May 1 is a day to celebrate international workers’ solidarity, and a good opportunity to post an interesting article by Urs Häner, a worker priest from Switzerland.
I met Urs last year at a European conference of worker priests. A thoughtful man with a long beard, Urs worked in a Lucerne-based printing company for 33 years. He studied theology and had planned to become a Catholic parish priest but changed his mind after meeting worker priests doing factory labour
in Germany. At the printing company, he worked for 13 years in the packing
department and later in the administration. The company closed in 2018; Urs, at that point
chairman of the factory works council, an employee representative body, had to
negotiate with management over the redundancy terms for his 150 colleagues.
“I saw my role (in the works council) in particular as
bringing to the table the views of those without a voice” he told me (this article includes a profile and picture of Urs).
Urs’ article, in German, traces the recent history of two
strands of the European worker priests’ movement: The significance of the regular
gatherings of German-speaking worker priests, and the efforts among worker
priests from across Europe as a whole to share their experiences.
The German-speaking group, which meets every six months in a
village near Frankfurt, is called the ‘Arbeitergeschwister’, or the ‘Working
Brothers and Sisters’. The name is designed to enable many people to feel
welcome, Urs writes. The group includes people who are not priests but have “Christian
roots’. Many have, or have had manual jobs, including in car factories, in an umbrella
company and in supermarkets, or worked as miners, cleaners, taxi drivers or
even in the circus.
The sharing of experiences across Europe has included worker
priests and others from Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands,
and the UK. Urs attended his first such international meeting in Lyon in 1987.
These gatherings were more priestly, and therefore more male dominated, than
the German meetings, he notes. A highpoint was in 2001, when almost 500 people
came together for the international meeting in Strasbourg. Such a large
gathering has not happened since (the one I attended had around 30
participants).
Urs concludes that it’s not really about the numbers attending the meetings, but
about being consistent in the approach taken by worker priests, to be close to
and among working people. This applies, also, or perhaps especially, at times
of radical change such as now, when many people are facing great uncertainty
due to the corornavirus crisis – rising unemployment, millions of people on
short-time working and companies going into insolvency.
Thanks Urs for your valuable reflections.