Religious brothers and workers’ rights: A surprising May Day connection

At a Catholic Jesuit mission on a Plains Indian reservation early in the 21st century, there was a religious brother, a brilliant carpenter, who built a ramp.

The ramp was in the mission church, and it took you up to the altar and was made for one of the mission priests who used a wheelchair because of his multiple sclerosis.

At the same Plains mission church in a small side chapel, a different brother went to daily Mass at 7 a.m. (So did the carpenter brother, actually. Both of the men were carpenters, truth be told. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)

Every single time a priest celebrating the daily 7 a.m. Mass in the side chapel finished the Gospel reading and began his homily, this other brother, the one who did not build the ramp but was also a carpenter, would glance at his watch.

He would glance at his watch to time the homily; to ready himself to be irritated at the length of it; to prepare to become a smoldering font of muted, middle-American rage at a priest whose remarks had gone too long. With all the warmth and subtlety of a backhoe razing a playground, the brother was signaling the priest to keep it short.

The two carpenter religious Plainsmen brothers did what religious brothers have done for centuries: provide invaluable humble service by building churches and pews and altars and tabernacles and wheelchair ramps and anything else that makes it possible for priests to celebrate Mass.

And then with a weaponized-annoyance glance at their watches, they get priests to finish the Mass.

Today is National Religious Brothers Day, established by the Religious Brothers Conference and other religious order conferences to highlight and advance the vocation of religious brothers in the church.

The Society of Jesus is a priestly order, but it began to welcome brothers (or “temporal coadjutors”) a few years after its founding in 1540. They helped the day-to-day running of the mission so the Jesuit scholastics and priests could go about their work. The brothers were builders, bakers, cooks, carpenters, farmers, blacksmiths, doorkeepers, infirmarians, launderers, buyers, stewards, haberdashers. (I assume haberdashers; someone had to make all those black robes.)

Like Jesuit priests, brothers take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But as laymen, they do not administer the sacraments. Sometimes they describe their work for the church as taking place outside the walls of a church. (Or at least I do.)

Reflecting on what he was looking for in a brother, St. Ignatius wrote in the Jesuit Constitutions, “they ought to be men of good conscience, peaceful, docile, lovers of virtue and perfection, inclined to devotion, edifying for those inside and outside the house, content with the lot of Martha in the Society, well-disposed towards its institute, and eager to help it for the greater glory of God our Lord.”

Religious Brothers Day takes place every year on May 1, which communists, socialists and trade unionists established in 1889 as International Workers’ Day and which the church commemorates as St. Joseph the Worker Day. The church established this memorial because it wanted to affirm the dignity of labor (and because it really does not like communism). Karl Marx begat May Day begat St. Joseph’s Day begat Religious Brothers Day, an association which springs from the classic image of the brother-worker. But it is different from the “workers of the world!” whom Karl Marx incites in the “Communist Manifesto.”

In 1846, Pope Pius IX condemned “that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism, which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the right, property and possessions of all men, and even society itself.”

In the encyclical “Quod Apostolici Muneris,” in 1878, Pope Leo XIII declared communism to be “the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.”

When Pope Pius XII established St. Joseph the Worker Day in 1955, he was marshaling the co-parent of Jesus to redirect the energies of the labor movement from communism to Christianity. May Day had been owned by the reds, and the Vatican was trying to claim it for the yellow and white.

The great irony is that the church might not have begun to advocate for workers on an institutional scale had it not been for the work of socialists and communists. Amid the horrendous realities of life in the mills and factories during the Industrial Revolution—dirty and dangerous working conditions in debilitating heat in 12- to 16-hour days for a nubbin of money, with child labor to boot and no power to change any of it—it was union organizers bearing anti-capitalist ideology who started to care for and encourage the workers to claim their dignity. It was not clerics of the church.

Pope Leo XIII released the encyclical “Rerum Novarum” in 1891, the first encyclical of the church to focus directly on social conditions, in part to counter the Marxist interpretation of social reform. It promoted a Christian alternative to the ideologies of class struggle, the abolishment of private property and atheism. The church aligned with Marxist ideals, however, in urging that, among other things, workers be allowed to form unions and reap the rewards of their work.

In language that would delight any labor organizer then or now, Leo XIII warned the capitalist class that “to exercise pressure upon the indigent and destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of heaven.”

Today, the connection between workers’ rights and religious brothers, memorialized by joint celebrations on May 1, may seem less obvious. The “traditional” cook-doorkeeper-carpenter brothers are beginning to retire or die, and very few Jesuit brothers in the United States are employed in working-class professions.

They are counselors, teachers, administrators, nurses, filmmakers; an astrophysicist or two. Brother Guy Consolmagno, the head of the Vatican Observatory, is probably the best-known brother in the Society today. It is gratifying to find out he is the kind of scientist who can intelligently discuss black holes, headline an evening called “Jedis and Jesuits” and write a book called Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (Answer: If the alien asked, sure.)

Brother Pat Douglas, who works as a counselor and coach at Creighton Prep in Omaha, Neb., described how, though not building churches and crafting tabernacles, he supports the priests’ sacramental ministry today. “It is not uncommon,” he told me, “for people to have gone to confession and felt God’s grace and mercy and now want to make changes in their life so they don’t make those same mistakes again.”

They speak to a brother, he said, because they might not feel as comfortable talking with a priest about the nuts and bolts of getting their life back on track. In regards to dealing with the institutional, hierarchical church, Brother Douglas said, fewer walls are sometimes thrown up around a brother than around a priest.

On this International Workers’ Day and St. Joseph the Worker Day, I cannot speak for the communist or anti-communist tendencies of religious brothers.

My sense, though, is that the ramp builders and Mass-timers and nurses and teachers among us would sympathize and probably even join with anyone fighting the ever ancient, ever new scourge of union-busting, child labor, modern-day slavery—anyone trying to secure a more just and equitable society for God’s poor.

These same brothers would also likely, with great agitation, get out of their chairs and walk out of the room if anyone went on too long sermonizing about a more just and equitable society: Why are we talking instead of doing something about it?