Benedict Signing Caritas in VeritateIn his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI observed, “The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum (1891), for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past.” If you were a Catholic Law School offering an education “in fidelity to the Catholic Faith as expressed through Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the teaching authority of the Church” and seeking an attorney to teach labor relations in line with Catholic Social Teaching, where would you look? Probably not the National Right to Work Legal Foundation, which has spent a great deal of time and money fighting workers’ associations, and — so far as I can tell — none whatsoever in “promoting them”. Yet that is precisely where Ave Maria School of Law turned, hiring former National Labor Relations Board member and current National Right to Work attorney John Raudabaugh. Sure, it may be exciting to have a former NLRB member join your faculty. It would be exciting to have a former Health and Human Services Secretary, too, but even so I wouldn’t expect a Catholic university to offer Kathleen Sebelius a post teaching health policy.

 Clayton Sinyai is a trade union activist and the author of Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement (Cornell, 2006). He is a member of the Catholic Labor Network, the American affiliate of the World Movement of Christian Workers. He can be reached at clayton@catholiclabor.org.