The AFL-CIO is saddened to learn of the passing of Msgr. George Higgins May 1, 2002 at the home of his sister outside Chicago. Reflecting on his faith and love for workers everywhere, we share this appreciation.
Monsignor George Higgins 1916-2002 |
 Msgr. Higgins with Farm Workers
President César Chávez |
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Monsignor George Higgins:
An Appreciation
For decades, Msgr. George Higgins kept a promise he made long ago never to turn down an invitation to offer a prayer at a trade union gathering. The women and men of the union movement saw him keep that commitment at more rallies and picket lines and organizing campaigns than anyone could count.
In the late 1960s, when César Chávez and the Farm Workers were struggling against the large grape growers in California’s Coachella Valley, the American Catholic bishops set up a committee to mediate the dispute—and Higgins was the bishops’ adviser. He talked to both sides and soon the growers were coming to the bargaining table, one at a time. Earlier, when Chávez had a private audience with the pope, Higgins was there.
When Robert Reich was sworn in as secretary of labor at the outset of the Clinton administration, Higgins gave the benediction. He offered a prayer that mentioned unions. “A few days later,” he recalled, “I received a letter from a longtime bureaucrat in the department saying, ‘You caused consternation in this building. That word union hasn’t been used around here for a good number of years.
And when the workers at Sacramento’s Mercy General Hospital, which is part of the Catholic Healthcare West system, were battling to form a union, “a white-haired man of the cloth rolled his wheelchair through the automatic doors” of the hospital. He was there to chat with the delighted hospital service workers and, according to The Sacramento Bee, to “prick the hospital system’s Catholic conscience.” That white-haired man of the cloth was Higgins.
The hospital administrators, who were opposing the workers’ freedom to organize, reportedly greeted Higgins with “tight smiles.” No wonder. As one theologian said, “It would be almost like bringing in Gandhi. He carries with him a long history and the respect of many people and he is well-known in the Catholic community.”
Influenced by family, labor priests and Catholic social teachings
A lot about Msgr. George Higgins—the deep connection to both the Catholic Church and the union movement—is explained by his roots. His father, Charles, and his uncles were the children of Irish immigrants; they worked in the Midwest on the railroad as machinists, firemen and engineers and they all were strongly pro-union. As Higgins was growing up, his father, a man with an eighth-grade education whom his son would later describe as exceptionally well-read, worked as a postal clerk. Charles Higgins’ devotion to the union never wavered.
A young George Higgins attended seminary in Chicago. He got an early exposure to Rerum Novarum (a papal document on the condition of workers) and other Catholic Church social teaching, and he was surrounded by the excitement and turbulence of the Depression years. He was influenced by a group that was enormously important for the union movement in those days: the labor priests.
They “made the unions their parishes,” Higgins later recalled. “They became known as labor priests because, in season and out, they supported the God-given right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Moreover, they vigorously supported the exercise of this right.” The labor priests set up labor schools where working people could learn how to organize, how to serve as a steward and how to hold union elections—and that the church’s social teaching was on the side of working people. The labor priests were central to the union movement in most of the larger cities of the Northeast and Midwest.
Not everyone in the church hierarchy was pleased with the labor priests, but for thousands of Catholic workers from the assembly lines, docks and foundries who were entering the union movement for the first time, the labor priests were a godsend.
Higgins was shaped by them. His career always fell squarely in their tradition. In fact, Higgins subtitled his memoirs “Reflections of a Labor Priest.” His work in the formal structures of the Catholic Church strengthened the case for unions as well.
To trace another influence on Higgins, one might look at his personal credo—two sentences penned by Msgr. John A. Ryan, a giant in the reform movements of the early 1900s: “Effective labor unions are still by far the most powerful force in society for the protection of the laborer’s rights and the improvement of his or her condition. No amount of employer benevolence, no diffusion of a sympathetic attitude on the part of the public, no increase of beneficial legislation, can adequately supply for the lack of organization among the workers themselves.”
While his youth, the labor priests and an array of influences shaped George Higgins, the largest single influence on his career was the church’s social teaching itself.
From Rerum Novarum in 1891 through Centesimus Annus a century later, the church’s teaching on a just economy and the rights of working people were Higgins’ beacon. It was there in everything he did. He understood it and advanced it as well as anyone in this country. Higgins knew better than anyone what a precious legacy this social teaching is for Catholic working people.
Higgins’ legacy
Now that Higgins is gone, where is his legacy? It is all around us. The seeds he has been planting for decades are sprouting. There are countless signs of budding new strength—a new activism—in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the union movement.
No one knows when the union movement will find the next George Higgins. Perhaps there will be not only one but dozens or even hundreds of women and men, clergy or laypeople or both, who follow his example. One thing, however, is certain: Three generations of workers have been very lucky to have him by our side.
Working people from all over will remember him and miss him.
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