Sixty years ago, high school and college-age students took low-wage jobs at fast-food chains and restaurants as part-time or summer work. Today’s mature workers, often low-income women, have made these and similar jobs full-time, and the labor movement has spearheaded corporate campaigns to support them. There remains a market limit to the pay and benefits of these workers because of the price of caregiving, cleaning, and eating out. Every person has a right to human dignity, but, to some degree, you will never see a world without the haves and have-nots.
Such causes are a question of both dollars and cents (material well-being) and spiritual truth. This short commentary underscores the importance of promoting the Catholic understanding of marriage and the family in today’s U.S. labor movement. I use my studies and experience to highlight the importance of the family, describe labor’s contributions and challenges to the family, and criticize the postmodern rejection of norms and boundaries, which reject the family. The essay concludes with a fervorino to develop our character through the spiritual life. It requires a knowledge of the Catholic virtues and a focus on our memory, understanding, and will as sons and daughters of God.
Workers without more marketable skills continue to fill low-paying jobs for their families, particularly their children, in the hope of a brighter future. However, the rising cost of higher education, unmarketable degrees, and inevitable technological advances have become severe and urgent challenges for future generations. Our collective responsibility is to understand and address these issues with good discernment. Although entry-level, low-income jobs once provided work experience for the young, they are not long-term sources of economic well-being. Work that previously required human skills is threatened in every field. For instance, artificial intelligence will inevitably expand from today’s routine boilerplate legal tasks to the more demanding logical thinking and argumentation of the legal profession.
A college degree alone does not ensure a significant return on investment in today’s world. On the one hand, political leaders have made forgiving student debt a campaign platform. On the other, academics and college administrators have gained immense social, political, and financial capital from the public largesse, a part of our collective national debt. Buyers (students and taxpayers) beware. Rising expectations, a poorly discerned college education, and a rapidly changing economy will lead to more significant individual challenges and social pressure. However, well-formed, faithful men and women of character will continue to find inner peace no matter their successes or disappointments on this temporal pilgrimage.
Higher education, the entertainment industry/media, and a significant portion of organized labor have veered to the cultural left for years. Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the most successful at raising labor’s banner, has fought for low-income wage earners in corporate campaigns and political lobbying. However, the individualism found in the political identity causes inside and outside of the labor movement has left the social fabric of family, work, and faith threadbare. This has reinforced society’s individualism and malaise, which leads to isolation or, at worst, violence and should be a concern for everyone.
Labor leaders, educators, and celebrities have mistakenly told us that we have no right to enforce boundaries or limits to behavior. “Don’t offend.” “Respect everyone’s personal decisions.” No one can criticize others’ personal choices. Then, rhetorically speaking, why not throw out the Ten Commandments? There are no sins.
While organizing workers to meet basic material needs is essential for the labor movement and all people of goodwill, the culture’s spiritual tank has nearly reached empty. Jesus’s ministry pointed to the spiritual life as primary; he taught and lived a personal and communal relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. His life, teaching, and resurrection have shaped and are the Christian life. Manifesting the presence of the Holy Trinity, he fed the hungry and cured the sick, gaining disciples by his example and teaching.
A frequent protest chant at labor and social justice marches is “No Justice, No Peace.” In Catholic teaching, God is charity (love) and truth (justice); justice is a moral virtue, and peace is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. They are not a call to break windows, spray paint graffiti, storm buildings, or menacingly threaten the peace of others, as sometimes happens in aggressive postmodern social protests. The nonviolent protests of Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., resulted in significant and lasting change. To their credit, organizers in the corporate campaigns of today’s labor movement recognize the importance of leveraging off of social tension and conflict and following peaceful, nonviolent protest methods.
Catholic boundaries and Fiducia Supplicans
Without any sociological data, my experience is that many low-income immigrant workers come from traditional cultures and families and often hold conservative, traditional social values. But U.S. social activists within and outside the Church frequently criticize and reject Catholic beliefs held by the same immigrants. As an example, various Catholic African Bishops Conferences and the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), representing Catholics across the continent, reminded their faithful that Fiducia Supplicans had not changed Catholic teaching about marriage, blessings, or sin.
African priests and deacons cannot, nor can any other priest or deacon, bless homosexuals as married couples, given Fiducia Supplicans and the clarity of Church teaching. Moreover, Pope Francis has said that any such blessings of people in irregular marriages or same-sex relationships are not liturgical blessings. Again, bishops, priests, and deacons cannot bless same-sex relationships or irregular marriages as a sign of Church acceptance of the relationship or any sin. A blessing is a sign that people want God’s help. The priest is to believe and teach what the Church teaches; the hope is that those blessed will follow Jesus Christ and Catholic teaching. Like any faithful Catholic, the priest is to fulfill his role, which St. Ignatius of Loyola calls “thinking with the Church” in the Spiritual Exercises.
A blessing in no way supports sexual relations outside of the sacramental marriage of a husband and wife. Despite the silence or failure of some American religious superiors, diocesan bishops, priests, and deacons to inform Catholics, Pope Francis and the Church have never approved of gay sexual relationships or sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Superiors and diocesan bishops must be vigilant, or Fiducia Supplicans will be abused to attempt to normalize sin. In this respect, the African bishops have reasonably and justifiably denied the blessing of same-sex relationships in their dioceses.
In a similar vein, Pope Francis has emphatically spoken against the acceptance of transgenderism and its promotion. The media popular Fr. James Martin, SJ, to my knowledge, has said nothing about the Pope’s opposition except to use French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s reframe of vien (“come” in French), insinuating that the Church’s “no” to sexual distortions and sins will pass away with time.
In Derrida’s postmodern thinking, no essences exist; the truth is only subjective. Therefore, everything is in flux (everything will pass; nothing is permanent). Vien is a call to enter something different or an eternal recurrence that welcomes difference. This is Derrida’s use of vien. Such thinking recognizes that change occurs; it fails to acknowledge the permanence of our self, particularly our soul, or a purpose to creation. It has no belief in the transcendent or metaphysical. There is nothing higher than each individual’s free will.
If anyone should be upset about Fiducia Supplicans, it is the German bishops and Fr. Martin. There was no change in Church teaching. Priests and deacons can bless a car, a house, a boat, an animal, a sinner, new tools, and so on. But as a priest, I will not provide a blessing in any such case if I know the item will be used for evil, the person blessed has some evil/sinful intent, or the person requesting the blessing manifests neither the thought nor desire to follow the Church’s understanding of what is good and true—in other words, that which comes from God. A personal blessing request should include some sign of humility on the part of the recipient. Jesus reprimanded the apostles for preventing the children from going to him. They came to him in humility and innocence, a model for us all.
Whether the immigrants come from Latin America, Africa, or Asia (Catholic or non-Catholic), they bring their values when they join or organize with American labor unions. A valid question for the leaders of any meditating institution, especially democratically led organizations like unions, is whether these values are acknowledged and respected. The labor movement’s institutional promotion of same-sex platforms and internal gay advocacy groups came from the labor movement’s power elites and their Democratic party supporters (the top down) and not from the union members (the bottom up).
This is true for the promotion of abortion and transgenderism, and other immoral responses to life that many people of goodwill reject, whether Catholic or not. Do Catholic leaders and laity fall to these errors? Yes. However, these failures of the faithful are not made a rule of faith or promoted as a norm for society. They require contrition, forgiveness, and conversion.
Catholics in the labor movement
In 1996 and 1997, I supported the union-organizing janitors who worked for Service-Master, a contractor at the University of Southern California. SEIU Local 399 asked me to speak to them and support their right to organize, which I did. They had attempted to organize independently and failed, and SEIU Local 399 took up their cause. I also met with Mike Garcia, Local 399’s president and the future president of state-wide Local 1877, because I was interviewing union and community organizers for my dissertation.
I asked him about the labor movement’s promotion of the homosexual agenda, which clashed with the Catholicism and values of many of the Latinos (immigrants and non-immigrants) he was organizing. He made a muted, affirmative acknowledgment, making me feel like I was sitting before a penitent. He was focused on organizing workers and winning union representation fights. I had raised a troubling question. He conceded that there was a culture clash and offered that his wife, who was a faithful non-Catholic Christian, would agree with me.
Mary Kay Henry was the international president of the Service Employees International Union from 2010 to 2024. I met her in 2001 when she was a national organizer for SEIU, working for Eliseo Medina, a former leader of the United Farmworkers and then an SEIU executive vice president for the Western U.S. She worked on the organizing of the multi-employer Catholic HealthCare West health system and helped to finalize a contract. I taught in San Francisco and was writing a paper about Catholic healthcare institutions and their Catholic identity. Religious women’s communities had shrunk while the national financial and administrative challenges of providing healthcare had increased. She was thoughtful, articulate, and engaging.
She fully recognized that men and women work in healthcare because they are caring people. They are willing to sacrifice for others so the employer can take them for granted. She believed that SEIU could not simply organize workers; the union had to tackle the healthcare system in the U.S. Initially, she wanted to work in alliance with the Catholic women’s religious orders that operated hospitals and nursing homes.
She found, however, that when employees sought collective representation, the sisters reverted to the usual employer defenses, even hiring a union-busting firm in Los Angeles. Recognition of workers’ rights and national healthcare system reform were not linked in their minds. Henry recognized the lack of shared values, and SEIU returned to engaging Catholic HealthCare West as another corporation, which was the original position of her fellow organizers.
She had also caught the attention of John Carr, the director of the Dept. of Justice, Peace, and Human Development at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). She became an advisor to the USCCB’s Catholic Health Care and Work Subcommittee. She is Catholic. She is also a lesbian and promoter of the homosexual agenda, including same-sex “marriage”. When she became president of the SEIU, her priorities were labor rights, immigrants’ rights, and LGBT rights. She was the co-founder of SEIU’s Lavender Caucus.
When I interviewed her over twenty years ago, I asked about the gay activism that had become a part of the labor agenda, particularly in SEIU. She did not answer, remaining silent; she had nothing to say about an important contemporary issue for Catholics and Americans. She was a capable person, but she rejected Catholic teaching. In this matter, she had lost her depth. She did not offer to discuss the Catholic Church’s teaching and seemingly had nothing to contribute. She leveraged her Catholicism when it served her purposes, but publicly and actively rejected it concerning marriage and the family.
SEIU and Henry played a gigantic role in helping poor workers increase the minimum wage in tens of states and major cities in the past decade. Fight for $15 was a minimum wage campaign for millions of workers, especially fast-food employees, home care workers, gas station convenience tellers, and others. When minimum wages increase, the divorce rate in poor households decreases,i but well-formed Catholics supported by their faith also understand the importance of faith, hope, love, and the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. Character is essential to resilience, and Christianity remains the touchstone of character for billions.
Today, just as a vast swath of the U.S. population has not embraced the dilution of marriage (nor abortion or euthanasia), labor unionists, their supporters, and workers in general are divided. Well-formed Catholics realize marriage is between a man and a woman, and the family they create is the vital cell of society—as the Church has always understood. If you believe the social fabric of United States culture is torn and frayed, what happens when the culture has completely lost respect for marriage and life?
SEIU’s get-out-the-vote operations, like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are highly efficient and effective. They make personal calls and visits to registered voters, which is how elections are won.
Adult children should ask their parents if they registered to vote and whether they are well informed about the candidates and issues. Given labor’s mixed cultural and election agenda, labor activists have become experts at getting their supporters’ votes counted. Who is helping the elderly and poor cast their vote? Unfortunately, individual labor unions and leaders have sometimes crossed the bounds of legal electioneering.
Responsible adult children want their senior parents close to them or at home if they can afford home care. Elderly care is not offshored. Adult children depend on immigrants and the working poor for home care with various duties and tasks. Janitorial work cannot be offshored (but it can be subcontracted), and the consumer blindly accepts the low wages and inadequate benefits. This is why unions will mount public campaigns against institutions, corporations, and office building owners, such as the Justice for Janitors actions. In these actions, they turn the public against them to win gains for those on the bottom rung.
From my pastoral experience and studies, the actual marginalized union members are the non-woke dissenters who want decent wages and benefits but are uncomfortable with the injustices and divisiveness created by identity politics. Union politics is as easily manipulated and controlled as national and church politics. Like any social institution, the group in power determines policy and manages work assignments, compensation, and benefits, whether your vocation is a call to a union, a large corporation, or the church. I routinely pray for the Catholics who have to accept the woke agenda of their corporate and government employers.
Yet union dissenters have influence inside and outside their union. This is true for union members who follow their faith and participate in religious congregations. They are potential allies, along with the social conservatives among the 90% of the nonunion workers in the U.S. They want a better future for themselves and their communities but not the promotion of gender ideology at work, in the union, or with their children.
Along the same lines, I have never counseled anyone to divorce his or her spouse. Catholics promote marriage as a sacramental act of love and a lifelong commitment. Still, the culture’s lackadaisical attitude toward commitment and the acceptance of divorce, unfortunately true among some Catholics, has increased social and economic inequality. The poor are more economically and educationally challenged when divorce happens. Individual decisions made through self-will, not including God’s will in discernment, affect the nuclear family and the wider society.
Catholicism and theology studies
In the early 1990s, I shared with the rector of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (JSTB) my concerns about the homosexual presence and activism in the faculty and the student body. He responded that perhaps the Church would change its teaching about homosexuality someday. In my seeing and judging, he had kowtowed to the homosexual influence in the school and our religious community. American Jesuits and their institutions were becoming the Catholic point group to win the Church’s acceptance of the LGBTQ ideology. Trying to hold to Church teaching and his responsibilities as superior, the rector synthesized opposing positions: 1) Church teaching and 2) the JSTB acquiescence to wokeness and the gay presence. We were in Berkeley across the bay from San Francisco. He, unfortunately, tried to harmonize the community in a disparate place and time.
Bishop John Stowe of the Diocese of Lexington and I attended JSTB simultaneously. Although I did not know him personally or have any conversations with him, I can attest to the fact that JSTB had faculty member priests and students who were homosexuals—not all—who were supporters of gay liberation, quite likely contributing to Bishop Stowe’s support of radical sexual individualism.
Along with my theology studies, I helped Tom Ryan, now the San Francisco Labor Council’s Community Director, with the Plant Closures Project. We worked with others to organize a conference on the North American Free Trade Agreement at UC Berkeley. I visited maquiladoras in Sonora, Mexico, with theologian Robert McAfee Brown and his wife, Sydney Brown, an organizer. One maquila produced General Electric extension cords. GE moved the entire plant, trucking the machinery to Sonora, where the $15 per hour union wage in Rhode Island was reduced to less than 50 cents per hour. Labor unions lost jobs and members, but arguably, other workers and consumers benefitted from the cooperating economies of North America. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. supported a free trade agreement, and President Bill Clinton completed and signed the final NAFTA agreement.
We also organized community support for Teamsters Local 853 warehousemen and drivers when Safeway moved its distribution center from Richmond, CA, to Tracy, CA, in 1992. Fortunately, the efforts of many unionists and community members saved the union’s contract and work.
My history, studies, and apostolic efforts focused on workers and their families. I never had issues with the workers, but I was wholly alienated by the organizing around the sexual revolution within the labor movement, which was counter to the beliefs of many unionists and the Catholic Church.
Boundaries and borders and the U.S. Labor Movement: A seafarer example
The problems of postmodernism wokeism become more apparent with an example of workers at sea. Are there limits to who and what Catholics support? Are there norms and boundaries in Church thinking?
The laws of the sea, the location of their work, and changes in shipping technology distinguish seafarers from the larger land-based worker population. Moreover, just as there are fewer dock workers worldwide because of automation and technology, there are fewer sailors on cargo ships. Container ships can sail with 20 sailors today compared to 40 in the mid-20th century.
We need to support marginalized seafarers, but words like “marginalization,” “limit,” and “boundary” have a contemporary philosophical history that is easily manipulated. I venture that most people would not support Somali pirates, nor would most sailors. The pirates are very much at the boundaries, limits, or margins of society, the common moral understanding of right and wrong, and lack the support of many reflective thinkers across the globe. Endangering people and stealing are wrong.
An advocate for Somali pirates might raise the question of injustices the Somali pirates have faced, e.g., loss of fisheries and civil war in their land. Still, the pirate advocate is looking at others (particularly the pirate victims) as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Human beings made in the image of God are always ends, not a means to an end. This is foundational to Catholic thinking. As Pope Francis has said, corporate titans are responsible to their workers, and denying adequate wages, fair benefits, and safe working conditions is always wrong. There is right and wrong, and some acts are intrinsically evil, for example, killing an innocent human being.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an extreme libertarian who criticized all societal norms by rejecting all boundaries. In Foucault’s worldview (a postmodern narrative, although a description he would reject), people can do what they please if it does not interfere with his worldview of absolute freedom. The point is that Foucault created his own subjective and relative narrative, i.e., do what you will. A Jesuit-educated atheist, he never discerned God’s will for him.
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason was Foucault’s first book, and its arguments point to his subsequent thinking. He became the primary academic resource, at the top of Google’s humanities citations, for groups who felt marginalized because of their sexual lives and identities. He first looked at the history of treating the mad or mentally ill—”historicity.” He found that in each era, the powerful/authorities defined insanity and determined the practices for treating the mad. Their knowledge led to their use of power. In earlier times, the mad were often respected and lived among the people, and only later were they imprisoned—marginalized. For Foucault, this was an injustice. He later related his power and knowledge analysis of the treatment of the mad/insane to a criticism of the historical and social boundaries placed on human sexuality.
Foucault concluded that the focus of sexuality was no longer procreation. He also described reality as no longer an enclosed circle representing humanity’s temporal experience and, outside the circle, a transcendent existence—no visible or invisible, as opposed to the Catholic profession of faith. He described existence as a spiral that always drew into the center what was at the outer edges at a particular time (the boundaries, borders, limits, and margins). Since transcendence does not exist for Foucault, he anticipated a “transgression” in human experience when free human beings living moments of transgressive experience were instantly pulled back into the interiority of the spiral. In a society, the groups at the margins of the society are drawn into the center of the society. Following his argument, the lives of unrepentant and dangerous Somali pirates could be normalized. They are living out their freedom.
For Foucault, what society considered mad or sexually inappropriate was drawn back into the “social interiority” of the spiral. In his perspective, there was no exclusion and, consequently, no ethics. Here, Foucault made the great mistake of being inclusive without limits or boundaries. If you follow Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness (DEI) to its logical ends, DEI will lead to immorality and lawlessness. It also explains Foucault’s dark fascination with madness, sex, and death.
Society, however, does not benefit from indifference to mental illness and vagrancy, sexual licentiousness, sex trafficking, or abortion and genocide. It is unreasonable and unloving to have sick people living without care, human beings at any age turned into objects, and unborn babies lost to abortion.
Any lifestyle and behavior in Foucault’s thinking became acceptable, including what the vast majority would still consider reprehensible. The result is an absolute individual choice in living one’s human sexuality by poisoning and knifing one’s bodily integrity or killing life in the womb.
Applied postmodernism is now promoted in the U.S. labor movement and corporate America, and the source of formation and support comes from higher education. Just as some might call Somali pirates marginalized seafarers, progressive labor unions, and others use Foucault’s worldview to justify diversity, inclusion, and equity programs to normalize outrageous positions. People are ostracized and reprimanded for using the wrong personal pronoun for someone, but the outlier “she/he” (?) is given maximum support of the wrong kind in the reflective thinking of many religious people, including Pope Francis.
This includes open borders, another rejection of boundaries, limits, and norms. Non-discriminatory legal immigration is good, but open borders permitting illegal immigration are unfair and dangerous. People around the world wait patiently to immigrate to the United States legally. The Church respects sovereignty. Vatican City has protocols, legal rights, and security, too. Church teaching and Pope Francis support a nation’s right to regulate its borders. In the same breath, one does not build a fence and then forget about a neighbor’s needs. Jesus reminded us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
Foucault’s view of the “other,” his neighbor, rejected any metanarrative roles for heterosexual marriage and sexuality but justified his personal use of recreational drugs and the practice of sadomasochism. In the 1980s, Foucault was a visiting professor in California, including a visiting professorship at UC Berkeley. He publicly reported on his visits to San Francisco’s gay bathhouses and promoted homosexual sadomasochism. He died of AIDS in 1984, one of the first French victims.
Hugh A. Donohoe, a former president of the Thomas More Society of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and a friend, told me the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where he had worked, and the Public Health Department had sought to shut down the bathhouses in San Francisco at the onset of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. However, activists in the community and political leaders hesitated because of the political backlash from gays. In effect, shutting them down was a rejection of the liberal, boundaryless norms of their city, but people were dying.
Ultimately, the bathhouses were not forced to close, but SFPD monitored them under a court order. ii This is a sad commentary on San Francisco politics and politicians who live out of the postmodern worldview. Postmodernism pushed to its logical end is absolute personal freedom without conscience. It has no God. Unfortunately, Foucault lived out his illogical, atheistic philosophy and died from it at age 57.
Foucault was also an intellectual student of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who focused on every person’s supposed will to power. Nietzsche called for an affirmation of life without focusing on means, purpose, or ends. It was living life to its fullness—affirming it—without regard to the restrictions, limits, or boundaries imposed on people, especially the lies and weaknesses of Christianity. He promoted the übermensch or the overman—the model of a superman or hero living by strength and power.
Nietzsche, a sophisticated man who later became drug-addled by self-medicating and suffered from mental illness, attacked Christianity by using the Greek contrast between Dionysus, the unordered, lustful, wild god of wine and intoxication, and Apollo, the ordered God of music, astronomy, and geometry. According to Nietzsche, Greek tragedy melded the ecstasy of a protagonist’s tragic end with a mystical-like high of unity with the primeval will and low of human absurdity. He embraced this interpretation of the ancient Greek view of the human person.iii
In the preface of his book Birth of a Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism, Nietzsche calls his Dionysian view one of the Antichrist.iv During the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the Dionysian scene depicting the Last Supper—played by Drag Queens—was a blasphemous presentation that both Nietzsche and Foucault would have immediately recognized and probably embraced. As Nietzsche became progressively physically and mentally enfeebled, he signed his name as Dionysus.
A Virtuous and Healthy Way to Work
Labor Day is not only about labor unions and their members. Due to the pride and sin of our parents, Adam and Eve, we all face the sometimes-toilsome nature of work. Our Lord, who followed St. Joseph into the building trades, divinized work, making work a holy vocation. He gave it meaning for all of us. People generally find meaning in work, even if only at the foundational level of paying one’s bills. I saw it in the Holy Land when men with great purpose and plastic lunch sacks caught buses and carpools to construction sites. However, such work has come to a standstill in my area.
Those men wanted to care for their families and pay their bills, but they also wanted to create, contribute, and fulfill a purpose in life. It was palpable.
The meaning of our efforts is tied to our daily bread and the transcendent. How do we go about it? The answer is uniting Christian virtues to our activities. The future of labor and work-life emphasizes the habits and practices that build character. Living a virtuous life is not an instrument for achieving happiness or simply a tool; it is the form of one’s life.v Working on a project, organizing co-workers, and interacting with customers are ways of forming each other through common habits and practices that will lead to a communal understanding of the virtuous character. We have all met or know of people in the most common roles who have profoundly touched the lives of others. St. Alphonsus Rodriquez, SJ, served God as a doorkeeper at a Jesuit school, and he became a source of spiritual counsel and hope by living a virtuous life.
In From Morality to Virtue, Michael Slote recognized the deficiencies of Kantian ethics (doing one’s duty) and utilitarian ethics (maximizing one’s happiness).vi He offered a self-other symmetry in living our lives. He turns Kant’s “ought” imperative into words like “admirable” and “deplorable” as signposts for recommendations, commands, or precepts to give weight to our ideas and values. I would say our Christian ideas and values. In our spiritual reflection and action—seeing, judging, and acting—Jesus teaches us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
After recently rereading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, I better understand the importance of psychology for identifying and healing wounds that also influence a person’s capacity and joy for work life and one’s work in particular. Work is fundamental to life. We sometimes need an attitudinal adjustment to find meaning and joy in it.
Along this line, I recommend a website that links neuroscience and behavioral psychology to improving your work life. I believe OptimalWork provides a beneficial means of fulfilling your workplace call from God, whether you are a union organizer, management consultant, CEO, or night janitor. In their podcast (Spotify), videos (YouTube), and coaching, Dr. Kevin Majeres, a cognitive behavioral psychiatrist and Director of the Elmbrook Education Center near Harvard, and Sharif Younes provide multiple paths to understanding oneself and the barriers to fully embracing one’s life and work.
Subtly, they promote means of growth that borrow from and unite with the Christian understanding of the virtuous life and human flourishing. For example, the person who feels anxiety about tasks or uncontrollable events rather than running away from them takes a virtuous course that leads to growth and freedom. This is the path to true peace. I recommend their materials to any school, company, union, parish, or seminary that wants to experience the holiness of holy work.
Happy Labor Day.
Endnotes:
i Benjamin R. Karney, Jeffrey B. Wenger, Melanie A Zaber, Thomas N. Bradbury, State minimum wage increases delay marriage and reduce divorce among low-wage households, Journal of Marriage and Family Volume 84, Issue 4 p. 1196-1207, and Wiley Online Library (accessed August 27, 2024).
ii Gay SF Bathhouses can reopen, The Napa Valley Register, Napa California, Nov. 29, 1984, p. 18 (accessed August 27, 2024).
iii Lou Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, ch. III, p. 145 as quoted in Sjöstedt-Hughes, Peter, Antichrist Psychonaut—Nietzsche and Psychedelics (UK: Psychedelics Press, 2015), 59-74 (accessed Aug. 27, 2024).
iv Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism, translated by WM. Haussman, PhD., New York: The Macmillan Co. p. 11 (Accessed August 27, 2024).
v Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997: 17.
vi Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992: 13.
• Additional Reading: Aguiar, Luís and Joseph Mccartin, Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU, University of Illinois Press, 2023.
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Section 2, (Catholic boundaries . . .), para. 7, (Whether the immigrants . . .) – the leaders of any MEDIATING institution . . .
Moving right along.
Section 5 (Boundaries and borders . . .), 1st sentence – The problems of postmodern wokeism . . .
This is a very long and wide-ranging article….Therefore, five long and wide-ranging marginal thoughts, here!
FIRST, we read: “Due to the pride and sin of our parents, Adam and Eve, we all face the sometimes-toilsome nature of work.” About which, St. John Paul II (also) understood that “work” is more than a biblical punishment (Genesis):
“Work is a good thing for man–a good thing for his humanity–because through work man NOT ONLY TRANSFORMS NATURE [italics], adapting it to his own needs, but he also ACHIEVES FULFILLMENT as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes “more a human being” (the encyclical “On Human Work,” 1981, n. 9; no doubt reflecting, here, JP II’s “The Acting Person”).
SECOND, about Fiducia Supplicans, we read: “…The media popular Fr. James Martin, SJ, to my knowledge, has said nothing about the Pope’s opposition [to transgenderism] except to use French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s reframe of vien (‘come’ in French), insinuating that the Church’s ‘no’ to sexual distortions and sins will pass away with time.”
Indeed, what does it mean when all of the past eleven years are preceded/framed by(?) the italicized “principle” in “Evangelii Gaudium” (2013), superimposed upon the Gospel: “time is greater than space”? Why the photo-ops and synodal stature of poster-child Fr. Martin, SJ, and not Courage International?
THIRD, about labor union promotion of woke and sexual fluidity, we better understand the flood of over 400 corporate boardroom amicus briefs in 2015 in support of gay marriage. A fish doesn’t always rot from the head down.
FOURTH, Fr. Schultz mentions in passing the cardinal virtues. Below (FIFTH) is a bit of cut-and-paste from a recent posting, but the point here is that well-grounded Classical-school education doesn’t—yet–get us to where we need to be in applying the Catholic Social Teaching to asymmetrical global situations…
In a globalized world (not as an utopian ideology but more as an existential situation) and with the core value of “families” in mind, how exactly does one deal prudentially/justly with the both the mentioned NAFTA/offshoring (for example) and domestic minimum wages levels for residual and even menial service industry jobs? Or with national and international “solidarity,” both (coherent immigration vs fentanyl/the wall?). Escape to the interior fly-over country? And, on moral theology, any middling “harmonization of polarities,” (e.g., Fiducia Supplicans) is the epitome of clericalism.
FIFTH, about Classical Education, this from Fr. Rutler on the continuity with cardinal virtues and theological virtues:
“We might say that the cardinal virtues have their counterparts in the ‘quadrivium’: music and justice are both sciences of harmony; arithmetic and prudence are sciences of order; geometry and temperance are sciences of imagination; astronomy and fortitude are sciences of transcendence. And the theological virtues comport themselves with the fundamental ‘trivium’: grammar being to discourse what faith is to supernatural conversation; rhetoric being to grammar what hope is morally to faith; and dialectic providing a natural analogy of the heavenly discourse of love, just as love is the highest logic of creation. It is an arbitrary scheme, to be sure, but a fair reminder of the community between natural and spiritual sciences” (Fr. George William Rutler, Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-modern Catholic, Ignatius 1987; p. 123).
Now, about the lay vocation of resisting woke and of untangling global asymmetries… despite the adolescent Land O’ Lakes Declaration and foggy Jesuit Spirituality?
Not quite sure what the central thesis of this article is; it covers many different answers seemingly unrelated topics. I would question the basic assumption that it is appropriate ir acceptable to support any type of union in this day and age. They’re basically criminal organizations.
The author is obviously well educated in some fields and has a great vocabulary that most of us do not understand . I also was born with a high I Q, and attended college many years. However, I have no idea what he was trying to say. Inspite his great intelligence and education, he rambled causing great confusion. If he wants others to learn from his writings, he should learn to use simpler and more familiar words.And to organize.
But ask the Holy Spirit and pay attention. To begin with it’s the Holy Spirit at work. Later the Holy Spirit might move you to do what is right and true and you might not even relate what happens then to what the priest was communicating earlier.
So low wage workers do not deserve a decent wage because some unions tolerate homosexuality? Curious logic.
No. Low wage workers deserve a lower wage because their labor is unskilled.
So lower skilled workers deserve to be taken advantage of and paid the legal minimum?
So they deserve to be exploited?
Framing the discussion in terms of exploitation is dishonest and manipulative. People’s wages should correspond to their levels of education, skill, and expertise. If people decide not to take advantage of the many available opportunities to better themselves, then they “deserve” a wage that reflects that decision. It’s not exploitation, it’s economic justice.
So paying workers minimum wage (which has not moved in 15 years) is “economic Justice.” Should they never get a raise? Is that Justice?
Yes, this is exploitation. I guess that Elon Musk acquiring more billions is economic Justice?
Are you implying that all of the people who cannot afford college,or unable to compete academically deserve to be poor and exploited because God gave them less capacity than He gave you? Such arrogance!
What is a “decent” wage?
It depends on place and time. In Maryland today, it might be $15/hr. Wanting a decent wage does not make you a Bolshevik,
A red herring diversion is not a definition. Every price depends on place and time.
I asked a simple question. Either you have an answer, or you do not. It would be better to say “I do not know”, then to arch your back and hiss.
For the record, $15/hr in Maryland is likely to be wholly inadequate to acquire and maintain and engaged, competent and reliable staff. If I had a client that proposed a $15/hr other than for a limited probationary/training period, I’d tell make them sign a warning that their renumeration was going to result in poor attendance and high turnover.
In Pennsylvania, Sheetz pays $15 plus to start.
So then what would be a “decent wage” in Maryland? It will vary by industry and experience of course.
Unions have a legitmate place if they counterbalance the accumulation of power by employers, but when they are in cahoots with all the other institutions of power, promoting the same anti-God agenda, they become difficult if not impossible to support. We’re all too familiar with how power corrupts, and we are all aware of labor unions that have become as corrupt as the institutions that they are supposed to counterbalance. Finally, as the author of this piece appears to understand well, legislating a $15/hour minimum wage doesn’t mean that people will be willing– or able– to pay $15 for a hamburger. Government and unions can try to tinker with economics all they want, but eventually reality hits everyone in the face hard. Today, the dual threats of automation and offshoring hang in the background any time workers try to reach beyond what reality will support.
Today as Labor Day is observed in the U.S., most American workers and laborers must surely be thinking of the recent Elon Musk interview of Donald Trump. When they got into discussing about labor issues, Trump expressed delight and highly praised Musk for his anti-labor assaults like when Musk quickly fired striking workers at X asking for better working conditions and wages. Trump’s and Musk’s attitude towards labor are actually showcase examples of the long nagging anti-labor ambiance in the U.S. economy that can best be explained in the origin of the choice of the date of Labor Day commemoration in the U.S..
The U.S. does not synch with the rest of the world in celebrating Labor Day on May 1. The global Labor Day observance actually remembers the day when workers in Chicago started a strike fighting for an eight-hour workday on May 1, 1886. Three days later the strike was violently crushed by the police, killing and wounding several workers. To honor the Chicago workers and to raise awareness for labor rights and dignity worldwide, the international labor movement started commemorating May 1 as International Workers Day back in 1889. Following this historic worldwide trend, even the Church instituted the feast of St. Joseph the Worker on the first of May on top of his feast as the Husband of Mary on March 19.
The U.S. did not take May 1 as Labor Day but instead chose the first Monday of September as the titans and leaders of Big Business pressured the government and the economy to distance the U.S. market from the international labor movement. This historic antagonism towards workers and laborers was made by a campaign of fear, smear, and caricature portraying the labor movement as communist, socialist, or even criminal. This American Big Business view is contradicted by Catholic Social Teaching. In that era of surging labor consciousness, Pope Leo XIII in 1891 wrote the first social encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” subtitled the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” This started the tradition called the Catholic Social Teachings (CST) now made up of twelve papal social encyclical letters, the latest being Pope Francis’ “Fratelli Tutti” (2020) . Among the many matters related to capital and labor taken up by the Pope Leo XIII, one of most memorable teachings in the founding social encyclical was how Leo XIII showed that as a matter of faith and morals, workers are entitled to wages not merely sufficient to live on (living wages) but to that which is enough for the worker and family not only to live on but also enough to save for a better life (fair wages).
Obviously vast portions of the world’s population do not receive such fair wages. Here in the U.S., most working class and middle class families do not have a single wage earner who has pay enough to be called a fair wage. Instead of a “living wage” or a “fair wage,” what we have instead is the legislated (often resisted and violated by business) “minimum wage” at a shameful $7.25 per hour confining many Americans to poverty. This “minimum wage” is utterly below the “living wage” or “fair wage” as first taught by Rerum Novarum. What is even more outrageous is today’s continued suppression of labor rights and dignity by big business like union busting, by the likes of Amazon, Wal-Mart, Starbucks and many of the fast food industry. Today, Labor Day, in the spirit of St. Joseph the Worker, may we remember the long-forgotten Chicago striking workers who shine as historical models in standing up for worker rights and dignity around the world.
Amen. Unions built the middle class. This homosexual nonsense is a distraction, like most culture wars schtick to distract from the billionaires picking the worker’s pockets.does Father Schultz get this?
Rampant greed and pervasive lust/perversion go hand-in-hand. Does Will get this?
Yes, both are among the “Cardinal sins.” Father Schultz takes unions to task, as he should, but does not appear to find fault with the billionaires and their greed. He does not even mention the minimum wage, which has not moved in 15 years. The article is not balanced. The focus on homosexuality is a straw man. How about the working poo?
Carl, why are you defending billionaires who exploit the poor?
That’s funny, firing a bunch of left-wing activists using their position to play judge and jury for what they consider thought-crime is “anti-labor”.
I think what we actually need is deflation. In inflation, the value of money is effectively moved from the poor and middle class to the banks and wealthy corporations. In deflation, it’s the opposite.
Since many of the current wage problems are caused by inflationary price increases combined with no wage increases (because most businesses can’t afford that yet, as they are still catching up with the price increases themselves), not by people being oppressed by their employer or large numbers suddenly being to unskilled to earn a decent living, the obvious solution is deflation, to reverse the problem by moving monetary value from the banks and wealthy corporations back to the poor and middle class.
Deflation can be just as bad as inflation in its own way. One of the effects of deflation is to remove the incentive to spend money and change it to an incentive to save money. With inflation, if all other things are equal, money saved or invested loses its value, and unless one can get a return that exceeds the rate of inflation, spending now makes sense. In a period of deflation, one will more likely want to squirrel away money to spend it when it presumably will have more value– if I can buy only one hamburger today with $5, why not save the $5 until I can buy two as long as i’m not hungry? If everyone starts to act that way, the economy could go into a nosedive, with people hoarding their money until the situation stabilizes again. Also, few people will be willing to accept a pay cut without complaint– and if money becomes more valuable, pay cuts would be a natural consequence. The alternative could be layoffs. In any case, the adjustments required in a period of deflation can be just as painful if not more so than those required during inflation.
Please don’t write this as an answer to any question on a test in a college level macroeconomics or money and banking class. You will not get a good grade and you might get the Billy Madison speech.
Are you an economist? What degrees do you have? You appear to think that you are an authority on economics, business, etc. please enlighten us.
Well I’m just so pleased you asked, otherwise I might be accused of bragging.
I have an undergraduate degree in economics; an MBA in Finance and Accounting, a designation from the Life Office Management Association and I’m also a CPA who is presently employed in corporate financial planning and analysis/forecasting and general accounting. My prior experience includes software testing, regulatory analysis related to qualified retirement plans and auditing.
For fun, I successfully filed a 1023 with the IRS to obtain tax exempt charity status for an organization, donating my time and skill.
I never said I was an expert, you did and I suspect that’s more to do with your background than mine.
And how, pray tell, do you propose to “move” monetary value from hard working people to the poor? What even gives you the right to do that?
Elon Musk does not work very hard at all. He could stand to have some us his unearned and undeserved billions transferred to the poor and working classes he regularly exploits. Defending him and people like him is a weird hill to die on. I guess you also approve of his multiple marriages and divorces as well as all of the IVF babies he has spawned.
Do you wish you were Elon Musk or something?
This is a long article into which Father has thrown many subjects, most of them individually quite interesting. I don’t know why he wanted to adopt such a “everything and the kitchen sink” approach, loosely, I would say very loosely and somewhat unsuccessfully, tied together by the issue of worker rights. I suggest to him that many of us would like to hear more from him, but that a more limited focus on some of the individual items might be more helpful in promoting thought and discussion.
I also will challenge him with a question which I aim at many in religious communities: What have you done to fight back against the infection of Catholic communities and institutions against the sort of thing you witnessed at the Berkeley school? What are your thoughts about the community structures and traditions which allow such ongoing sickness to persist? This cannot be what the Lord intends for a community so central to the Church as the Jesuits. How do you, Father, for instance, fight against the present pervasive illness within the Jesuit community? What can be done to remedy the current situation within the order and within the Church? I am sorry to be so pointed towards someone who is obviously a good hearted and well-intentioned man but it seems to me these are important questions regarding what Father describes, and I will go a step further: Is the very structure of a community like the Jesuits part of the problem? Does “brotherhood” become more important that the Truth and the Gospel?
I found this article quite informative but it seemed to lose steam in the last section (A virtuous and healthy way . . .)
As well, in the second-last section (Boundaries and borders . . .), it is not clear to me how Foucault, Derrida and Nietzsche lead to DEI, or how the logical end of DEI is immorality and lawlessness. (I am not defending DEI.)
Fr George Schultze SJ provides a candid, courageous and valuable analysis of the relationship between postmodern theory and Union prioritising of causes and activities rallied today under the banner of social justice and promoted in parts of the Church in affluent western nations – not just America. The academy, law and the media form a powerful triumvirate in the de-Christianizing of contemporary life and society. The Church cannot be their echo chamber if she is to be true to herself and her mission.
Fr.’s article focuses on the situation in which ordinary workers find themselves in situations where normal circumstances are thrown into upheaval making unsupportable demands on them while corralling them under DEI to force through a singular view.
I think the criticisms of the article in the Comments reflect the shortfall in understanding of those writers. The article would have to be even longer if you want to tackle the inter-relation of the corporate world at the same time.
Fr. draws from practical events to make examples of what is happening including over periods of time. And demonstrates how Catholics themselves with a skewed apostolate -anti-apostolate- make the plight of of the ordinary man ever more intractable.
In the process he traces lines of true apostolate in this sphere of life, at the same time highlighting areas of special significance as demonstrated in the legacy fallout from Modernism, re Foucault, Derrida, etc., impacting on everything.
A summary could be made with the word DIS-SERVICE. Modernism takes hold and captures positions in order to spread its philosophy of integral revolution. Add, EXTREMISM.
If you take the time with the article you will find how many points are made for orienting and channeling apostolate, for marking out pitfalls and for correcting or catching false starts. It is long and takes the effort but it’s not overly involved.
You will recall in high school they would give you a 2,000-word passage and ask you to make a 100-word capable summary – a subject called “Comprehension”. Your ordinary man does not always grasp immediately the intellectual onslaught. Bishops too fail.
Query: “If you are charting Catholic counsels why would you emplace a lesbian Catholic?”
Fr. Schultze gives a meaningful description of the environments.
‘ Today, just as a vast swath of the U.S. population has not embraced the dilution of marriage (nor abortion or euthanasia), labor unionists, their supporters, and workers in general are divided. ….. Given labor’s mixed cultural and election agenda, labor activists have become experts at getting their supporters’ votes counted. ….. Union politics is as easily manipulated and controlled as national and church politics. Like any social institution, the group in power determines policy and manages work assignments, compensation, and benefits, whether your vocation is a call to a union, a large corporation, or the church. I routinely pray for the Catholics who have to accept the woke agenda of their corporate and government employers.
Yet union dissenters have influence inside and outside their union. This is true for union members who follow their faith and participate in religious congregations. They are potential allies, along with the social conservatives among the 90% of the nonunion workers in the U.S.
Along the same lines, I have never counseled anyone to divorce his or her spouse. Catholics promote marriage as a sacramental act of love and a lifelong commitment. Still, the culture’s lackadaisical attitude toward commitment and the acceptance of divorce, unfortunately true among some Catholics, has increased social and economic inequality. The poor are more economically and educationally challenged when divorce happens. Individual decisions made through self-will, not including God’s will in discernment, affect the nuclear family and the wider society. ‘
– Fr. Schultze