Feast of St. Joseph the Worker

May 1 is celebrated in much of the world, but not in North America, as an international day to commemorate workers’ rights.

Many historians attribute the choice by many countries to mark this date as a public holiday to the Haymarket riot, which took place in Chicago in early May 1886, when police officers were killed by a bomb as they dispersed a demonstration by immigrant workers protesting working conditions. Four anarchists were subsequently sentenced to death and hung.

The first day of May in the Catholic calendar marks the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Pope John Paul II had this to say about Jesus Christ’s foster father: “What emanates from the figure of St. Joseph is faith. Joseph of Nazareth is a just man because he totally lives by faith. He is holy because his faith is truly heroic. Sacred Scripture says little of him. It does not record even one word spoken by Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth. And yet, even without words, he shows the depth of his faith, his greatness.”

When I think about what people have started calling the Great Recession and rising unemployment rates here and elsewhere, I can’t help but think that Canada’s social safety net and attitude of compassion for those less fortunate are not only rooted in the painful lessons of the Great Depression of the 1930s but more deeply anchored in Christian values.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who spent 1850 to 1854 in a Siberian prison, once wrote that a society can be judged by how it treats its prisoners. By extension of that argument, a moral measure of a society would be how the poor and vulnerable are treated.

I don’t mind paying more taxes here at home than I did in some of the other countries I’ve lived in because I know they go to these social safety net programs, drafted by a community that was and continues to be anchored in Christian values.