Pope Francis and Robert F. Kennedy on work
It confers dignity
A belated entry for Labor Day. Pope Francis served as pope from 2013 to 2025. Robert F. Kennedy (the father, not the son) was the attorney general when his brother was president, then a senator from New York, and was murdered when running for the 1968 Democratic nomination, raising one of American history’s great “What if?” questions. Pope Francis’s words appear in Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, an interview published in 2010 when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, RFK’s in a posthumous collection, Make Gentle the Life of This World.
Pope Francis
The good thing about work, going back to what I was saying before, is that one sees the result and, feels “divine,” like God, able to create. In a certain sense, one feels the way a man and a woman do when they are holding their firstborn in their arms. The ability to create changes their lives. The kid who works feels the same way. The culture of work, combined with healthy pastimes, is irreplaceable.
Francis’s father has sent him to work when he was thirteen, combining work with school, a decision for which he was grateful. Asked about his pastoral experience with unemployed people, Francis replies:
They don’t feel like they really exist. No matter how much help they might have from their family or friends, they want to work, they want to earn their daily bread with the sweat from their own brow.
The thing is, at the end of the day, work anoints a person with dignity. Dignity is not conferred by one’s ancestry, family life, or education. Dignity as such comes solely from work. We eat with what we earn, we support our families with what we earn.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a little or a lot. If it’s more, all the better. We can own a fortune, but if we don’t work, our dignity plummets. . . .
The Church has always maintained that the key to the social question is work. The working man is at the center. Today, in many cases, this is not so. You can easily get cast aside if you don’t yield to what’s expected. You become a thing, no longer considered a person. Over the past few decades, the Church has denounced the dehumanization of work.
Remember that one of the principal causes of suicide is failure at work in the face of fierce competition. Because of this, you cannot look at work purely from a functional perspective. What is at the core is neither profit nor capital. Man is not for work; rather, work is for man.
Robert F. Kennedy
• But the root problem is in the fact of dependency and uselessness itself. Unemployment means having nothing to do — which means nothing to do with the rest of us. To be without work, to be without use to one's fellow citizens, is to be in truth the “Invisible Man” of whom Ralph Ellison wrote.
• The answer to the welfare crisis is work, jobs, self-sufficiency, and family integrity; not a massive new extension of welfare; not a great new outpouring of guidance counselors to give the poor more advice. We need jobs, dignified employment at decent pay; the kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, "I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. I am a man."
• In my judgment, the lack of private enterprise participation is the principal cause of our failure to solve the problem of employment in urban poverty areas.
• Action on any one front alone will not succeed. Providing a man a job, while in my judgment the most important step we can take, will not improve the schools his children attend or assure that medical care will be available even though he can afford it.
Building new housing without providing social services or transportation to get to work or accessible health services will result in one slum replacing another. Improving the quality of education or job training without any promise of a job at the end will not ease the dropout rate.
But action on all these matters in concert will build a community.
Previous: Abraham Joshua Heschel on the sacred duty to care for the old.