Making a Life, Not Just a Living: Reframing Work Through Catholic Social Teaching
Based on Kate Ward’s Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (Bloomsbury, 2026). Using the See-Judge-Act Method
Making a Life, Not Just a Living: Reframing Work Through Catholic Social Teaching
Most of us inherited a definition of work we never actually chose. It arrived through job postings, performance reviews, LinkedIn feeds, and the quiet dread of the Sunday-night inbox. It tells us that work means a paycheck, that more hours signal greater virtue, and that the honest answer to “who are you?” is whatever’s on our business card.
Theologian Kate Ward thinks we can do better — and that the Catholic tradition, of all places, has spent over a century building the tools to do it. In Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work, Ward uses the Church’s social teaching not to moralize about laziness or productivity, but to widen the frame entirely: what counts as work, who does it, and what it’s actually for.
This post walks through her opening argument using the classic pastoral method of See, Judge, Act — a way of reading our situation honestly, evaluating it against a deeper vision, and then asking what changes.
SEE: Naming “Workism”
Ward starts by describing the water we’re swimming in. She calls it workism: an economy and a culture that <cite index=”6-1”>values activity in the world almost exclusively by outputs that can literally be counted</cite>. Under workism, an activity only “counts” if it’s paid, and a person only “counts” if they’re producing.
The symptoms are familiar. Ward points to <cite index=”6-1”>long hours on the job, unpredictable job schedules, and the spread of side hustles</cite> — the second and third gigs we take on not out of ambition but out of necessity, dressed up in the language of entrepreneurship. Add to that the quiet, corrosive habit of answering “what do you do?” as if it were the same question as “who are you?” — and you have a culture where a layoff or a diagnosis doesn’t just cost income, it costs identity.
This is the “seeing” step: before we can judge or act, we have to be honest that this is the air we breathe, often without noticing.
A question to sit with: Where in my own life do I unconsciously treat my job as my primary source of identity and worth? Notice what happens internally when you imagine losing your job tomorrow — is the grief only financial?
JUDGE: The Catholic Social Teaching Standard
Here, Ward pivots, and it’s the heart of the book. Rather than accepting workism’s terms and merely arguing for better hours or better pay (worthwhile as those fights are), she reaches for a fundamentally different definition of work itself.
<cite index=”6-1”>Catholic theology regards work as more than what we do for pay — unpaid work is work</cite>. In Ward’s formulation, work is <cite index=”6-1”>any activity through which humans transform the world</cite> — or, put more fully, any activity in which we use our God-given abilities to transform creation, whether or not we’re compensated for it, and whether that transformation looks like a spreadsheet, a sourdough loaf, or a diaper change. This is what she calls an inclusive definition of work: paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive, waged and unwaged, all counted as genuinely human activity that participates in God’s ongoing work of creation.
This move does real theological and moral work. It means the parent managing a household, the daughter coordinating a parent’s hospice care, the neighbor organizing a mutual-aid network, and the volunteer teaching catechism are not doing something adjacent to “real work” — they are working, full stop, and their labor deserves the dignity, support, and recognition that Catholic social teaching insists belongs to all workers.
Ward is also careful to reject an older, more punitive reading of work as merely a punishment for sin. Work, rightly understood, is not primarily a curse to be endured but a vocation through which the human person is meant to flourish and to participate in creation — even as she stays realistic that work, in a broken world, is often also toilsome and unjust.
A question to sit with: What forms of unpaid work — care, household labor, community organizing, spiritual practice — do I currently ignore or undervalue, whether in myself or in the people around me?
The Five Lenses
Having reframed what counts as work, Ward organizes the rest of her book around five lenses she’ll use to examine it:
Purpose — what work is for, and whether our activity serves human flourishing or merely output
Care — the unpaid, often invisible labor of sustaining other people, historically and disproportionately carried by women
Food — the labor of growing, preparing, and sharing food, which Ward treats as sacramental, since a meal represents “a larger reality” — the labor and the laborers behind it
Art — creative and repetitive work, and the question of when making something is labor versus leisure.
Pay — the justice question underneath it all: what people are owed for their labor, and the mechanisms (living wages, family wages, and proposals like universal basic income) the Church has weighed for getting there
Each lens lets her test the inclusive definition of work against a different corner of real life, rather than leaving it as an abstract principle.
The Sources She’ll Draw On
Ward roots all of this in Catholic social teaching’s century-and-a-half-long conversation about labor and human dignity — a tradition she reads for its substance rather than treating it as settled by hierarchy or authorship. Key touchstones include Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor), widely regarded as the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching on labor; Pope St. John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), which insisted that work’s <cite index=”6-1”>primary importance is how it shapes the worker, rather than what work produces</cite>; and the broader body of papal and conciliar teaching on solidarity, subsidiarity, and the dignity of the person. Notably, Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name in part to signal continuity with Leo XIII’s founding vision of Catholic labor teaching, now extended to the questions raised by an AI-driven economy — a thread Ward’s book helps set up.
ACT: What This Asks of Us
The “seeing” and “judging” steps are only useful if they lead somewhere. A few concrete places to start:
Audit your own definition of work. For one week, notice every time you (or someone else) uses “work” to mean only paid employment. Silently expand it: does the caregiving, the meal-making, the emotional labor of a hard conversation count too?
Name and value unpaid labor out loud. If someone in your life carries a disproportionate share of care work — a parent, a partner, a friend — say so, plainly, as a form of labor deserving recognition, not just gratitude.
Loosen the grip of “what do you do?” Practice introducing yourself, even just internally, by something other than your job title. Notice what else is true about who you are.
Ask what your work is actually for. Not what it produces, but what it’s meant to serve — your household, your community, the common good. Ward’s “purpose” lens starts exactly here.
Support policy and workplace practices that reflect the inclusive definition. Family leave, fair scheduling, living wages, and support for caregivers aren’t fringe issues under this view — they follow directly from taking unpaid and reproductive work seriously as work.
Ward’s larger claim is quietly radical: if we keep measuring human worth by output, we will keep burning people out and overlooking the labor — much of it unpaid, much of it done by women, much of it invisible — that actually holds our lives together. Catholic social teaching, at its best, offers a way to see work whole again: not a treadmill to survive, but one of the ways we participate in making — and sustaining — a life worth living.
Based on Kate Ward’s Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (Bloomsbury, 2026).