and still are heroic voices echoing the moral and political wisdom of Cardinal Gibbons. In particular, Labor Day always reminds me of John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York from 1984 until his death in 2000, who, in his homily during a Labor Day Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in 1986, almost exactly a century after Gibbons' Memorial, affirmed his own strong commitment to organized labor: “So many of our freedoms in this country, so much of the building up of society, is precisely attributable to the union movement, a movement that I personally will defend despite the weakness of some of its members, despite the corruption with which we are all familiar that pervades all society, a movement that I personally will defend with my life.”

More recently, when Kentucky legislators proposed anti-union “right to work” legislation in 2017, Lexington's Bishop John Stowe spoke out boldly in defense of Catholic Social Teaching on unions and worker justice. 

And, of course, Pope Francis , in his aforementioned ILO Message, has continued to proclaim the Church's tradition in response to the heightened distress occasioned by the present pandemic, which "has reminded us that there are no differences or boundaries between those who suffer. We are all fragile and, at the same time, all of great value. Let us hope what is happening around us will shake us to our core. The time has come to eliminate inequalities, to cure the injustice that is undermining the health of the entire human family."  On that occasion, he recalled how Pope Pius XI, in 1931, "denounced the asymmetry between workers and businesses as a flagrant injustice that gave carte blanche and means to capital," which "has undoubtedly long been able to appropriate too much to itself. Whatever was produced, whatever returns accrued, capital claimed for itself (Quadragesimo Anno, 55)." 

(Photo: Labor Day Parade, Union Square, New York City, 1882.)