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Cardinal Robert McElroy stood in the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Sunday, Sept. 6, and told a congregation of union members and parishioners that “no one intrinsically owns anything.”
The Catholic Labor Network and the Archdiocese of Washington organized the Labor Day weekend Mass, and the first reading came from Genesis. The archbishop of Washington built his entire homily on it.
“Every blessing that we know on this earth is a gift to us from God, created in grace and given to us in love,” he said. Catholic theology calls this the universal destination of goods.
“No one intrinsically owns anything; all that is, that has come ultimately from the gift of God, belongs to all of us,” McElroy said. Private property, in his telling, exists “as an accommodation to the ways of the world to make economies work.” Beneath it sits the older claim that “everyone has a right to part of the world’s bounty.”
From that gift flows a duty.
“When we are workers, we are co-creators with God,” McElroy said, pointing to St. Joseph the carpenter, who made a home for his family and “was a responsible participant in the community.” Work, he went on, “is not something imposed upon us merely as a burden,” even on the days when “it is really hard to get up and go to work.”
Then he turned to Leo XIII. When the world moved from the farm to the factory, Rerum Novarum (1891) confronted “immense new threats to workers,” from the exploitation of wages to the tearing apart of families, and it treated organized labor as “a counter force to the raw economic power of major employers.”
That conviction, McElroy said, “has been in Catholic teaching strongly since that period.” Pope Leo XIV, as I have written before, chose his name to carry that teaching into the age of the algorithm.
In August, McElroy told the congregation, he, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, spent several days in Silicon Valley with the leaders of the AI teams at “what they call the frontier labs.”
The engineers, he said, spoke “very openly about the state of AI,” including its “many destructive elements.” One of the subjects on the table was work.
“Will there be meaningful work left?” McElroy asked. “And the answer to that is, no one knows.”
The labor market, he said, “is going to radically change in the next 20 years.” Certain sectors “will essentially be wiped out by AI,” while others (he named manual labor and social service) will survive. “Millions of workers who have jobs now will not have those jobs 10 years from now.”
His prescription put labor at the center of the response. “We as a society have to be at the table,” he said, so that “the wealth of the country doesn’t increasingly go to the fewer and the fewer at the expense of the working class.”
Anticipating the transition before it arrives, he said, “is the challenge of labor for labor in our day.”
The U.S. bishops said much the same on Friday. Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, who chairs the bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, issued the conference’s Labor Day statement, and this year it centers on “young people and vulnerable communities who face uncertainty in today’s economy.”
Young people, the bishops write, “have been the most impacted so far” by AI “and also experience the most anxiety about AI’s impact on their work.” Roughly a quarter of the labor force earns low wages, they note, and 72 percent of those workers “lack stable and secure jobs.”
The statement leans throughout on Magnifica Humanitas, the pope’s first encyclical, which the bishops credit with naming the risks AI poses to workers: “de-skilling, surveillance, rigid and repetitive tasks, reduced agency and creativity, unemployment, job insecurity, concentrated power, and increased inequalities.”
Leo wrote the union question into the encyclical himself. “Labor unions, which the Church has consistently supported, are called upon to be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them,” he writes in paragraph 155, warning that without “bold decisions” many people will be left “marginalized, stranded and surrounded by the machines and automated systems that have replaced them.”
When Chicago labor leaders visited him in Rome last October, he reminded them that Pope Francis “urged every union to be re-born each day at the peripheries.”
Michael Sean Winters, in a beautiful Labor Day column for the National Catholic Reporter, traces how this alliance formed and how it frayed. The bond between the Church and organized labor in the late 19th century “was entirely organic,” he writes: immigrant Catholics filled the factories and the Knights of Labor, and when a Canadian archbishop condemned the Knights as a secret society in 1884, the American bishops appealed to Rome, where Leo XIII took their side on his way to writing Rerum Novarum.
The relationship “atrophied in the last half of the 20th century,” Winters writes, as the GI Bill carried Catholics to the suburbs and “many bishops also retreated from the public square except on abortion.” Rebuilding it, he concludes, “will not be organic; it must be intentional.” He adds a line I keep returning to: “I do not see how the country can dig itself out of the many holes it is in without a strong labor movement.”
I would add one piece to Winters’ diagnosis. Labor lost young people somewhere along the way, and I count myself among the lost. In fifteen years of campaigns, including my own run for Congress in Tennessee in 2020, the movement struck me, as far as I could tell, deeply out of touch with young people.
It had its own form of lay clericalism, where young people weren’t given positions of influence and authority.
A cause that leaves a 25-year-old feeling like a guest at someone else’s club has a problem no policy paper can fix, which is why the bishops were right to put young workers first.
If this pontificate helps organized labor become young again on this side of the Atlantic, in the middle of the revolution McElroy described, it will rank among Leo’s lasting gifts to his own country.
McElroy closed with thanks “for men and women and children and families who have little of this world’s good,” and with a charge: “let us do everything that we can to vindicate workers in this moment in which we live and in the years which are going to come, which will transform human labor.” A pope who took his name from Rerum Novarum and a bishops’ conference writing about anxious young workers add up to a Church that has decided the AI question is a labor question. Whether labor can answer it remains open.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal McElroy and the workers who filled St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Sunday, and with a pope who wrote the word “unions” into an encyclical on artificial intelligence.
Leo XIII put it in writing in 1891, and McElroy preached it from the pulpit on Sunday: a worker is a person before she is a cost of production, and the goods of the earth were given to all of us. That teaching is about to be tested by machines that can do the work of millions of people, and by an economy tempted to let the bounty flow, as the cardinal put it, “to the fewer and the fewer.”
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that takes their labor seriously, a faith that can look at an IBEW electrician in the pews at St. Matthew’s or a nurse on a night shift and see a co-creator with God. That hunger is not going to be met by a chatbot.
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America MUST SUPPORT our Labor Unions!!
THAT'S the WAY we support our American Laborers!
WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!!
WE ARE STRONGER TOGETHER and WE CAN DO THIS TOGETHER!!
Back when Reagan was president and started breaking unions I knew it would not be good for workers. I’m a retired special education teacher and always belonged to the teacher union. Unions protect workers jobs, pay, benefits and working conditions.