Faithful Careers

Integrating the Catholic Faith and Work

Peter M. Smudde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

In Faithful Careers Peter M. Smudde contends that God calls us to live an "integrated life" that unifies both the spiritual and the secular aspects of life.

As an introduction to integrating the Catholic faith with one's work, this book answers, in the Catholic context, basic questions of what work is, why work is important, who we are as workers, how may we have fruitful careers, where may we find help about faith-work integration, and when we should take next steps toward better integrating our work and the Catholic faith. Smudde demonstrates how the Catholic faith truly does apply to our labor, and that our lives depend on that labor, by putting forth particular matters of the faith that pertain to faithful careers. He then puts into real-world context, pertinent teachings, concepts, principles, practices, and other means the Catholic Church provides for us, so that those lessons can be practically applied on a daily basis. Sources such as the Bible andwritings of the saints, popes, contemporary Catholic spiritual writers, apologists, and scholars are applied to strengthen the support made about the book's content.

Catholic professionals at all stages of their careers will welcome this insightful book, which explores the call to put spirituality in the foreground—to obtain ever-deeper faith and, thereby, greater integration of faith in everyday life and career.

1 What Is Work?

The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.

(Genesis 2:15)

Do not hate hard work; work was assigned by God.

(Sirach 7:15)

Do you remember your first-ever job? Mine was delivering a weekly community newspaper for which I also had to collect payment once a month. I was in middle school at the time. The responsibility, experience, and meager income I made were good for my youthful age and needs. Other jobs I held later on in my youth were similar in purpose and outcomes. In high school I worked part time in a small workout facility near my parents’ home as a custodian. I later worked part time at a large nursery of trees, shrubs, flowers, and so on with a close friend of mine as a “loader,” helping customers pick out and load their plants into their vehicles as well as doing other tasks as needed to keep the yard of plants and the facilities stocked and maintained. For several summers while in high school and during my college years I worked during the summers in the local school district as a custodian at a designated school or on a maintenance crew that maintained heating and air-conditioning systems in school buildings. While in college, I had a work-study job in the public affairs department of the college I attended my freshman year, was a sales associate in a retail specialty clothing store in a large shopping mall during my sophomore year, worked in the dining hall for my dorm my junior year, and worked at the front desk of the dorm in which I lived during my junior and senior years. I also held two internships, one in public relations in my senior year and one in technical writing during my graduate studies. Between my graduation with my bachelor’s degree and the start of my graduate studies, I was a full-time custodian at an elementary school in the school district in which I worked in previous summers. I liked those jobs (mostly) and profited from them for as long as I held them.

While my brother and I were growing up, our dad and mom would “go to work.” So, I always understood work and jobs to go together, and work was both a place where someone had a job to make money and a variety of tasks that had to be done to make that money. I felt that I was enacting this view well through my early work experiences, which, as I look back, were quite formative in my work ethic in addition to what my parents taught. Now, consider when you were young hearing adults talking about “going to work” or what they did “at work” and what impressions that left on you.

Beginning with the word, “work,” we find that it has multiple definitions in any contemporary dictionary, because subtleties of context matter and it can function as other parts of speech (e.g. noun or verb). “Work” also is the root word for other words that stem from it. For a simple and secular starting point, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “work” primarily as “to perform or carry through a task requiring sustained effort or continuous repeated operations.” Likewise, the related term of “labor” can be variously defined because of its own usage patterns, and it has its own stem of derivative words. The same dictionary defines “labor” as “expenditure of physical or mental effort especially when difficult or compulsory” and as “human activity that provides the goods and services in an economy; the services performed by workers for wages as distinguished from those rendered by entrepreneurs for profits.” The two words are virtually synonymous but have their own special subtleties that differentiate them and make them work well in context. As we will see, the sense and reference for the words “work” and “labor” (and their derivatives) as given here are shared in Catholic teaching. So having these terms defined gives us a solid starting point for examining the Catholic faith’s intersection with them and our lives.

To examine what work is according to the Catholic faith, we need to turn to several vital sources. This chapter covers how the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, popes’ documents of different kinds, certain Vatican publications, and lay authors’ writings illuminate the subject. The idea is that these authoritative guides are useful to us for understanding what work is and its significance in our lives and the lives of others throughout the world.

The Bible

The Holy Scriptures are at the heart of the Catholic faith and, together with the Magisterium and Sacred Tradition, make up the sum of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. A basic question is this: Where is work addressed in the Scriptures? A very interesting place to begin is the frequency with which the word “work” occurs in the Bible. According to the Vatican’s statistics about words (and “tokens”) used in the books of the New American Bible (NAB, revised edition), where the data are available online at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_INDEX.HTM, there are 1,218,577 words in the NAB, and the number of occurrences of the word “work” is 501. Other related words’ occurrences are “worked” (40 times), “worker” (11 times), “workers” (17 times), “working” (21 times), “workingman” (1 time), “workmanship” (3 times), “workmen” (17 times), “labor” (84 times), “labored” (11 times), “laborer” (11 times), “laborers” (19 times), “laboring” (5 times), and “labors” (21 times). Add to this list “toil” (40 times), “toiled” (7 times), “toilers” (1 time), “toiling” (2 times), and “toils” (7 times). In this dataset, the total number of times in the NAB that work (including very related terms of labor and toil) is referenced as a concept, person, or action is 819. (Note that a very small number of the occurrences of these words are in the “Preface” and in footnotes to the books of the NAB, and those occurrences are indicated in the reported data given online.) As points of comparison, “pray” (and its derivatives, including “prayer”) occurs 685 times, “bless” (and its derivatives, including “blessing”) occurs 754 times, and “spirit” occurs 855 times. So, work is addressed throughout the Bible, and sometimes it is more prominent in certain books than in others. But the point is obvious: Work matters as much in a religious way as it does in a secular way. In fact, they necessarily intertwine, which means we must live our faith on the job as much as we do at home, at Mass, and in the community.

With the volume of occurrences of work in the Bible, a complete examination of work as it is addressed in the Bible would be a huge challenge, and it is one that is well beyond the scope of this modest book. (One example of such an undertaking is the Theology of Work Bible Commentary, edited by Will Messenger, which examines work in all the books of Protestant versions of the Bible.) Thematically speaking, however, work (including labor and toil) in the Bible is presented as a dignified and essential part of human activity ordained by God, the fruits of which should be enjoyed and offered up to God in thanksgiving and praise to Him. Work matters as much when done at home and for one’s self and family as they do when done with and for others, ranging from helping a neighbor with a task, being a community volunteer, to working for an employer. In fact, as the first “scriptural spark” for this chapter shows, God had Adam and Eve take care of the Garden of Eden in every way, and that was before Adam and Eve’s sin. Those who refrain from labor when they should be laboring are admonished for their idleness (see St. Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians). People are expected to work for their own good, the good of others, and, especially, to give thanks and glory to God for what He has provided for them. In this way, work is redemptive, as we carry our individual crosses each day and follow Christ.

The Bible recognizes there are many kinds of work and people who perform the labor they do, because God, through the Holy Spirit, has given certain gifts, talents, and charisms to certain people but not others. Consider this passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (12:3–8):

For by the grace given to me I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than one ought to think, but to think soberly, each according to the measure of faith that God has apportioned. For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them: if prophecy, in proportion to the faith; if ministry, in ministering; if one is a teacher, in teaching; if one exhorts, in exhortation; if one contributes, in generosity; if one is over others, with diligence; if one does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

It is best, then, to view your life as a mission on which the Lord has called you to work in His vineyard. Doing so also requires, as Pope Francis explains in Gaudete et Exsultate,

listening to God in prayer and recognizing the signs he gives you. Always ask the spirit what Jesus expects from you at every moment of your life and in every decision you make, so as to discern its place in the mission you have received. Allow the Spirit to forge in you the personal mystery that can reflect Jesus Christ in today’s world.

(§23)

The reason is that God desires diversity and variety among people so His will can be done and done well among everyone—provided people exercise their free will that, through some degree of discernment, supports God’s will and not reject Him or His will.

Knowing that work is addressed frequently and positively throughout the Bible is comforting and liberating, as it gives us confidence in using the Bible to help us in this avenue of our lives and in our Catholic faith. In fact, using the Vatican’s concordance of the number of times that “work,” “labor,” and “toil” (and their derivatives) occur as words in the Bible makes it easy to find passages. Just go to the Vatican’s webpage for the statistics about word occurrences, look up “work,” “labor,” and “toil” (or any word), and see very short previews of all the Bible passages that contain them—and click on the previews to read the full passages. The “scriptural sparks” at the beginning of each chapter of this book function in a similar way—to give some direction to how work and faith in Jesus Christ combine and point the way to using them together. In fact, notice in the first scriptural spark from Genesis that work was ordained by God and essential in the Garden of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve!

It is at this point that looking at the Catholic Church’s teaching about work further illuminates what work is and its importance in our faith lives. There are a number of vital sources from the Church that explain to us how work and the faith interrelate and, most important, show us how what we do in our jobs and careers matters in God’s vineyard. Those sources include the Catechism, documents popes have written and published, and documents that Vatican organizations have published. Additionally, there lay authors who have published works that are excellent guides about integrating the faith and work.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

Formally speaking, the Catholic Church teaches well about work, its importance, and people’s obligations as workers in the Lord’s vineyard. The primary document for us is the Catechism of the Catholic Church (second edition). Created at the direction of Pope St. John Paul II in 1992 and revised at his direction in 1997 (to be in concurrence with the new Latin translation of the Bible published then), the Catechism is a full and complete presentation of Catholic doctrine. In this way it is a massive (920 pages), singular text that is immensely important, informative, and useful. In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI presented the Compendium: Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is a condensed version of the full Catechism but does not replace it. He did this so that anyone (believer and nonbeliever) can have a concise, more accessible, and easier point of reference about the Catholic faith that also links directly to the full Catechism throughout.

So if we want to know what the Catholic Church teaches about work, the best place to turn is the Catechism. Thanks to the Compendium, we can get to the fundamentals directly, then if we wish, turn to the detailed content in the full Catechism. The following excerpt from the Compendium summarizes Catholic teaching about work. (In the text excerpt below, the abbreviation “CCC” and the numbers that follow them refer to the Catechism of the Catholic Church in its full form, where there is more detail in the numbered sections about Church teaching on the given topic. The numbering scheme for topics is ...