Work

 

        Fr. Edward Lutz was the “sub-rector” during my high school years in the seminary at Westmont, Illinois. He was the friar most responsible for the day-to-day life of the students.

        One of Fr. Edward’s favorite quotations was “Man is made to work as the bird is made to fly.” It turns out that this is a faulty translation of a verse in the biblical book of Job, but that doesn’t mean the idea is faulty.

“Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment.”

        That is a quotation from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” but in that letter he references several of his immediate predecessors: Benedict XVI, John Paul II, and Paul VI, all of whom had things to say about work.

        Work is any activity I do that someone else depends on.

        In my father’s declining years, he was able, once a week, to drive his older sister to the grocery store. That was about the only thing that someone outside his family depended on him for. That was work for him. It helped him maintain a sense of dignity.

        In some of the Franciscan communities in which I have lived, one of the brothers had the job title of “refectorian.” The refectory was the traditional name for the dining room, and the refectorian set the tables in the dining room. It was not a time-consuming job—it took perhaps a half hour, when the community had several dozen members. But it was work. It wasn’t paid work, but it was enough to provide dignity to the brother who held the position. Fr. Irenaeus Kimminau, now almost 103 years old, was still setting the tables for the six members in our community until he had to move to assisted living a year ago. After the meal he would pick up the cloth napkins and take them to the laundry room.

        Pope Francis again:

“We were created with a vocation to work. The goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replace human work, for this would be detrimental to humanity.”

        The problem is that in the way we do capitalism in this country, any activity that other people need has to be tied to money, or nobody can do it. That leaves many people with no way to contribute to the community, and with the loss of dignity that goes with that inability.

        Free-market enthusiasts would have us believe that everyone can be employed if they really want to. If they don’t want to, then they should starve.

“Yet the orientation of the economy has favored a kind of technological progress in which the costs of production are reduced by laying off workers and replacing them with machines.”

        Very true. It happened with my grandfather, who arrived in America with the job title of “cooper”—maker of barrels. The machine caught up with him. It drove him to spend his later years as a janitor and, I suspect, an alcoholic.

        Today the machine gets at our young people before they ever enter the work force. They know that, regardless of their personal gifts and dreams, they had better enroll in courses that are most likely to survive the machine or they will never be able to have a family. Teachers who can provide them with anything beside marketable skills are driven out of employment. We are left with nothing but trade schools.

        No wonder our Catholic schools seem to do a poor job of helping young people develop a vibrant faith life. What good is knowledge of God or God’s will on a job application?

        No wonder that Quincy University, where I have spent the last fifty years of my life, can no longer afford to support solid programs in philosophy or theology.

        Or, for that matter, in literature or history or foreign languages.

“The loss of jobs also has a negative impact on the economy ‘through the progressive erosion of social capital: the network of relationships of trust, dependability, and respect for rules, all of which are indispensable for any form of civil coexistence.’”

        Here Francis is quoting his predecessor, Pope Benedict, from Benedict’s letter “Caritas in Veritate.”

        We need societies that allow men and women, of all ages, to contribute to the common good, whether or not their contribution can be marketized into a paid position. That means that the community as a whole needs to support people whose contributions are not immediately monetarized. That requires higher taxes, but raising taxes is heresy in our culture. The reason that it is heresy is that we believe the dogma that unless people are threatened with starvation, they will not work.

        Perhaps people who fear that everyone else is a potential free-loader are projecting their own fears onto everyone else.

        For several centuries of European history, ordinary people could live lives of dignity and relative security and still enjoy periods of leisure. Even today, many European countries combine capitalist enterprise with government support for people and services that allow leisure and security—vacations and medical care.

        Most people want to contribute to the common good. Few people are free-loaders. The problem is what so many of us can contribute cannot be rewarded enough for us to live on. We have gifts that no one will pay for.

        Our customs and laws and tax policies should allow all of us to live with dignity, security, and leisure.