by James Parks, Apr 27, 2011
AFL-CIO President Emeritus John Sweeney will keynote a two-day conference celebrating the 120th anniversary of the landmark papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things).
The Church, Labor and the New Things of the Modern World conference at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., May 2-3, will bring together top Catholic religious leaders and scholars, journalists Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne and others to discuss the relevance of Catholic social teaching in the modern world.
Sweeney’s keynote speech on “Renewing the Historic Partnership of Unions and the Catholic Church in an Anti-Worker Era” on May 2 will explore Catholic involvement in labor issues around the world guided by the principles outlined in Rerum Novarum. While the conference is free and open to the public, you must register. Click here to learn more about the conference and here to RSVP.
Dr. Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at Catholic Univeristy, says Sweeney was a natural choice for the keynote.
Nobody gets the moral dimensions of labor solidarity and its commitment to the common good better than John Sweeney. A symposium on the contemporary significance of Rerum Novarum, a document that speaks so eloquently about the moral and social imperatives of worker justice, would be inconceivable without John Sweeney.
Written by Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum laid the foundation for the Catholic Church’s longtime involvement in workers’ issues, Schneck says.
That encyclical endorsed Catholic religious participation in organized labor. The result was that from its beginnings, the labor movement in America has had a religious component. Arguments for worker justice and for the moral cause of unionism reflect these religious influences, and throughout the 20th century and down to the present, the history of American labor benefited from the continuing commitment of religious support.
Catholic social teaching has played a central role in Sweeney’s more than 50 years of serving those who work for a living. After receiving an honorary doctorate at Georgetown University, Sweeney said faith “has been the bedrock of my life.”
He added:
[The] Holy Father [the Pope] reaffirms our belief in government as a legitimate tool for correcting injustice and inequality, and for regulating business. He writes: “The market is not, and must not become, the place where the strong subdue the weak.”
He also reinforces the spiritual teaching that society should honor work—work is a way of worshipping God and participating in God’s ongoing act of creation. Honoring the dignity of work is the core of our shared support for free labor unions, for the absolute right of workers to join together and bargain collectively, and the absolute obligation of corporations to honor those rights and hold themselves to higher standards of social responsibility.
