From the NY Times: Tending to a Flock in Hard Hats

The Rev. Brian Jordan had just loped to the end of a long run on a Saturday afternoon, savoring one of those rare times a priest could be considered off duty, when he checked the message on his cellphone. The voice belonged to an old contact in Local 14 of the operating engineers’ union. His words were succinct and specific: —There’s been an accident at 51st and Second. Can you help us?—

Within minutes, Father Jordan covered his running gear with the brown habit and capuche he wore as a Franciscan and drove from the Rockaway beachfront back to Midtown Manhattan. The scene he found there on March 15 was a chaos of rubble, crushed cars, rescue crews, ambulances, gawkers and, at the center, a collapsed building and a buckled construction crane.

Father Jordan looked past all of it, searching for the men in hard hats —” his parish, his flock. Some were crying, some were hugging, some were kicking at the ground. A couple recognized the priest from the months they had spent at ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

On this day, as on those days, Father Jordan picked his way into the ruins. Four construction workers were known to be dead, and the bodies of two more workers would be found days later (along with the body of a woman who had been visiting from South Florida). Their surviving comrades lifted off their hard hats as the priest sprinkled holy water amid the wreckage and prayed that God would grant the souls of the departed eternal rest.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, Father Jordan has ministered to the building trades, which has meant both celebrating acts of material creation and mourning those killed in this dangerous work. The six workers’ deaths on March 15 were the most he had dealt with on a single day since Sept. 11, and came amid an especially tragic 12 months, with 26 fatalities on New York work sites.

On April 28, Father Jordan officiated at a Mass for Workers’ Memorial Day in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In most years, safer years, the annual event had been easily accommodated in the priest’s home church, St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street. Regardless of the setting, Father Jordan has preached a consistent message.

—Union construction workers have sacred instruments,— he said in his homily at St. Patrick’s. —No, not just their tools, machinery and computerized systems that they are trained and responsible for. These sacred instruments are their hands.—

—As a surgeon has sacred hands while performing a medical operation, as a priest has sacred hands while celebrating the Eucharist, so are union construction workers with their sacred and skillful hands— doing godly work by building hospitals, schools, family homes. —I am not stretching the imagery of sacredness,— he continued. —I am simply stating a fact.—

Father Jordan, 52, grew up in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn, the son of a bakery-truck driver who was the shop steward in his Teamsters’ local. —My father used the term ‘solidarity’ when I was a kid,— Father Jordan recalled in an interview. —He’d say, ‘When we go to church, we pray together. When we do a job, we work together. When we stand up for something, we stand together.’ So I had that concept from a young age.—

Still, Father Jordan entered Siena College near Albany with the goal of becoming a lawyer. It was the Rev. Mychal F. Judge, then an assistant to the college president, who recruited the undergraduate with this sales pitch: —Don’t be an unhappy lawyer. Be a happy priest.—

During seminary, through ordination in 1983 and in his initial parishes in the Bronx, Boston and suburban Washington, Father Jordan counted Father Judge as his mentor. In particular, he learned from the example Father Judge set in his role as chaplain to the New York City Fire Department.

So it was almost eerily appropriate that on the day Father Judge died at ground zero while tending to the fallen, Father Jordan arrived there with his holy water, beginning 10 months of praying for the dead and the living alike.

—Caring for people, making time for people, not worrying about your own needs,— Father Jordan said of his mentor’s example. —He always said, ‘Time is a gift from God. What you receive as a gift, give as a gift.’ He said that to me 30 years ago. Still makes sense.—

In acting on Father Judge’s advice, Father Jordan has worked extensively among immigrants as well as construction workers. Increasingly, he has seen the lines blur between his two specialties as immigrants have moved into the building trades. Father Jordan’s role requires a series of balancing acts: being on good terms with labor unions as well as contractors, visiting union workers as well as nonunion worksites, empathizing with illegal immigrants while hearing out rank-and-file members convinced that those same immigrants are driving down wages. On one point, though, Father Jordan has been repeatedly, publicly assertive: he believes that nonunion contractors do not provide the high level of training that construction unions do and that, as a result, nonunion workers face a greater risk of injury or death…

Because of the work I do in my non-clerical profession I know of what he speaks – and I have seen it first hand. The abuse of workers (also see here, here, and here) is rampant and is keyed in to one thing – improving the bottom line. I have often said that the abuses that take place, especially those aimed at the immigrant worker community, equal the horrors seen in the the manufacturing environment in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.

The Polish National Catholic Church (PNCC) is the church of these workers. It was founded by the hard working coal miners of Pennsylvania, as well as those who worked in manufacturing in Chicago and Buffalo. Their struggle for fair wages, education, health and safety protections, and the elimination of child labor was championed by Bishop Hodur.

On November 30, 1919 Bishop Hodur gave an address at a reception for Maciej Leszczyński held in Scranton’s town hall. Mr. Leszczyński was in the United States as a delegate to the International Conference of WorkersSee the History of the ILO, specifically: The ILO has made signal contributions to the world of work from its early days. The first International Labour Conference held in Washington in October 1919 adopted six International Labour Conventions, which dealt with hours of work in industry, unemployment, maternity protection, night work for women, minimum age and night work for young persons in industry.. Those in attendance at the event included congressman John Farr and District President John T. Dempsey of the United Mine Workers. At the reception Bishop Hodur said:

One of the greatest achievements of modem civilization is respect and honor for human labor. In the past, labor was undervalued, work was shameful, and what goes with that, working people were mistreated and abused. There was kowtowing and bowing before those who did not need to work hard, and those who did work hard and with their toil created wealth and fed others were regarded as half-free or slaves. Even the greatest of the ancient thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle regarded this economic system as just and the only one recommended, in which a minority rules and possesses full rights of citizenship and the majority works and produces. This majority of people had no rights, it was not free. And such a system lasted whole ages.

Truly Jesus Christ came on earth as the greatest teacher of humankind, the spiritual regenerator, and he condemned a social order based on cruelty and injustice…

Not until the beginning of the nineteenth century were the commandments of Christ the Lord remembered, His teaching about the worthiness and value of labor…

And from that time, that is, more or less from the middle of the last century, begins the organization of workers on a larger scale in the name of the rights of man, in the name of the value and worthiness of labor. Everything that workers did in the name of their slogans was good.

And today one may say boldly that the cause of labor is the most important one, and that progress, the development and happiness of the whole nation, of all mankind, depends on its just resolution. Workers today have more privileges than they have ever had.

In this reasonable and just struggle for rights, bread for the family and education for children, for common control of the wealth created by the worker, our holy Church stands before the worker like a pillar of fire, and the hand of Christ blesses him in his work.