Church Labor

Catholics should honor Labor Day for many reasons. Most of the labor that created and sustains the Catholic Church was and remains unpaid and exploited. Here are three simple examples: 

The Catholic labor struggle in the United States begins with the enslaved labor and indentured servitude of indigenous people who built churches and missions which pre-date the country itself. These buildings are still the foundation of the church's wealth and influence in most places. CTA recently began organizing with a tribe who are still seeking payment for their labor which built the local mission, four generations later. 

The exploitation of Catholic women in the US reaches back just as far. The church’s entrenched patriarchy has concealed or expropriated most of the value of Catholic women’s labor. Even though it is widely acknowledged that orders of women religious founded most of the Catholic schools and hospitals around the country, the wages of the women who worked in these institutions were paltry, while most of the value of their labor was extracted by the male clerics who controlled the Church. It is still true in many parishes that women run the church while the priest functions as a figurehead with the authority to administer sacraments. 

Finally, our Church’s exemption from labor laws means that Catholics in schools and churches can be fired — and regularly are — based on identities like gender or sexuality. It also means that unionizing church workers or Catholic school teachers is nearly impossible. Catholic social teaching nominally supports organized labor, and there are examples of Catholic unions in US labor history. But Church leaders never fully endorsed these groups, Catholic unions never turned their sights on the Church itself, and the unions were deeply racist organizations. Today in practice Catholic churches and university employers are as tenaciously anti-union as any corporate boss.

For years, CTA ran a Church Worker Justice program. This was mostly a defense and support network for parish employees who were unjustly fired. This necessary frontline work is all we had the capacity to do. But there is clearly reason and potential for broad, deep, and long-term labor organizing in Catholic settings. 

The hierarchical structure of our Church with clerics and lay people is older than capitalism’s hierarchy of bosses and workers. Indeed, the Church is still built like a pre-capitalist feudal order. So it is no coincidence that Catholicism and capitalism mirror each other in their structures. Our Church was there as capitalism developed. Bosses adapted the exploitative aspects of the Church. The Church usually threw its official power behind the bosses, even though most Catholics were workers.  

We who seek reform of our Church should learn this history, how bosses learned to exploit workers by watching clerics exploit the laity, because this history will also teach us how workers learned to fight back.* As lay people, we should complete this dialectic and learn to win from patriarchal, authoritarian clerics by studying how labor won from bosses who fit the same description. On this Labor Day, the best way to honor labor is to begin learning from it, adapting it, and practicing its lessons in our struggle to change our Church. 

* This history is included in many places, but for starters it is outlined in Eric Hobsbawm’s trilogy of histories on “the long 19th century” and Silvia Federici’s feminist classic, Caliban and the Witch.