Today is May Day, although a chilly 44 degrees in the city at the start of the day.
May Day is a curious combination of, on the one hand, an ancient spring festival, midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, traditionally marked by rituals to ensure fertility for crops and livestock, and, on the other, a modern International Workers' Day, originating in the late 19th-century U.S. labor movement and adopted as an international socialist holiday. Those of us old enough to remember the Cold War will recall how May Day was one of the days when big parades would be held in Moscow and other communist capitals (the other one, of course, being November 7, the anniversary of the October Revolution).
May Day was highlighted in the 1960s musical Camelot. ("Those dreary vows that everyone makes, everyone breaks, in the merry month of May"). Apart from such theatrical evocations, however, in our de-natured, disenchanted, post-industrial, technological world, the change of seasons obviously matters much less than it did for all of previous human history. Such seasonal celebrations as May Day survive only marginally as folkloric occasions, the stuff of romantic nostalgia. Maybe some group erects a maypole somewhere, but its original meaning no longer has any operational significance in the lives of those play-acting dancing around a maypole.
Likewise, with the fall of communism, the political salience of May Day has receded. International Workers' Day still resonates in labor and left-wing political circles, of course, but labor unions, social democratic political parties, and workers' and "left" causes in general have fared poorly in our present politics of neo-liberalism and populism. On the other hand, we now have an acknowledged social democrat as mayor of New York, whose election may infuse some new vitality into that troubled movement. The more fundamental problem, however, is that much of what passes for the progressive left represents society's winners, those whom the system has favored and who have benefited so much from it, not those left behind, who tend to look elsewhere for political allegiance.
As Pope Benedict XVI famously wrote back in 2006: "Democratic socialism managed to fit within the two existing models as a welcome counterweight to the radical liberal positions, which it developed and corrected. It also managed to appeal to various denominations. In England it became the political party of the Catholics, who had never felt at home among either the Protestant conservatives or the liberals. In Wilhelmine Germany, too, Catholic groups felt closer to democratic socialism than to the rigidly Prussian and Protestant conservative forces. In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness." ("Europe and Its Discontents," First Things, January 2006).
That said, the Church's mid-20th-century attempt to co-op May Day hasn't fared much better than the day's secular iterations. In 1955, Pope Pius XII established a religious analogue to International Workers' Day, the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, which acknowledged the dignity of labor and celebrated Saint Joseph (himself referred to in scripture as a carpenter) as a patron of workers. Saint Joseph the Worker replaced the feast of the patronage of Saint Joseph (formerly celebrated on the third Wednesday after Easter). Liturgists, however, seem not to have taken to the new feast, for in the problematic post-conciliar 1969 calendar, Saint Joseph the Worker was reduced from the highest ranking liturgical day to the lowest ranking ("optional memorial"). It is perhaps pointless to try to make sense of the post-conciliar calendar reform. Personally, however, given the abiding religious resonance of at least some aspects of democratic socialism, I find the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker worth keeping.
The Gospel reading for today (Matthew 13:54-58) recalls the famous incident in the Nazareth Synagogue where the peopel took offense at Jesus. Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter's son? That's as good an account as any of the lack of respect accorded to work, of our failure to appreciate the contribution of those whose labor is in fact essential to society's successful functioning.
