On Being a "Worker Priest"

In the 1940s in France, a group of priests set out to find out what life was like for the industrial working class. Working class church attendance was very low and these priests wanted to know why. They quit parish ministry and took up jobs as factory workers, making their living alongside everyone else at the factory and writing to their bishops about the conditions of workers. Many of them became actively involved in union organizing. Others worked hard to raise up church leadership from the working class itself.

Much has changed since the 1940s. In Europe and the U.S., there are few factories left in which to work. In a post-industrial society, working class people now overwhelmingly work in a low wage service based economy—as Wal Mart greeters, hair stylists, part time truck drivers, housecleaners, and office workers. I think of this as I do ministry in a blue collar town and support myself (barely) while grooming dogs.  If the worker priests of yesteryear wished to understand the lives of working class people today, I would invite them to groom dogs or to take much less stable jobs in a fragmented and non-organized context (which, I am told, some European priests have done). The struggles and stresses of life on the edge are profound.

Probably 65% of Americans are working class, but most of them are not blue collar industrial workers and a good number of them are living on the edge. And, just as the French church recognized was the case in the 1940s, the U.S. working class, especially the white working class, is not very likely to attend church.

What sacrifices might the church and its ministers in the 21^st century be willing to make in order to ask why? In order to find the church anew among a post-industrial, deeply fragmented people?