We are several weeks past Labor Day, but work as a topic of reflection is always timely since it constitutes a significant component of our time, energy, and lives.
Catholicism has developed a profound, coherent, and attractive theology of work, seeing our daily labor as an integral part of our spiritual life and Christian vocation.
In the Creation narrative of Genesis, God commands humanity to be fertile, to fill the earth and subdue it, to be stewards of the world, caring for and being in relationship with all that the Lord made.
In a sense, we continue God’s creativity by using our intelligence, energy, and abilities to serve the common good and to make our contribution to human flourishing and the care of creation.
God fashioned everything out of nothing, setting the stars and planets spinning, but He calls us to be collaborators in this ongoing unfolding of His generous, creative, and saving plan.
When we do our work well, making our best effort, offering our daily labor to God for the well-being and salvation of our brothers and sisters, we are living out our vocation and sanctifying the world.
A Christian example
As Christians, we follow a Master who was a worker Himself.
Although the Gospels are quite silent about the hidden years of Nazareth, tradition tells us that Jesus was a carpenter, or a builder of some kind, if you attend to the original Greek, following in Joseph’s vocation.
God worked with His own hands, thereby sanctifying all human labor by completely identifying with it. Jesus’ great and ultimate work of public ministry, culminating in His death and resurrection, shows His absolute gift of self to the fulfillment of the Father’s will.
He put all of His wisdom, energy, time, and love into the person in front of Him and the task at hand. What a worthy and divine example for us to follow!
Inspired by the work of the Lord Jesus, the early Church transformed the common understanding of human labor.
In the ancient cultures of the Middle East, slaves and women did the work.
Free men of the upper classes viewed it as beneath their dignity. Christianity slowly changed that perception.
Think of St. Paul who continued to do manual labor, so as not to be a burden on his communities.
Think of the monks and Nuns of the Middle Ages who embraced vast projects of agriculture, architecture, education, and health care.
Serfs of these centuries endured a harsh existence of work in the fields, yet the Church sought some fundamental rights for them.
They were not slaves; their lords could not separate couples and families; they could not be removed from their land; the serfs had Sundays and many Church holy days off to rest and pray.
Work and faith
St. John Paul II was the first modern pope who was also a worker. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was forced to work both in a stone quarry and a chemical factory.
There, he experienced the oppressive impact of forced labor, where the workers were treated as objects instead of persons, those who actually did the work did not receive a just wage, and a negative force of alienation sought to dehumanize them.
These experiences led him to issue an encyclical, Laborem Exercens, a theological reflection on work, in September of 1981, just months after he had been shot in St. Peter’s Square.
In his reflections, the pope insists on the fundamental dignity of the worker, the human subject, as the ultimate value of any economy.
The worker is not simply an objectified cog in a machine and the work done is not simply transactional.
In any sort of human effort, the individual brings his talents, energy, intelligence, and spirit to the job.
Each person makes an integral contribution to the common good and the flourishing of society. Neither the employer nor the employee, in this Christian vision, can view work as simply an exchange of money for service.
The worker has the obligation to offer the best effort possible in the job at hand and the employer has the obligation to respect the dignity and rights of the worker.
This spiritual understanding of work helps us realize that our job is not just about making money; it is fundamentally a creative and spiritual task, by which we share in God’s plan of salvation for the human race, by building a civilization of life and love.
No matter how humble, boring, or seemingly unimportant our work may appear, if it genuinely contributes to human flourishing and if we do it as a sacrificial offering to God, it becomes holy and helps to sanctify the world.
As we come out of COVID, we seem to be in a fundamental cultural shift regarding work.
Labor shortages abound. Many people seemingly do not work regularly or simply do so from home.
Not all of these changes are necessarily bad in particular circumstances, but there does seem to be a general malaise regarding work among many people, a sense that it is just about the paycheck.
Working looks like a burden or an obstacle to many, an interference to living.
A study of the Catholic Church’s teaching regarding the dignity of work, the spiritual value of labor, and the inherent humanizing effect it has on us are more important than ever.
I encourage you to read Laborem Exercens. I promise you will not look at your job quite the same.