This Labor Day, presidential candidates will no doubt be talking about the plight of American workers and fairness in the U.S. economy. Few, if any, are likely to mention the Catholic Church’s significant contributions to the fight for worker justice. But as extreme inequality continues to grow, there’s value in reflecting on how Catholic social teaching has offered a check on the excesses of unfettered capitalism over the past century.
A hundred years ago, America’s Catholic bishops issued what then amounted to a radical set of proposals that in the following decades would influence President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms. The bishops’ “Program for Social Reconstruction” called for a minimum wage and labor participation in management decisions, along with insurance for the elderly, disabled and unemployed funded by a tax on industry.....

Outside Washington, Catholics were leading progressive movements for economic dignity. In New York, Boston and other major cities, “labor priests” organized parish schools where workers were instructed in Catholic teaching about workers’ rights and concretely applied those principles to the practical details of collective bargaining.