Dear friends of Istituto Acton,
April 2 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Pope St. John Paul II. It’s hard to believe a decade has passed since we gathered to pray outside his window in St. Peter’s Square and later came together with millions from around the world for the funeral mass. The subsequent beatification and canonization of John Paul II only confirmed what the JPII generation already knew was true and we remain magnetically attracted by his personal example of holiness, charisma, and joyful suffering.
I’ve already written about what John Paul II meant for me personally and I don’t want to be overly nostalgic in remembering the man who brought me into the Catholic Church and for whom I later worked. But since we now have an equally popular and charismatic pope who has often decried the problem of youth unemployment, I can’t help but recalling what JPII had to say about the dignity of human work.
Following the example of the new head football coach at my alma mater, I’ve learned it is wise not to make comparisons, but there are a few aspects of JPII’s teaching that could help us in our current situation. (I write this after returning from economic disaster zones in Greece and Ferrara; in both places, the inhabitants seemed to spend much more time drinking coffee than working. Perhaps they think the beautiful vistas, art and architecture are worth it!)
One is that JPII had a very keen philosophical understanding of something he also had experienced personally. Second is that he was aware of the intellectual criticisms made against human work and replied to them. And finally he proposed how we may have to think and act differently in order to appreciate work’s true greatness.
In his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, John Paul II addressed not only how work affects us but how we, as subjective, “acting” persons, affect work. It is easy to imagine the young Karol Wojtyła, who engaged in manual labor, performed on stage, and studied the great intellectuals of the modern age, grasping this lesson from his own experience. When highly influential thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche (German intellectuals!) wrote about alienation and the degradations brought on by the division of labor, Wojtyła knew they were missing something important in their diagnoses.
Work done merely for work’s sake, to distract oneself from larger questions about life and death, is indeed dehumanizing, which makes it even more imperative to place work in a human, non-mechanical context. It does no good to exhort the unemployed to “get a job” if that job is seen as exploitative, boring or pointless. Growing up hearing the Nazi and Marxist rhetoric about the bourgeoisie, Wojtyła well understood the critique of the problems of liberalism. Even more importantly, he proposed an answer in the person of Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
More than any other modern pontiff, John Paul II put the Second Person of the Trinity at the center of his political, social and economic teaching. As Russell Hittinger has written, every pope from the French Revolution until 1978 wrote his first encyclical on the contentious subject of Church-State relations; John Paul II’s, entitled Redemptor Hominis, was on Christ as the Redeemer of man. He likewise approached the problem of work from the unique perspective of God-made-man that ought to guide all Christians. It was not until after the fall of the Berlin Wall that he formally addressed the issue of the modern liberal state in Centesimus Annus.
Proposing Christ as the answer to the problem of work requires us to reflect about His human nature and especially His “hidden life” before the start of His public ministry. His time learning from St. Joseph in a workshop is not the kind of education thought fit for a king, of course; His contemporaries were constantly surprised by the wisdom of the “carpenter’s son.” If God Himself can occupy Himself with such a humble trade, what does that mean for how we should regard our own professions?
Christ’s Incarnation, Death and Resurrection not only redeemed the world from its sins, they also gave all human activity new significance. The silent perseverance of a manual task like carpentry becomes a model for the rest of us in our professional and spiritual lives. And rather than look at work from the “outside in” as most intellectuals do, John Paul II urges us to do so from the “inside out,” i.e. from the perspective of the subject who performs the work, because that is, in a very concrete way, how Our Lord and Savior did during His earthly existence.
Now, just because Jesus didn’t critique the political and economic system of His day doesn’t mean that such critiques have no validity if we are to live as Christians in the world, and Catholic social doctrine remains the Church’s key contribution in this area. But I cannot overlook the fact that the critique of the “system” takes a back seat to the perspective of the person and what we may nowadays call his “attitude” towards work. In particular, do we really look at all work as something valuable through which we reflect God’s glory, or are we more influenced by what our peers think?
In many highly-developed Western countries, humble manual trades like carpentry are often neglected not just to our economic, but also our human and spiritual detriment, as Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft described so well. The fact that Crawford studied political philosophy and worked at a think tank before finding more rewarding work in a motorcycle repair shop is particularly relevant to your author. For intellectuals to make this turn requires not only an open mind but the willingness to “lower” oneself in the world’s, but certainly not God’s, eyes.
So when Pope Francis speaks about the tragedy and misery of youth unemployment, I cannot help but think of John Paul II’s understanding of the dignity of work. As the world sees it, such dignity has to do with keeping people occupied, earning an income for oneself and one’s family, becoming self-reliant while interdependent on other buyers and sellers in a commercial society, and upon nebulous things like status and prestige. These are not small or unimportant things.
But what St. John Paul II and indeed Christ Himself teach us, we’re missing the hidden but ultimately more important way of looking at work as a way of fulfilling God’s will, i.e. of looking at work as a vocation, not matter whether such work is highly paid or highly regarded. Work becomes a way to serve others while also finding out more about ourselves in the process. It’s probably a lesson we can learn only if we disembarrass ourselves about what we think we already know about work.
Please accept my best wishes to you and your families for a blessed Triduum and Easter season – Christ is truly risen, alleluia!
Kishore Jayabalan
Director
