COMMENTARY: Baltimore Colts’ legendary wide receiver Raymond Berry, who died in May, embodied what Pope St. John Paul II taught in Laborem Exercens: Through our work, we become more the person we were created to be.
In his June 2 Wall Street Journal column, Jason L. Riley noted a disturbing trend in our American moment: “According to the Department of Labor, 1 in 3 men were neither working nor looking for a job in April.”
That sad state of affairs is multi-causal, to be sure. The hard fact, though, as Jason Riley argued and Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrated in his book Men Without Work, “is that the long-term rise in male joblessness doesn’t stem from an inability to find employment. It results instead from an unwillingness to search for work.”
And that bespeaks spiritual distress. For as Pope St. John Paul II, himself a veteran of manual labor under awful conditions, explained in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), through our work we don’t just make more or earn more; we become more. Work is our participation in God’s ongoing creation of the world, and mastering work’s hardships is our participation in Christ’s ongoing redemption of
