Preach What You Practice: Why Catholic Institutions Must Welcome the Union
The Church has long upheld workers’ dignity. Now is the time to live that principle within its own walls.
It’s uncomfortable when a Catholic hospital administrator discourages unionization while a local bishop endorses labor dignity. This contradiction can be resolved. Catholic institutions shouldn’t just accept worker organizing—they should welcome it as true to their identity.
WHAT THE CHURCH ACTUALLY TEACHES: THINK JOSEPH CARDINAL CARDIJN
Catholic social teaching does not speak in vague generalities on this point. Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, names the right to organize as a basic human right — one that must be exercised “without risk of reprisal.”
It does not say workers may organize if management permits it. It says this right belongs to workers as persons.
Think of the work of Joseph Cardinal Cardijn and organizing Young Christian Workers during the Industrial Revolution.
“Never has the worker problem experienced the dimension, significance or gravity that it has today,” ~ Joseph Cardijn.
The U.S. Catholic bishops reinforced this in their landmark 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All:
“All church institutions must also fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. No less than other employers, they must recognize the freedom of employees to choose their own representatives.” ~ U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (1986), §306
The bishops made their expectation clear: The Church must be an exemplary employer. This is a demand, not a suggestion. Yet, Catholic institutions often abandon this standard when it’s inconvenient.
A LABOR PRIEST PUT IT PLAINLY
Msgr. George Higgins, the Chicago-born priest who spent five decades as the Catholic Church’s most prominent labor advocate, had little patience for institutional evasion on this question. He argued throughout his ministry that the Church’s credibility on social justice was inseparable from how it treated its own workers. As he wrote:
“The right of workers to organize and bargain collectively is not merely a pragmatic arrangement tolerated by the Church. It is a moral imperative rooted in the nature of work and the dignity of the human person.” ~ Msgr. George G. Higgins, “The Yardstick” column
Higgins spent decades walking picket lines, mediating disputes, and insisting Church leaders practice what they preach. He warned that if a teaching isn’t enforced internally, it becomes just a slogan.
THOMAS MERTON ON WORK AND THE PERSON
The connection between labor rights and human dignity is not merely a matter of policy — it is, at its root, a spiritual one. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and one of the twentieth century’s most compelling Catholic voices, located the problem precisely in how institutions reduce persons to functions:
“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Merton’s words take on uncomfortable weight when applied to Catholic employment practices. A worker who accepts that her wage is non-negotiable, that her schedule is set without her input, that her concerns will be heard only at management’s discretion — she has been invited to settle for too little.
The institution that extends that invitation, while proclaiming the dignity of the human person from its pulpits and press releases, has settled for a diminished version of its own mission.
WHY CATHOLIC WORKPLACES ARE DIFFERENT — AND WHY THAT RAISES THE STAKES
Catholic schools form children. Catholic hospitals care for the sick and dying. Catholic home care agencies support elders and people with disabilities. These are not neutral service transactions — they are acts of ministry, carried out by workers who are, in most cases, themselves people of faith or people who have chosen a vocation of care.
When workers are underpaid, overworked, or denied a meaningful voice in their working conditions, the moral contradiction is hard to skirt. The institution proclaims the common good while quietly managing labor costs. It celebrates human dignity in its mission statement while disciplining workers who try to exercise it.
The Catholic Labor Network has made this point directly: the Church’s social doctrine does not carve out an exception for Catholic employers. The labor rights it defends in the broader economy apply with equal force inside Catholic institutions — perhaps with greater force, given the Church’s public teaching role.
IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING — AND IT WORKS
Critics sometimes argue that unions and Catholic institutions are fundamentally incompatible — that collective bargaining introduces an adversarial dynamic into what should be a community of shared mission. New York’s Catholic institutions quietly disprove this every day.
Archdiocese of New York Catholic Schools
Teachers: Federation of Catholic Teachers (OPEIU)
ArchCare
CNAs & home health aides: SEIU 1199
Catholic hospitals across New York
Nurses: NYSNA · Healthcare workers: SEIU 1199
Fordham University
Clerical: OPEIU · Adjuncts: SEIU 200United · Grad assistants: CWA 1104
These are not anomalies or embarrassments to be explained away. They are evidence that union relations are not foreign to Catholic institutional life — they are already part of it.
In those institutions, the relationship between mission and employment practice can be lived honestly, because the workers who carry out that mission have a genuine voice in how it is done.
THE MORAL CASE, STATED
Unionization gives workers a voice in the decisions that most directly affect their lives: wages, scheduling, staffing levels, benefits, and workplace safety. In a Catholic setting, that voice is not a threat to mission — it is what makes mission credible. It is the difference between proclaiming human dignity and actually practicing it.
A Catholic institution that actively resists organizing sends a message it may not intend: that the people who carry out its work are primarily costs to be managed rather than persons to be respected.
A Catholic institution that genuinely welcomes organizing says something else entirely — that the dignity it proclaims belongs to everyone inside its doors, not just the people it serves.
The Church has spent more than a century building one of the most sophisticated bodies of social teaching the world has ever seen.
The question now is whether its own institutions will have the integrity to live by it — not as a reluctant concession, but as a form of witness