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While we enjoy our long weekend, the meaning and history of Labor Day might not get much thought.
But there is something profoundly Catholic about Labor Day: Since the beginning, the Church has advocated for the rights of workers and the dignity of work, a tradition embedded in its social doctrine and uplifted in holidays like the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1.
The Catechism describes so beautifully how our ordinary daily work can be an act of cooperation with Christ’s creation and redemption:
Work represents a fundamental dimension of human existence as participation not only in the act of creation but also in that of redemption. Those who put up with the difficult rigors of work in union with Jesus cooperate, in a certain sense, with the Son of God in his work of redemption and show that they are disciples of Christ bearing his cross, every day, in the activity they are called to do.
In this perspective, work can be considered a means of sanctification and an enlivening of earthly realities with the Spirit of Christ… Work is an expression of man's full humanity… Man's free and responsible action reveals his intimate relationship with the Creator and his creative power.
It doesn’t matter whether we work as a janitor or CEO: If we do our work with love and offer it to God, any dignified work can be elevated beyond the mundane to become something that helps us grow in holiness.
The saint who most ardently championed sanctification through ordinary work is St. Josemaria Escriva, the Spanish priest who founded Opus Dei, a Catholic organization dedicated to helping ordinary people achieve holiness in the midst of the world.
But many other saints also spoke and wrote about work’s dignity and value over the centuries.
Words of wisdom from the saints
In honor of Labor Day, here are a few inspiring quotes from the saints to uplift you in your own daily work.
"Every worker is the hand of Christ that continues to create and to do good.” - St. Ambrose
“Let me stress this point: it is in the simplicity of your ordinary work, in the monotonous details of each day, that you have to find the secret, which is hidden from so many, of something great and new: Love.” - St. Josemaria Escriva
“In this superior vision, work, a punishment and at the same time a reward of human activity, involves another relationship, the essentially religious one, which has been happily expressed in the Benedictine formula: ora et labora! The religious fact confers on human work an enlivening and redeeming spirituality. Such a connection between work and religion reflects the mysterious but real alliance, which intervenes between human action and the providential action of God” - St. John Paul II
“Do not lose heart, even if you should discover that you lack qualities necessary for the work to which you are called. He who called you will not desert you, but the moment you are in need he will stretch out his saving hand.” - St. Angela Merici
“God is more pleased by one work, however small, done secretly, without desire that it be known, than a thousand done with the desire that people know of them. Those who work for God with purest love not only care nothing about whether others see their works, but do not even seek that God himself know of them. Such persons would not cease to render God the same services, with the same joy and purity of love, even if God were never to know of these." - St. John of the Cross
