My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Several state legislators from Wisconsin and Indiana have been spending the last few weeks in Illinois. We hope their stay in the Land of Lincoln will revitalize them so that they can return to their home states with a renewed commitment to carrying out their civic responsibilities for which they were elected and are paid to serve.

The reason that these government officials have fled their jurisdictions was to avoid voting on legislation designed to address budgetary deficits by diminishing or restricting the prerogatives of unions that represent public workers. Even the president of the United States has weighed in on this matter of local government as an “assault on unions.”

I will leave it to the politicians to sort out the details of how best to balance the budget, but to the extent that the Catholic Church has a well-developed tradition of teaching about the moral implications of the rights of workers as they relate to unions, it is appropriate for me here to elucidate that teaching.

The genesis of the church’s teachings regarding unions stems goes back to the 19th century, when Pope Leo XIII stood up for the rights of workers in the context of the industrial age when factory workers, often including children, were subjected to harsh working conditions in factories known as “sweat shops” due to their brutal hardships of long hours with low pay, no breaks, no overtime pay and no benefits in hazardous situations that were often crowded, poorly ventilated and prone to fires and rat infestations. This context is important to keep in mind when citing papal statements from the 19th century. It is not so simple to apply those statements in a 21st century context where workers’ rights and union prerogatives have made great strides in the intervening decades now spanning over 100 years.

In addition, those decades of union development have unfortunately seen too many instances of union members and union leaders using violence to achieve their goals, falling into corruption and becoming intertwined with organized crime. Thus, while Catholic social teaching generally upholds the rights of workers in principle, the church cannot be said to give uncritical support to everything that unions do or seek to do.

Our late Holy Father, the great Pope John Paul II, who will be beatified on May 1, was a hero and an inspiration to the Polish workers involved in the movement known as Solidarity that started in the 1980s during the years of communism in Poland. On the 90th anniversary of the 1891 publication of the groundbreaking encyclical of Catholic social teaching of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II issued his own document called Laborem exercens (On Human Work), in which he specifically addressed the topic of labor unions and the right of association, about which he wrote:

“Catholic social teaching does not hold that unions are no more than a reflection of the ‘class’ structure of society and that they are a mouthpiece for a class struggle which inevitably governs social life. They are indeed a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice, for the just rights of working people in accordance with their individual professions. However, this struggle should be seen as a normal endeavor ‘for’ the just good: in the present case, for the good which corresponds to the needs and merits of working people associated by profession; but it is not a struggle ‘against’ others. Even if in controversial questions the struggle takes on a character of opposition towards others, this is because it aims at the good of social justice, not for the sake of ‘struggle’ or in order to eliminate the opponent. …

“Just efforts to secure the rights of workers who are united by the same profession should always take into account the limitations imposed by the general economic situation of the country. Union demands cannot be turned into a kind of group or class ‘egoism,’ although they can and should also aim at correcting — with a view to the common good of the whole of society — everything defective in the system of ownership of the means of production or in the way these are managed. Social and socioeconomic life is certainly like a system of ‘connected vessels,’ and every social activity directed towards safeguarding the rights of particular groups should adapt itself to this system.

“In this sense, union activity undoubtedly enters the field of politics, understood as prudent concern for the common good. However, the role of unions is not to ‘play politics’ in the sense that the expression is commonly understood today. Unions do not have the character of political parties struggling for power; they should not be subjected to the decision of political parties or have too close links with them. In fact, in such a situation they easily lose contact with their specific role, which is to secure the just rights of workers within the framework of the common good of the whole of society; instead they become an instrument used for other purposes” (§20; emphases in the original).

We need to pray that principles such as these will be kept in mind in addressing and seeking to resolve the conflictual situations that confront our civic officials and labor leaders.

May God give us this grace. Amen.