Worship, Work, & Wages

“Work is a good thing for man, a good thing for his humanity, because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being.”

— John Paul II: Laborem Exercens (1981)

Lately I have been pursuing a line of inquiry that braids together economic history, religious thought, and the politics of labor in the United States. The focal point is the Catholic Worker Movement and the ways anti Catholic and anti labor sentiment, especially anti socialist and anti communist reactions, shaped its reception and legacy. The long term aim is to refine this into a dissertation ready question about how faith, labor, and ideology intertwine in modern America. As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, this thread takes on new urgency. Questions about labor, education, and wages may appear mostly economic from a worldly perspective, yet a deeper reading reveals their spiritual character as well. The challenge is not only how we will work and learn, but how we will preserve our humanity in an information saturated world.

As an entry point into the movement’s economic vision, the Catholic Worker summarizes its critique of modern economic life this way:

Private and state capitalism often produce an unjust distribution of wealth because decisions are guided by the profit motive. In this view, those in power live off the sweat of others’ brows, while those without power are robbed of a just return for their work. The movement also identifies usury, defined as charging interest beyond administrative costs, as a major contributor to the wrongdoing intrinsic to this system. It further highlights how global debt structures can push poor countries into deeper deprivation and long term dependency, while in the United States the number of hungry, homeless, and unemployed people rises even amid increasing affluence.

Read in these terms, labor, wages, and economic justice are not peripheral concerns but central pillars of Catholic Worker moral teaching. Approaching recent scholarship with that lens helps surface where anti labor, anti communist, and anti Catholic reactions appear, and how those reactions shape the movement’s significance from its founding to the present.

A Research Map

Reconstruction and the West: Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox positions free labor as a guiding postwar ideal. The questions here are definitional. Who counts as free, who benefits from expansion, and how is economic freedom bounded by law, culture, and power?

Populism and Progressivism: Steven J. Diner’s “Linking Politics and People” traces the shift from local life to an integrated national economy. As institutions scale, reform debates migrate from community to state, raising perennial tensions about subsidiarity, regulation, and the common good.

The Great Depression and the New Deal: Mason B. Williams’ historiographical survey frames the contest between market mechanisms and state intervention. This is the context of the Catholic Worker’s birth in 1933, when mass unemployment and relief policy thrust working class life to the center of national politics.

World War II and the Home Front: Allan M. Winkler shows how mobilization, taxation, and production reconfigured labor and national identity. Wartime coordination makes visible the moral stakes of work, duty, sacrifice, and control, while sharpening questions about who directs the fruits of labor.

Postwar Consumer Capitalism: Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic charts the rise of a mass consumption order. Its logic often strains against Catholic Worker commitments to personalism, voluntary poverty, and solidarity, which helps explain why social justice language was readily conflated with radicalism during the Cold War.

Civil Rights to the New Right: Economic justice and civic equality remain inseparable. Movements for jobs, housing, and dignity were frequently branded communist, shaping public perception and institutional responses, including within American Catholic life.

Reagan and After: The Reagan era fused economic policy with moral identity in ways that still structure debates about unions, welfare, taxation, and personal responsibility.

What This Thread Seeks to Clarify

1. Moral economy versus market ideology: How Catholic Worker principles reframe production, property, and finance beyond profit first assumptions, including in an era shaped by algorithms and automation.

2. Religious identity under suspicion: How anti Catholic and anti communist currents intersected to shape the movement’s reception, and how Catholic institutions navigated that pressure.

3. Labor as vocation and politics: How concepts of work, its dignity, ownership, and rewards, shift across eras and technologies, altering the language of rights, duties, and the common good.

4. Continuities into the present: How digital platforms and artificial intelligence revive old questions about exploitation, dislocation, and solidarity in new technological forms, and how education and formation can safeguard humane judgment and compassion.

Taken together, this research map offers a way to situate the Catholic Worker Movement within the contested terrain of American religion, labor politics, and anti radical sentiment. The next chapter of labor history is still being written. Returning to these earlier arguments is less about nostalgia than about gaining the conceptual tools to read our present and our future with greater clarity, and to keep our humanity at the center of work, learning, and life.

“Ora et labora” (pray & work)

-Benedict of Nursia