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Mary Peterson, The Worker

All You Who Labor: The Vocation to Work

Issue One / 2017

Work is so common that it is easy not to think about it...other than how to get around it, be treated justly for it, be better remunerated for it, or remunerated at all, in the event of unemployment. Indeed, unemployment has a great deal of our attention now. Pope Francis made everyone's head turn when he made the startling claim that one of "the most serious evils that afflict the world these days is unemployment." Was this mere hyperbole? What about the dissolution of the family? The attacks on human life? The loss of the sense of God? And yet, one detects that the problem of unemployment touches on something essential to the human person, obliging us to ask a more fundamental question: What exactly is work?

Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
620 Michigan Ave. N.E. (McGivney Hall)
Washington, DC 20064