Your humble blogger is a lawyer who represents farmers. He is also a Catholic. Naturally, when the bishops say something about farm labor issues, he pays attention. Some of the presentations are not as balanced as the bishops likely desired. This is troubling to your humble blogger for the simple reason that he is required to give the assent of faith to episcopal teaching. The following statement provides a nice corrective and reminds us that social teaching must begin with the presumption that all people possess human dignity and that valid praxis of Catholic social teaching would seem to require, as a starting point, viewing allegedly competing groups positively so as to avoid succumbing to stereotypes. Here is a Catholic version of “And God Created A Farmer . . . .”:
The farmer’s calling is a sacred calling. True, he does not wear a white collar as he goes out to his work; his face is begrimed by dirt as caressing winds press in on him while he follows the plow; his hard-horned hands give proof of the toilsome labor that is his on the farmstead. But, what a tremendous fallacy has laid hold of the minds of men that they have come to think that fine clothes, powdered faces, and dainty hands measure the true worth of man’s calling. The sacredness of the farmer’s calling rests on something more substantial than such external things.
His is a sacred calling because he is collaborator with God in continuing the work of His creation. In partnership with God he becomes to men a provider of the food, fiber, and shelter they need. Let the farmer, then, no longer depreciate himself in his own eyes. His calling is among the noblest in all the world. The Lord considered it so, and the farmer must think of it in the same terms. With God he lives and works in the vast realms of His bountiful and beautiful nature. He is not one of the millions who in thick formations swarm through freedom-destroying factory gates. He is a freeman as he strides through his fields following a plow, or sowing his seed, or harvesting his crop. He breathes God’s free air uncontaminated by the dust and smoke of a factory town. He may lack some of the material things of city life. What does it matter? “There can be culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without enslaving factories, science without worship of matter. Gigantic factories, office buildings rising to the sky, inhuman cities, industrial morals, faith in mass production, are not indispensable to civilization.”
. . .
In truth, the farmer’s calling is one that must command great respect. Much knowledge and much skill are required to manage well a farmstead with its land and fences, barns and granaries, tools and machinery. Farming is among the greatest of human arts. The farmer must be an artisan and a craftsman; a capitalist, financier, manager, and worker; a producer and seller. He must know soil and seed, poultry and cattle; he must know when to till the soil, cultivate his fields, and harvest his crops; he must know how best to combine and utilize his capital and his labor; he must know markets, when to buy and when to sell. Few occupations require such a combination of knowledge, skill, and experience as farming. The varied functions of a farmer require not merely a man of brawn but also a man of brain. Certainly it is not a calling for every man.
In the presence of his Lord the farmer should recall all this, not in senseless vainglory or in sinful pride, but in grateful appreciation of the calling that God gave him as a tiller of the soil. Praise and thanksgiving should rise in his heart as he reflects on the high regard the Lord showered on him and his work.
But other pious and fruitful thoughts come to his mind as he kneels in the presence of his Eucharistic Lord. The Holy Eucharist is a superabundant source of life. It is life in and through Christ, who is life, who came upon earth in order that men might have life and have it abundantly, who shares His life generously with those who abide in Him. Through the Holy Eucharist our membership in the Mystical Body of Christ becomes a living and fruitful membership so that with St. Paul we may cry out: “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Our Blessed Lord thought of our living with Him as an organic union with Him. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” He said, “He who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit.”7 Organic life — that is the law of all life in nature and supernature.
This passage contains an important reminder. “There can be culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without enslaving factories, science without worship of matter. Gigantic factories, office buildings rising to the sky, inhuman cities, industrial morals, faith in mass production, are not indispensable to civilization.” When we think about the common good in purely material terms, we need to remember that what we value in our lives (“culture”) can exist in many different forms and that when we get to prescribing how others shall be, we risk overthrowing their essential dignity and doing so in the name of improving it. We also, at least as farmers are concerned, risk erasing a way in which Christ enters this world. Farmers are neither inherently more or less moral than others, but their way of life tells us something about Christ and allows Him to work in our world.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: catholic social teaching, farm labor issues, farmer |
Leave a comment