Today’s feast of Saint Joseph the Worker presents us with the image of a saint marked by hard work, quiet dedication, and loving concern for the wellbeing of the Holy Family. It recalls the essential sanctity and dignity of work, and reminds us of the relationship between Joseph, the Church, and the cause of workers.
The feast was established by Pope Pius XII in 1955 to highlight the Christian understanding of work on a day when the Soviet Union promoted communism and military power on International Workers’ Day.
Saint Joseph is proposed as a model of work, and the beautiful image of him mentoring the young Jesus in the craft of carpentry stands out especially today. He exemplifies dedication in providing for one’s family, making of one’s work an offering to God, and of quiet service and integrity. Through his example, even our seemingly mundane tasks at work can become a way of co-operating with God’s plan.
Indeed, work has always formed part of the divine plan. In the creation of the universe, God Himself works and rests, and later He took man and “settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it” (Gen 2:15). Work is thus ordained by God and endowed with a profound dignity.
The importance of workers such as farmers, engravers, smiths, and potters stands out in the writings of Ben Sira, who describes their work and praises their crafts, reminding us that:
“all these are skilled with their hands,
each one an expert at his own work;
Without them no city could be lived in,
and wherever they stay, they do not go hungry.”
(Sirach 38:31-32)
Work also has a distinctively monastic value, as the Benedictine maxim ora et labora suggests. Saint Benedict understood not only the necessity of labour for a monastery to sustain itself, but also as a guard against the spiritual danger of idleness. He therefore prescribed fixed times for work alongside periods of sacred reading, insisting that “when they live by the labour of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks.” In the spirit of Benedictine moderation, he adds, however: “yet, all things are to be done with moderation on account of the fainthearted.”[1]
Such moderation reminds us that work must be rightly ordered: work is made for man, not man for work. In reflecting on this, we might consider those for whom there is no work or those unable to work, as well as the many whose labour is dangerous, unrewarding, or all-consuming, and all those who are sadly mistreated at work. We recall in a particular way the responsibility incumbent upon Catholics to uphold the dignity of work and defend the rights of workers, in accordance with the Church’s social teaching.
Here John Paul II writes that “the Church considers it her task always to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work, to condemn situations in which that dignity and those rights are violated, and to help to guide [social] changes so as to ensure authentic progress by man and society.”[2]
This responsibility should also make us attentive to the treatment of workers within the Church itself. As the American Catholic commentator Don Clemmer observes, “the treatment of employees matters for a church with robust social teaching on the dignity of work and the human person,” as “an institution set up to serve people is called to examine its track record as servant of the servants.”[3]
May this feast lead us to reflect more deeply on the example of the holy saint of Nazareth – as a model for our own lives, and as a call to champion the cause of workers around the world.
Saint Joseph the Worker, pray for us.
Justin Robinson OSB
[1] Rule of Saint Benedict, 48.
[2] John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 1.
[3] Don Clemmer, “Church employees are vulnerable to workplace injustice.” U.S. Catholic, 30 April 2024.https://uscatholic.org/articles/202404/church-employees-are-vulnerable-to-workplace-injustice