Weigel: The Church and Unions, party like its 1919

Jesuit priest Dennis J. Comey discussing
work issue w. a group of longshoremen

Judging by the impassioned commentary from some Catholic quarters during recent confrontations between unionized public-sector workers and state governments, you’d think we were back in 1919, with the Church defending the rights of wage slaves laboring in sweat shops under draconian working conditions. That would hardly seem to be the circumstances of, say, unionized American public school teachers who make handsome salaries with generous health and pension benefits, work for nine months of the year, and are virtually impossible to fire even if they commit felonies. I don’t think those were the kinds of workers Leo XIII had in mind in Rerum Novarum, or John Paul II in Laborem Exercens.

Is it morally worthy of us to leave our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt because we cannot bring ourselves to reform unsustainable entitlement programs that were enacted when life expectancy was far lower than it is today? Is it morally worthy of today’s public-sector workers’ unions to defend what one columnist described as “massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking”? Is it worthy of citizens of the world’s leading democracy to mortgage the country’s future security interests and diplomatic options to the fact that the People’s Republic of China owns vast amounts of American governmental debt in the form of Treasury bonds—and may well call our financial bluff one day when freedom’s cause is on the line?

Rather than acting as if this were 1919, Catholic leaders in America might begin to assert that selfishness is selfishness, with or without a union label, and that the common good requires sacrifices from all.

The whole thing at First Things 

HT Dad29