Anytime I can get a progressive/dissenting Catholic magazine/blog like the Jesuit-run America simultaneously to quote papal documents, defend the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, embrace the Natural Law and even yearn for a theological investigation “by those charged with oversight for the Church’s doctrine” of a writer suspected of heresy, I consider that I have had a good day.

And to think that all this was prompted by two sentences of mine quoted in a New York Times story on an attempt by adjunct professors at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University to form a union! Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer asked how I made sense of the resistance on the part of Duquesne, a Catholic University, to unionizing efforts by adjunct professors in light of the Church’s teaching about unions. We had a pleasant half hour talk on the subject in which I first explained that the Church generally looked favorably on unions – certainly not all of them, at all times or in all places, and not at all they do, and not as an end in themselves, but rather for the well-being of those workers and their families (i.e., that the Church’s support for unions is contingent). This favorable bias does not mean that workers are obligated to join a union, nor that management is obligated to accept the terms of a union. The right to join a union, in Church teaching, is rooted in the natural right of association, which of course also means that people have the right not to associate. It all boils down to the details of the specific case, meaning that Duquesne was probably considering the ever-rising costs of education and its impact on the lives of students and their families.

It was in this context that I uttered what the America magazine/blog writer Vincent Miller deemed offensive when I observed that Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, “In the industrial revolution, [when] the church was concerned about communism, and not just capitalism but savage capitalism . . . People were being brutalized. That’s just not the case in Pittsburgh today.” Read more on Rev. Robert Sirico: Reply to America Magazine…

The New York Times interviewed Rev. Robert A. Sirico about a movement by professors at Duquesne University, a Catholic school in Pittsburgh, to organize a union. The Times writes that, “Duquesne is arguing that its affiliation with the Spiritans, a Roman Catholic order, affords it a special exemption from the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board. It’s a conflict between church and state, the school’s lawyer argues, to allow workers to file for a union election.” Rev. Sirico, Acton’s president and co-founder, responded to the question of whether or not “the importance of unions in Catholic teaching is historically contingent.”

Read more on Rev. Sirico on the Duquesne Unionization Drive…

In the discussion of whether the problem with our national public debt is a question of receipts, outlays, or both, I linked to a helpful set of graphs from Anthony Davies, an economics professor at Duquesne University. This data shows that even though a variety of tax rates have changed a great deal over the years, the federal government has basically taken in receipts within the range of 16-20% of GDP over the post-WWII era. If you haven’t looked at this presentation before, you should do so now.

Read more on Federal Receipts and Outlays in Historical Perspective…