From Worship to Workplace: The Eucharist Sends Us Forth

courtesy of Aimee Shelide Mayer

Starting Sunday, July 21, 2024, through Pentecost of 2025, the People of God in the Catholic Church across the United States are being sent on mission. The third and final year of the National Eucharistic Revival is dedicated to going out: to the streets, homes, neighborhoods, and, indeed, to workplaces as messengers and missionaries of hope and healing. We are sent from the monstrance to the margins, as it were, to share Jesus with those desperately in need of Good News.

And aren’t we all in need of some good news? Gloria Purvis, in her address on the fourth day of the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, spoke of the Eucharist as a sign of our unity.  But then she quickly—and deftly—addressed signs of disunity that hurt our country, our Church, and the entire Body of Christ.

“I need to talk about some of the signs of disunity,” she declared in the middle of her address.  She went on to list examples of disunity plaguing our Church and world, including denying the pope’s authority, preference for temporal power, including partisan political power, and racism. She urged people to be missionaries and martyrs for the cause of unity and human dignity, adding the challenge: “Indeed we love the martyrs, it seems, until we might have to be one.”

In hearing her words and sitting with the theme of the third year of the Eucharistic Revival, “The Year of Mission,” I could not help but think of the work of the Catholic Labor Network and its members and friends, many of whom have been missionary voices in the battlefield of corporate America, fighting to uphold human dignity for all workers in the crossfire of unrestrained capitalism. Nourished by the Eucharist, they go forth from worship to the workplace, from the pew to the picket line, to be missionaries of hope and human dignity. There are also members and friends of CLN who simply try to bring a spirit of compassion and understanding to their workplace, evangelizing by word and deed to communicate the healing love of God.

For those of us who work in (or care about) the intersection of faith and labor, our mission territory is—and has been—in the public sphere.  It includes the picket line, the negotiation table, the breakroom, the city council meeting.  Our mission territory might be our own parish council or diocesan chancery, as we encourage our religious institutions to fully implement the tenets of our rich Catholic social tradition on the Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers, first documented in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 and echoed in papal encyclicals of Popes Pius XI, St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and pastoral letters in the decades since.

Wherever this Year of Mission takes you, know that you are not alone.  You go out in good company with people of good will across the country who believe that work is made for humankind, and not humankind for work.  From now through Pentecost 2025 and beyond, may we be missionaries who evangelize others about the dignity of work and the value of all human life.