A sermon for Labor Day

Happy Labor Day! School is out, the pools are open.

This morning, while recording commentary for Saint Kermit, Jim Henderson and I were lamenting the lack of economic diversity amongst our politicians. I was reminded of a passage from Tom Cornell’s Labor Day 2006 sermon:

By the middle of the 19th Century, the Catholic Church had to deal with the devastating effects of the industrial revolution on its people. In countries where the bishops were chosen from the sons of the powerful, the Church was very slow, too slow to respond to the crisis, and Pope Pius IX lamented, “We have lost the working classes.” In England, where the Catholic population was small and mostly Irish and poor, and in the United States, where the bishops were, almost every single one of them, sons of workers, the response was quick and positive.

I’m curious to know if Kaihsu agrees that “Catholic Social Teaching is the envy of our fellow Christians in [other] denominations.”

One thought on “A sermon for Labor Day”

  1. Nice to hear Mike B. on Saint Kermit. Not sure if the Church should encourage envy … but the question that really needs to be asked is: Why did it take more than a century to get Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) as a response to the revolutions of 1789±25?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.