Within the history of Catholic magisterial teaching, human work has always been given the importance it merits by the Church. As an expert on humanity, the Church cannot not make her voice heard when she sees that this most basic and fundamental right that every human person is entitled to is being ruthlessly violated. In work, the Church sees the growth and the fulfilment of the human person’s vocation to steward the earth and care for the entire human family.

From a biblical point of view, work has existed before the fall of Adam and Eve. Work is holy because God himself works. In the book of Genesis, work is portrayed in a positive light. It gives order to the chaos that pre-existed creation. Since God is the fountain and origin of work, the latter is never presented as something oppressive or painful. It was only after the sin of Adam and Eve that the human being started experiencing work as a distressing activity. Rest goes hand in hand with work. In effect, the apogee of the biblical understanding of work lies in the commandment of the Sabbath rest. God rested in the seventh day so that he could marvel and appreciate His creative work. Likewise, the human person is to rest on the Seventh Day to give thanks to the Creator for giving him life and the ability to care for creation. The Bible eminently shows us the value of work by presenting to us Jesus’ positive vision on work. To begin with, Jesus had a first hand experience of work. He “devoted most of the years of his life on earth to manual work at the carpenter’s bench” (Laborem Exercens, 6). Moreover, work has been a key concept both in his understanding of himself as well as the vehicle through which he proclaimed his message of salvation. Jesus always saw himself as a worker. “My Father is working still, and I am working” (Jn 5,17). Similarly, his disciples were to be like him, workers in the harvest of the Lord, precisely by evangelising humanity. In his teaching on the kingdom of God, Jesus continually made use of the image of work in order to explain it to his audience. For instance, the human work of the shepherd, the farmer, the doctor, the sower, the householder, the servant, the steward, the fisherman, the merchant, the labourer powerfully elucidate the dynamics of God’s kingdom on earth.

In their turn, the Church Fathers constantly held a positive view of work. In fact, they qualified it as being “opus humanum”, that is, human work. It is solely through work that the human person can control the world with God’s assistance both for his well-being together with that of his neighbour. In this perspective, idleness is to be avoided and work promoted since it is beneficial to the body and the soul.

The patristic contribution asserted that through the work of every worker Christ is still creating and doing good. Thanks to his own work, the human person is responsible for ameliorating creation and the whole cosmos. He unites both social and community resources so as to extend the common good, especially of those who are neediest.

Within the Christian understanding, work is both an objective and a subjective activity. Work is said to be objective when it is the totality of actions, means, tools and technologies employed by the human being in order to help him in his producing endeavour of things. On the other hand, work is subjective when it is considered as that activity in which the human person shows that he is able to accomplish a diversity of actions that are intimately involved with the work process as well as conform to his personal calling. Pope John Paul II overtly explains this point in his encyclical on “Human Work”, Laborem exercens. “Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the “image of God” he is a person, that is to say, a subjective capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realisation. As a person, man is therefore the subject of work” (Laborem exercens, 6). Speaking prophetically to our own times, where profit alone has become the yardstick of success and self-realisation in the field of work, Pope John Paul II powerfully stressed that the subjective dimension of work precedes its objective one. This is so since every human activity emanates and reshapes the human person in return. It is only the human being who, of his own accord, embarks on work and establishes its worth and consummate value. Since any human work is fundamentally ordered to the integral wellbeing of the human person, every type of work must be subordinate to and address in a particular way the human person’s need for self-realisation. Work is for the human person and never the other way round. In the aforementioned encyclical, the Pope makes the following valid note concerning the basic scope of human work: “it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man – even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest “service”, as the most monotonous even the most alienating work” (Laborem exercens, 6).

Work in itself is valuable because it opens up the worker to the social milieu. No man is an island. The work of any worker inherently affects the whole of society. In his encyclical Centesimus annus, that commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the first social encyclical of the Catholic Church Rerum novarum, Pope John Paul II asserted that work comes from a community to serve the needs of the human community. “More than ever, work is work with others and work for others: it is a matter of doing something for someone else” (Centesimus annus, 31).

It is the duty of every human being to work. The human person must work both because the Creator has ordered him to do so as well as to bring about the development of the entire human family. Most of all, work clearly shows the profound dignity of the human being. Thanks to it, the human person actively participates with his Creator, not only to safeguard the marvel of creation but also to partake from that communion of divine love to which every sort of human work is ordered to serve and glorify.

Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap