With the Labor Day holiday upon us and the 40^th Anniversary of the publication of Laborem Exercens by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1981, I thought it would be appropriate to recall this magnificent document, and thus the Church’s social teaching that developed after the publication of Rerum Novarum 130 years ago.

The voice of the prophet who was Pope Saint John Paul II is nowhere as clear as in the words of Laborem Exercens. The document on human labor came out the year after the birth of the Solidarity trade union in Poland. The encyclical was immensely personal for the Polish pope, given the sorrows of his native country. Saint John Paul’s concern extended to all humankind as the world continued to struggle to preserve the dignity of the human person and the hope of a common good which modern work and human institutions often value so little.

“It is proper that man acquire his daily bread practicing work” is my translation of the opening Latin phrase. With these words, the pope expresses the scriptural foundations of his teaching and with a clear reference to the ground of our being, our dependence on God not just for the food we eat, but our very existence. To talk about work in the Scriptures is to talk about the act of creation. Work is not just the activity we engage in to make money. Work is an expression most importantly of who we are as subjects created in the image and likeness of God. If the image of God is to be seen in the human person, that person’s work must be inextricably bound to the creation of goodness. The work proper to the human person is any and all activity that reflects the true solidarity of the human family and preserves the dignity of the human person.

There are so many important themes from the encyclical, but I’d like to illustrate one from my own life. One important theme of the encyclical is demonstrating the harm that comes from defining work as some object or end in itself, separated from the person doing the work and the necessary  good for human solidarity. I believe my father taught me this valuable lesson. His career as a human resources director came to an abrupt end when he had just passed 60 and the factory where he worked for over 30 years closed. He was in no way ready personally or financially for retirement. There was little my father could do against the economic juggernaut of outsourcing that shut down almost every one of the more than 80 shoe factories spread throughout the state of Missouri. 

With his six children all gone from the house that thankfully was all paid for, my father and mother were able to manage for the next ten years while he worked 20 hours a week as a courier for a bank. But just barely. They seemed to be only one major illness away from having nothing. Without a modest inheritance from my grandparents and a few other relatives, it would have been a much different story.
My dad humbly and without rancor performed work for those who just a few short months before were his peers and equals in the business world. My father used the new time he gained to put his talents into service in the Church and community. He welcomed the opportunity to finally attend daily Mass again, something he hadn’t been able to do since he was a college student at St. Louis University. He was the sacristan and reader, and in the absence of a priest, eventually he led the communion services. At his funeral an elderly man came up to me and said with the greatest sincerity, “You know, I really liked your dad’s Masses and homilies sometimes better than father’s!” Mindful of the theological implications of this comment, I still had to smile. Dad would be the first one to say that our true work is being a laborer for the Kingdom. Everything else is just a hobby.

My father experienced, as do so many workers, the reality of the Cross in the midst of his work. Not just in the toil and difficulties of dealing with the tasks and the people of the workplace. The true cross of work is that we give of ourselves as a human person. No work is worthy of the name unless we are willing to give of ourselves, not for profit or pleasure, but to ensure that the work of our hands does prosper the dignity of the human person and the common good.

The encyclical that began with echoes of creation, concludes with the proclamation of salvation through the great work of Jesus Christ on the Cross:  
#27:  The Christian finds in human work a small part of the Cross of Christ and accepts it in the same spirit of redemption in which Christ accepted his Cross for us. In work, thanks to the light that penetrates us from the Resurrection of Christ, we always find a glimmer of new life, of the new good, as if it were an announcement of "the new heavens and the new earth" in which man and the world participate precisely through the toil that goes with work. Through toil-and never without it. On the one hand this confirms the indispensability of the Cross in the spirituality of human work; on the other hand the Cross which this toil constitutes reveals a new good springing from work itself, from work understood in depth and in all its aspects and never apart from work. 

Too often, our work and our workers are sacrificed to the familiar human idols of greed, envy, or sloth.  The mystery of sin has from the Fall co opted human work. But the work of our redemption that is the Paschal Mystery is our hope. Pope Saint John Paul II issued the encyclical on September 14, on the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. This was not the first choice of the pope, especially given the history of the social encyclicals’ debut dates being generally around May 15. Publishing on that date was made impossible because of the assassination attempt on the pope’s life on May 13. This development only reinforced that modern human work manifests the Cross in a unique and powerful way. The cross then serves for work as it does for the entire human experience as a witness for or as an affront to Divine Mercy.

This September, as we celebrate Labor Day and begin the Season of Creation, Pope Saint John Paul’s encyclical should guide our prayer, reflection, and our action. The fragility of an economic order tied to an imperfect understanding of the dignity of work and the worker is manifested all around us. The hope and urgency of Saint John Paul can lead us forward. Without such light, reflecting the Light of Christ himself, the Word through whom all were created and by whom all are offered redemption, we will only see darkness, the darkness of the chaos-covered abyss, the darkness of the pit where the lazy servant was cast.