The moment the Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost was named the next pope, my office neighbor—a historian of the Soviet Union—knocked hard on my door. “THE NEXT POPE IS FROM CHICAGO!,” he proclaimed before even entering my office. His voice carried that mixture of relief and optimism usually reserved for the birth of a child. The hope that filled the air that Spring day felt like a reprieve from a storm of President Trump’s executive orders that had seemed to flood my office over the previous three months. These orders called for punishing the poor and stateless; breaking commitments to education, research, and humanitarian aid; and intimidating those who protested. In a moment when all three branches of the U.S. government were aligning under the authority of an autocratic ethno-nationalist party, we hoped that perhaps another authoritarian—perhaps this one with different values and a greater commitment to human rights—might check the power of a democratically elected dictator.
We wondered—then as now—what has the Catholic Church done for the poor, the vulnerable and stateless in the past? What can the Church do for the poor and vulnerable now, as we cross the precipice into a new moment of fascism?
As I explored in a recent Saint Louis University Law Journal article, the last Pope Leo (1878-1903) lived through a similar moment of intense ethno-nationalisms, exploitation of migratory peoples, social democratic fervor, and labor unrest. When Cardinal Prevost took the name Pope Leo XIV in May, he signaled an interest in following the teachings of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) and using his office as his industrial-era predecessor did: as a tool for critiquing the drug of nationalism and promoting the dignity of the poor. Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) boldly declared that workers deserve both a living wage and the right to representation within unions of their choice. Within a decade, bishops in most industrialized countries had drafted specific proposals for laws recognizing workers’ collective bargaining rights and states and municipalities investing in unemployment insurance, old age pensions, mothers’ pensions, and disability subsidies. In the United States, the Rev. John Ryan, an economist and priest who served in Minnesota, literally calculated and proposed what he understood as “fair” profit margins and the exact sum of a living wage. Ryan and his generation of “labor priests” around the world (1910-1945) saw themselves as agents of international humanitarian justice.
"Boys' Association Saint Rochus Rerum Novarum celebration Meir Antwerp", Rene Jacobs, CC BY-SA 4.0
What we understand today as 20th century labor protections—fair labor standards, social security, and collective bargaining rights—are, at least in significant part, the product of the coalition forged by labor unions and the Roman Catholic Church in the US and Europe. While mainline Protestants, Jews, and many others supported these basic “rights of labor” as “human rights” as well, Roman Catholics dominated the ranks of trade unions. As the historian Marc Karson detailed in American Labor Unions and Politics (1958), Catholic priests were major power brokers in both their urban communities and the Democratic Party coalition. By the 1910s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics collected data on work actions in language that matched Rerum Novarum. While employers and their lobbyists described work actions as the product of “Bolshevism,” “sabotage,” “anarchism,” “socialism,” or an unwillingness to accept wage cuts in tough times, federal labor statisticians—inspired by Rerum Novarum—categorized strikes as those which sought “union recognition,” higher “wages,” better “working conditions,” or some combination thereof.
Pope Pius XI’s 1931 labor encyclical celebrating 40 years of Rerum Novarum, Quadraegessimo Anno (literally, “in the fortieth year”) reiterated the fundamental concepts of Rerum Novarum and celebrated how its principles had reshaped democratic nation-states in multiple national contexts. Quadraegessimo emphasized the importance of sharing an ample portion of the profits of labor productivity with the workers who did the work. Pius XI reiterated that, in all laws, "chief consideration ought to be given to the weak and the poor.” The encyclical would prove a major boost for Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizing drives in the 1930s, particularly in major Northern industrialized cities like Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and (Prevost’s own) Chicago. The encyclical would be central to the articulation of workers’ human rights in the National Labor Relations Act (1935), which gave most private sector workers a federal right to form a union without retribution from their employer; the Social Security Act (1935), which provided unemployment insurance, old age pensions, care for dependent children, and disability insurance; and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), which defined a minimum wage and maximum hours within major industries. As the historian Jefferson Cowie reflected in The Great Exception (2017), these three laws were the crowning achievement of the New Deal’s support for workers.
Yet, if Catholic ideas about labor justice sincerely shaped the organizing emphasis of the CIO and the Democratic Party coalition, it was also limited by that emphasis. In the early twentieth century, workers demanded what they called “broader distribution” of the “social surplus.” The historian Rosanne Currarino has recounted this story at length in The Labor Question (2011). Early twentieth century workers wanted not just union recognition and social insurance, but the cooperative ownership and regulation of all public utilities. By the early 1910s, a rising number of municipalities were purchasing train and trolley systems and water, gas and electrical companies. But, the Roman Catholic Church drew the line at municipal socialists’ efforts to define schools and hospitals as public utilities. In the 1930s, a groundswell of Southern sharecroppers, tenant farmers and wage workers pushed for enhanced federal funding for public education and an expansion of federal ownership and regulation of hospitals, nursery schools and nursing homes. The Works Progress Administration offered states emergency relief to keep schools open. Nevertheless, the US Council of Catholic Bishops blocked every single measure to pass a substantive, federal funding package for public education or for public nursing homes or hospitals. The Roman Catholic Church had a substantive investment in education and healthcare. The bishops did not think they could afford to manage enhanced federal regulation or competition with a public option.
Under the Pope Leo XIV’s leadership, the US Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has continued to amplify the Catholic principle called “solidarity,” the idea that “chief consideration” be given “to the weak and poor.” Leo praised Pope Francis’s commitment to the human dignity of migrants entering the United States from Central and South America affirming his mentor’s parting letter on the human dignity of migrants. However, in a moment when Republican legislatures are moving quickly to defund public education and medical care for the poor and disabled, the Roman Catholic Church has had less to say. The bishops continue to praise efforts to expand school vouchers, which is a move that drains funding from public education. The bishops also continue to support efforts to protect Catholic hospitals and healthcare conglomerates from legal requirements to honor women’s health care decisions. As a journalist in Commonweal recently put it in reference to the church’s Vatican II reforms, “the men who oversaw the implementation of the Council’s reforms [in the 1960s] did not make elevating women a priority, because most of them were—and here I will use a technical term—kind of weird about women.” Holding onto a particular version of patriarchy, the Roman Catholic Church’s defense of the poor and vulnerable appears selective.
Photo of Archbishop Timothy Broglio by United States Naval Academy Photo Archive
As to the current relationship between the American labor movement and the American Church, we are making progress. On July 3, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the US Council of Catholic Bishops, denounced the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” as out of alignment with Catholic teaching. Broglio emphasized the rights of workers to a living wage, to social insurance, and to the human right to seek support for their families. Broglio said the bill (which has since become law) “includes unconscionable cuts to healthcare and food assistance, tax cuts that increase inequality, immigration provisions that harm families and children, and cuts to programs that protect God’s creation.” He went on to say that the legislation “will cause the greatest harm to those who are especially vulnerable in our society…. people will lose access to healthcare and struggle to buy groceries, family members will be separated, and vulnerable communities will be less prepared to cope with environmental impacts of pollution and extreme weather. More must be done to prevent these devastating effects.”
On the other hand, the bishops remain silent when schools are accused of being “woke” and “wasteful” for celebrating the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. My children’s public schools in the state of Indiana have lost tens of millions of dollars due to Republican tax cuts. The public institution where I work has lost tens of millions of dollars for the same reason. In the public sector, class sizes are growing and support for teachers is declining. Dozens of skilled nursing facilities in my state are limiting services and may need to close their doors because of the cuts to Medicaid. My local public radio station employs some of the few journalists in town, but they have lost all their public funding. My friends’ grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Parks Service have all been cancelled. Even many private schools, both Catholic and Protestant, are under attack for adhering to “DEI” principles. Each of these cuts to education, science, health care, and public arts and humanities are assaults on labor, but not in the narrow sense of the rights of trade unions or fair labor standards. In many senses, Rerum Novarum defined the interests of “labor” too narrowly around the elements of human dignity demanded of the men who worked in twentieth-century (private sector) heavy industry. The Church’s historic efforts to protect their own investment in “ministries” are leaving us workers wide open for the dismantling of the modern welfare state.
The labor movement would stand to benefit if Pope Leo XIV expanded on his predecessor’s statements on workers’ rights outside the workplace. Encyclicals since the 1960s have emphasized states’ responsibilities to protect human rights, including a living wage, social insurance, migration, and dignity for the accused. Catholic bishops should reiterate why we need a richer concept of human rights that is not limited by what the Constitution, Supreme Court, or the US president feel the need to uphold. The pope and the bishops ought to remind our leaders that human flourishing requires access to social utilities like schools, libraries, hospitals, nursing homes, research facilities, and national parks. They must define the interests of “labor” not just as entitlements to collective bargaining, living wages, and safe working conditions, but as the human right to a “broader distribution” of the “social surplus.”
This should not be too much to ask. During the Cold War, the Roman Catholic Church boasted a strong record in defending democracy and human dignity and opposing authoritarian governments. As Pope Pius XII articulated in a statement republished for an American audience in 1943, “The ‘common good’ is, and must be, under every circumstance, the final objective of the state.” The future of the relationship between the churches and the labor movement will depend on how both parties choose to define democracy, human dignity, and the common good.
