Some decades ago, Communist leaders in Moscow challenged the May celebrations surrounding Mary by launching a new celebration of workers, International Workers Day. The Catholic Church pushed back, making today the “Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.”
Joseph has a place in some of the central icons or images of Christianity, in art presenting the “Holy Family.” These icons present some of the Gospel, of course; but they also challenge us to put aspects of human life into right relationship. For example, the image of the Holy Family can be the beginning of a meditation on three central questions of human life: identity, marriage, and labor. Jesus, the central figure, challenges us to recognize the immense dignity of each and every person on earth. Mary invites us to understand what it means to bring a child from God into the world. Joseph, a carpenter, invites us to see the immense dignity of work, as an expression of the person and not merely a trap and a curse. The icon of the three is (in part) an invitation to keep identity and family and labor in balance and harmony.
In our time, we have seen some huge changes in social arrangements for work. Women are in the workplace in ways that were hard to foresee in the 1950s. The feminist revolution pushed back hard against systematic oppression of women, and developed new patterns of cooperation. Hallelujah!
My wife Betsy and I consider ourselves feminists. One detail of our understanding of the change is in our name: she kept her name (Cavanaugh) and I kept my name (O’Keefe), but we have the same name (Cavanaugh-O’Keefe). But our intent, when we took each other’s names, was not just to indicate support for the feminist revolution. It was (and is) our understanding that we became a unit, that two became one. Henceforward, to see me alone is to see a fragment of a unit; the other half is Betsy. We understood the change to be God’s work, and (therefore) to be permanent.
Shifting cultural patterns of labor must change family life. Not long ago, almost half the intelligence of the human race was focused on family life and child-rearing. Now, with two parents working, some families turn huge portions of childcare over to uneducated, low-paid, over-worked non-professionals. That’s not an obviously good thing.
The shift in work patterns is not inherently destructive, but it is definitely a challenge. If both parents work outside the home, dad must do much more work inside the home than grand-dad did. In practice, what happens often is that wage earning is split 50-50, and diaper duty is split 95-5 – and dad wants credit for doing his “share.”
For many feminists, the way around this challenge has been to de-emphasize children. “De-emphasize”? Kill. So we have a born/aborted ratio around 70-30. That solves the diaper problem. This is so common that many people today equate feminism and abortion.
It would seem to me, considering the balance and harmony of the icon of the Holy Family, that when women take on more labor, men must become more family-oriented, and more protective.
When Herod set out to quash a rumor of a new king by killing children, Joseph had dreams that he believed to be the word of God, and he took his family and fled into Egypt. No Hamlet he, he took the visions of the night and translated them into prompt action in the day. To protect his family from becoming a widow and an orphan, he became a stranger in a strange land.
Recalling Joseph the Worker, I am re-committed to protecting the dignity of each person, including the rights and dignity of workers and mothers and children.
Happy Feastday!