In Canada and the US today is Labour/Labor Day. In the rest of the world it is kept on the Feast of St Joseph the Worker, 1 May, or International Workers Day.
In honour of the Day, here is a link to the Great Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, considered by many to be the Catholic Charter of Labour. In it he expresses support for the trade union movement and lays down the proper dispositions of a Catholic labour movement.
Rerum novarum, On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour
I am proud to be a retired union man. I have never worked where a union was available without being a member. The Cuter and Shorter Half is a union member, and our middle son just got his card in the the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC).
We are a union family. My children walked picket line when they were too young to carry a sign and I've never crossed a picket line in my life. As Jack London said, 'After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.'
Many of my friends, who misunderstand the traditional Social Magisterium of the Popes, especially Leo XIII and Pius XI, assume that any supporter of the labour movement is a left-wing socialist. In fact, I was once accused of being a 'secret marxist out to infiltrate the Church'. The evidence for the accusation? I had just quoted from Pope Leo's Encyclical I've linked above! It is said that many Priests refused to read the Encyclical from the Pulpit (as was the custom when Encyclicals were actually Letters, not books!), because they were convinced that the Pope had 'become a socialist'. This was the Pope who said in his Encyclical Diuturnum, on the Origin of the Civil Power, “…communism, socialism, nihilism, (are) hideous deformities of the civil society of men and almost its ruin.”
At any rate, being a supporter of unions does not mean one is a socialist. Happy Labour Day!
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