We are told that it is bad form to gloat over the embarrassments of those who rub us the wrong way, that we should not “pile on” when things go our way, to be magnanimous in victory. You know the drill. And yet, there are many popular aphorisms that make a contrasting point.
From these expressions you might conclude that we are entitled to some satisfaction when those who pose as our moral superiors get a little comeuppance: “What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” “Howze them apples?” “How does it feel now that the shoe’s on the other foot?” “Turnabout is fair play.” It is what the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is all about.
No question, mean-spirited or not, it can be satisfying when what George Orwell called the “pious hypocrites” are caught with their hands in the collection basket, when Jimmy Swaggart is found chasing the girls of the night, when Hillary’s fingerprints turn up on the missing Whitewater files after they reappear on a desk outside her bedroom. Well, I must confess that I experienced some of these guilty pleasures when I read a New York Times story about a student sit-in at the Jesuit’s Fairfield University in Connecticut a few years back. The students were protesting the fact that the school’s janitors do not have union representation. The janitors are not employed directly by the university. The university’s administration decided to subcontract janitorial services to a private company, Service Management Group. This company pays the janitors slightly more than $7 an hour, or about $14,000 a year. Moreover, they are not given health care coverage as part of their employment package.
One of the student protestors complained that it is morally wrong to have “janitors making poverty wages with unaffordable health insurance on our Jesuit campus.” Another noted, “This is a Jesuit institution, and we’ve sat through class after class where they’ve told us about social justice. That ‘s why we think this fight is important.” The university president, Father Aloysius P. Kelly, S.J., disagreed, insisting that the janitors’ dispute is with Service Management Group, not the university.
And why should anyone take satisfaction with Father Kelly’s plight? Perhaps no one should. I don’t know anything about Father Kelly’s politics. But he is a Jesuit. And I do know something about the ideological positions that predominate within that order these days. I am a subscriber to the Jesuits’ America magazine. I like it quite a bit, as a matter of fact. Whatever else it is, it is informative and well-written.
In recent decades the corporate world has been roughed up quite a bit within America’s pages. You can count on the magazine’s editors to hit hard at executives who think only of “the bottom line”; who view their employees as interchangeable parts, bothersome production costs that must be downsized or shipped to the Philippines or Mexico to keep the company lean and mean. The magazine makes a concerted effort to link Pope John Paul II’s economic encyclicals to this point of view.
Could it be that they don’t have a subscription to America in Fairfield’s library?
Is that comment too snide? Shouldn’t we keep in mind the problems that schools run by religious orders face these days? After all, a university like Fairfield has a responsibility to keep tuition costs as reasonable as possible. Public colleges have access to public funding, private colleges do not. And there are some jobs that should not be considered careers. No one would expect McDonald's to pay a counter girl enough to support a family. Why shouldn’t this Service Management Group be entitled to view its entry-level workers in the same way? Nothing inherently immoral about that. After all, parish schools face the same difficulties. If they paid their teachers the same wages that public school teachers receive, the tuition would be so high that few parents could afford to send their children to Catholic schools. It is reality, life in the big city, the economic facts of life. All true.
But perhaps liberal activists in the Church should keep these things in mind when they take aim — in the pages of America, for example — at the “ruthless” CEOs who worship at the altar of corporate profits. Every executive who has ever shipped a job overseas would make his case pretty much the way the Jesuits at Fairfield make theirs. They would talk of low-cost foreign competitors threatening to drive them out of business if they did not downsize; of labor costs driving up prices beyond their consumers’ ability to pay; of the lower cost-of-living in Mexico justifying the low wages they pay in their Juarez plants; of the 500 office jobs saved in the United States through the “tough decision” to relocate assembly operations to Guam. The corporate executives making this case would assure us that they are as regretful about what they “had to do” as the Jesuits at Fairfield are about their “hard choices.”
Would the corporate big wigs be sincere? Maybe, maybe not. But the Fairfield case might discourage the editorial writers at America from jumping to conclusions about what motivates corporate decision-makers these days. Catholics seeking to apply the Church’s social teachings to the world around them should be distinguishable from Oliver Stone.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
