Limbo

This is not going to be what you expect.

Holy Saturday is Limbo. It’s between the sorrow of Good Friday and the joy of Easter. There
are no rituals except to prepare for tomorrow, or, nowadays, to pretend that 8 pm is really
midnight.

Limbo is more than not knowing. It is fearing and anticipation, wanting and dreading.
Right now we seem to have lots of limbo in our lives. We are in limbo waiting for something
awful to happen in Ukraine–again. We are in limbo not knowing how the ideas we’ve shared
for the synod will be represented. We are in limbo, for goodness sakes, about the future of
creation. We are in limbo wondering when the church will expand ordination to include
people of every gender.

Are we really Holy Saturday Catholics, always waiting, fearing, not knowing what’s going to
happen?

What you don’t expect, I imagine, is what prompted these reflections. Amazon and Starbucks. I
taught a course called “Work in America” for years and one of the last books I used was about
the new forms of union organizing for a new century. Not the large bureaucracies so far
separated from the workers that the interests they represent are as much the preservation of
their own power as what the workers themselves think they need. Rather, these thinkers
could imagine grassroots movements that spontaneously arise among the workers
themselves, and they worked to make them a reality.

It always seemed a bit too utopian – and now local organizers have won elections at Amazon
and Starbucks. Michael Sean Winters in NCR this week finds the many Starbucks locations voting for the union “thrilling” and the Amazon inside agitators in Staten Island a terrific way to challenge “when the corporation pretends a union is anything but the workers coming together.” Suddenly, the rights of labor
were a little less in limbo.

My father, a staunch independent in politics, nevertheless studied the papal encyclicals Rerum
Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno at the diocesan offices, so I had a sense very early on that
organized labor was an important part of Catholic social justice teaching. I can hear him
saying “the rights of the working man.” I’d expand that to include every working person, and
wherever I worked, I always was on the lookout for fairness and equity.

Winters resurrects the Catholic social justice concept of “subsidiarity” and connects it to the
“solidarity” more often used in the labor movement. “So much of the discussion about subsidiarity focuses on what is the appropriate level of society for a particular decision or action, but we sometimes forget what the word means: Subsidium, the root of subsidiarity, is Latin for ‘help.’”

His discussion resonated with my own experience. In addition to teaching about labor, I
worked very hard to organize adjunct professors when I became one after retiring. The full-
time faculty already had a union, which I joined the day I was hired, but the adjuncts were
falling further and further behind. Solidarity is the ideal, but competing interests are the
reality. The national union with which they were affiliated had its own priorities. Winters
says, ““It is the role of the national unions to help the local workers organize, not to try and do
the organizing for them.” Our campaign was not successful because of our local inexperience,
but our successors continued the struggle and, helped by the national union, won the next
vote and saw their interests folded into a contract covering the entire faculty. An example of
solidarity when subsidiarity is working, too. A little less limbo for a moment.

Winters goes on to challenge Catholic institutions to look at their own practices, and takes a
shot at Rome, too. “It is time for the Vatican to consider amending canon law so that all
Catholic organizations live by an anti-income inequality ratio, that the highest paid employee
at a Catholic hospital or university or other agency make no more than 10 times, or 20 times,
the lowest paid employee.” I have less confidence in canon law than he, but I’d like to see
Catholic hospitals and colleges respect when their own employees seek to represent
themselves in the workplace.

All this makes me think that Holy Saturday limbo is far more persistent than we want to
acknowledge. Our human condition is that we are always able to imagine something better, so
we move from one limbo to another. Think about this today, and tomorrow rejoice in a
certainty that belies this tendency.