Like many people, I watched last month’s Artemis II mission to return to the Moon with real awe. The Mission commander, Reid Wiseman, said shortly before lift-off: ‘We go for all humanity.’ The sentiment was unifying and hopeful; a small group of four individuals on a mission of scientific discovery.
Beyond those four faces that have been seen on screens around the world, what struck me most was the many whose hard work will never be seen, but without whom, the mission (if you’ll pardon the pun) would never have got off the ground.
Whilst one team designed the ‘Universal Waste Management system’ (read: space toilet) another calculated how much loo roll was needed. Whilst some built Solid Rocket Boosters, others perfected a tortilla recipe so crumbs wouldn’t damage the shuttle’s instruments.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of a caretaker at NASA, busy keeping the Headquarters clean, who encountered John F. Kennedy during a visit in the 1960s. JFK purportedly asked the caretaker, ‘What do you do here?’ to which he replied, ‘I’m helping to put a man on the moon.’
Most of us spend our days on tasks that feel small, repetitive, and often unnoticed. It’s easy to ask: what’s the point? But it’s precisely here that we need to remember: our work has a purpose beyond what we can see.
It’s into this that Catholic Social Teaching speaks. The CST principle of the Dignity of Work insists on something radical: every person’s work matters because every person matters. Each of us has a vocation: a calling from God to use our lives, skills and labour to build the Kingdom of God.
In this month of May, we mark two dates intimately connected with the dignity of work. On the 1st May, the feast of St Joseph the Worker acknowledges the pivotal role St Joseph played as the Guardian of the Redeemer. Joseph fulfilled this role through quiet trust and dedicated service, each and every day in his holy, family home in Nazareth. St Joseph models for us the importance of commitment to the mundane, he lived out his vocation through obedience to the will of God.
As well as this, the 15th May marks the 135th Anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, a landmark document confronting the exploitation of workers head-on. It did not soften its language. Instead it insisted that treating people as tools for profit is not just bad practice- it is morally wrong.
Leo XIII taught,
Even in humanity’s return to the moon, the measure of our progress is not how far we travel, but how we value the people who make the journey possible.
From the Site Staff to the CEO, let us never lose sight of this: to treat workers as expendable, placing profits, budgets and finances above the mission entrusted to our schools, parishes and dioceses, is not just poor leadership — it is unjust, and it is incompatible with the Gospel to which we are called to bear witness.
In our schools especially, this is a real test: whether we see staff as collaborators in a shared mission, or simply as resources to be managed.
From NASA to Nazareth, the lesson is the same. No work is insignificant when it is offered to God. Parents changing nappies, teachers marking books late into the evening, site staff opening buildings before dawn. The question is not how visible our work is, but whether we recognise the dignity of those who do it.
What is RE Deep Dive?
A masterclass video series for RE teachers in primary and secondary schools based on the new Religious Education Directory (RED). In the series, across four videos, Raymond Friel, speaks about the Catholic Social Teaching themes of Dignity, The Common Good, Subsidiarity and Solidarity.
