‘Seminary Summer’ brings religion, unions together

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Twenty-five seminary students from a variety of religious traditions and all areas of the country are exploring their faith and their commitment to social justice by participating in “Seminary Summer.”

The 10-week program sponsored by the National Interfaith Center for Worker Justice and the AFL-CIO started with a weeklong orientation at the Dominican Conference Center in River Forest. After that, the students were being sent to work on labor organizing campaigns around the country.
For Msgr. John J. Egan, a longtime champion of social justice and workers’ rights, the effort is welcome, if overdue. Egan and Anne Zimmerman, a Catholic laywoman who spent much of her life helping to organize nurses in Chicago, spoke to the students about the historical relationship of religion and labor.

Christian and Jewish traditions have long taught the dignity of every person, and held that workers have the right to organize to improve working conditions and make a living wage. But the relationship can be complicated, Egan said, because sometimes workers at a religious or religious-owned institution want to organize—especially workers at education and health care institutions. Those institutions sometimes resort to the same tactics as any other company, Egan said.

“I don’t think that because they’re a Catholic institution or a Protestant institution or a Jewish institution, you have to treat them any differently than you would, say, an automobile company,” said Egan, 83, now a special assistant to the president of DePaul University. “Don’t create an adversarial relationship if you can possibly avoid it. If it’s a Catholic institution, talk to the administrators and try to get them to understand that Catholic social thought says the workers have a right to organize.”

That advice can be taken to heart by the students who will be working specifically on campaigns to organize workers in Catholic health care institutions in Los Angeles—among them, Brian Gilles, who is studying to be a Redemptorist priest at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and Glenn Chen, a Catholic who just graduated from Yale Divinity School.

“It’s just in my blood,” said Gilles, who spent eight years working with Catholic Worker groups in California before entering the seminary. “I don’t like when people are cheated. When there’s injustice in the world, when there’s oppression, it diminishes all of us.”

Chen discovered the Catholic social justice tradition as a student at Yale, a school he chose because he would have the opportunity to question and learn about many faith traditions. While he was a student, he converted to Catholicism.

He is joined in the program this summer by Gavan Meehan, another Catholic graduate of Yale Divinity School, who will go back to New Haven to organize hotel and restaurant workers.

“I came [to Yale] loving social justice. It’s there in the Gospels, it’s there in the liberation theology of the church,” said Meehan, who plans to work in an ecumenical agency organizing social services in the fall. This summer, he will go back to New Haven to organize workers there.

Both men see parallels between workers organizing and demanding power and lay people in the Catholic Church assuming a more visible role.

“I think the future of the church lies in the laity and in ecumenism,” Meehan said.

“But I don’t see that as becoming less Catholic,” said Chen, who will be organizing Catholic health care workers in Los Angeles. “I see it as the church realizing itself.”

James Hadley, a 21-year-old graduate of St. Joseph Seminary of Chicago, grew up in an Assembly of God church in Lebanon, Ill., but converted to Catholicism in high school.

“I knew I should be a priest before I was even Catholic,” he said.

Now the future priest of the Belleville Diocese wants to put some of what he learned about Catholic social teaching at St. Joseph into practice. He will work on a campaign to organize hotel and restaurant employees in New York.

“My father was in a union since he was in high school, so I’ve seen how union life can help stabilize family life,” Hadley said. “And I saw this as a practical way of living some of what I was taught at St. Joseph.”

The students will work under the supervision of union organizers already involved in the campaigns in 15 different cities, said Regina Botterill, education and outreach coordinator for the interfaith committee. They also will be mentored by religious leaders who have shown a commitment to worker justice.

The program was modeled on the Catholic Labor Schools and the Presbyterian Institute for Industrial Relations of a generation ago, she said. It is one attempt to help rebuild alliances between faith communities and organized labor.

That alliance seems natural to Antonio Nilson Camelo, a Comboni Missionary studying at CTU. Camelo will work with poultry workers in Little Rock, Ark.

“The union movement is a way to strive for human rights, justice and life’s defense.” He said. “I think that when religious people join with workers to defend them, they put in practice God’s will.”

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