Today's feast was instituted by Pius XII in order to oppose the Communist celebration of May 1st as Labor Day and give it the right sense.
Here we see the difference between the Catholic approach to error and the Protestant approach to error.
The Protestants choose a completely different day to celebrate Labor Day, so as to dissociate themselves from the Communist celebration.
Whereas the Catholic approach, the Catholic Church, sure that the gates of hell will not withstand it, takes the day away from the Communists by giving into it the true sense of work.
That our work is not just something material, but our work is something that has an eternal value.
And we see that in the Collect, the Prayer at the Beginning of Today's Mass, which refers to the law of work.
It says that the Creator laid down this law, and so we pray him to help us complete what he has commanded so that we may attain the rewards he promises.
And when did the Creator lay down this law, when he created man?
He put the man he had created in the Garden of Eden to tell it and keep it.
We can understand this commandment more deeply if we consider that the two verbs used here are found together again in the Book of Numbers, where they indicate the duties of priests in the Tabernacle.
So work is a sacred task, it is a service of God.
After original sin, it took on another character.
Without losing that of service to God, it became also a punishment and a penance.
So God said to the man, curse is the ground because of you.
In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.
Then work really took work, then neighbor became laborious.
Given the connotations of these words, it's clear what work has become after original sin.
Because man rebelled against God, the world rebels against him.
Animals are not docile as they were before.
And since we have lost the infused knowledge that made it easy to manipulate material creation, our work is more difficult for us.
Even our own nature is no longer docile to the will, so we have to push ourselves to do things or even wind up failing to do them.
The redemption by which Christ makes all things new renews also work.
St. Joseph, even more so the incarnate word, in noble work by choosing it for themselves.
It remains laborious but it is no longer degrading.
In the Greco-Roman world, manual labor was the lot of slaves and the poor.
Free and educated men occupied themselves with intellectual work, works of the spirit.
This was also because of the dualism of the Greeks, which considered the spirit to be the real self and the body a prison for the spirit.
This error has come back in our time when people want to change their bodies to correspond to what they feel their real self is.
Opposing this error, the word became flesh.
God, who is pure spirit, took on human nature, both spirit and body.
So the incarnation itself helps us to understand the value of matter and of all that is material.
God did not disdain to become flesh.
He did not disdain to do manual work.
He chose for his virginal father St. Joseph, a manual laborer, and specifically a carpenter.
He thereby made manual labor something sublime, something divine.
Since then, any carpenter can say to himself, I'm doing what the great St. Joseph did.
I'm doing what God incarnate did.
And the Greeks were right to say that man should value the activity of the spirit more than the activity of the body.
But the most sublime activity of the spirit is prayer, which is perfectly compatible with manual labor.
And indeed, since manual labor generally engages the mind, thus it leaves it free to pray than intellectual labor does.
Unlike every aspect of redemption, the sanctification of work requires human cooperation to have effect.
When this is lacking, men engaged in manual work are more likely to use foul language or to take God's name in vain than are men engaged in more intellectual work.
It takes an effort to elevate the mind and to think not only of pots or plants or plaster, but of our Father who is in heaven.
Looking again at the text of today's Mass, we find some help.
The prayer at the beginning of the Mass, the Colect, says that God laid down for the human race the law of work and prays that we may complete the works that he set us to do.
So the work that we do, we do because God commands us to do it.
And already this helps us to remember God during work, because it is for him that we do it.
This is why St. Paul tells us, whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
And again, making his thought even clearer, he says, whatever you do, do from the heart as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that you will receive from the Lord the due payment of the inheritance.
Be slaves of the Lord Christ.
We hear he is speaking specifically to slaves, but what he says works also for paid employees.
Do not just work for your employer, but work for Christ.
He also tells us what reward the Colect is referring to, the inheritance of God's children.
But the emphasis is especially on the intention we should have.
So we should ask ourselves, in what way is the way that I work a fitting service to God?
Can I be content to offer it to him?
What does God look for in our work?
Not so much technical perfection, certainly we should do our work as well as we can with the talents that God has given us.
But he has given some more talents and others less talents.
Some are really great at what they do and others less so.
The fundamental thing is not so much that external aspect, which is how human beings judge work, but it is the interior aspect, the intention that we have.
Are we uniting ourselves to God?
And what are we doing with our talents?
Are we using them to serve the good of our family and the larger society?
If so, then our work can and should be motivated by charity, even though it may also be a duty injustice to do the work that we're paid for or to do the work that is our task as part of a family or larger society.
Every worker, St. Ambrose contends, is the hand of God that continues to create and to do good.
And thus human work becomes an occasion for contemplation.
We can think as we do this.
And St. Bernard of Clairvaux came up with all those brilliant ideas while he was cutting down trees to clear land for the monastery, or at least came up with a lot of his brilliant ideas, obviously.
He got some of them later in life, but early in life, as he cut down trees and cleared the land, which was what the monks had to do to prepare the area for the new monastery, he was thinking of the Psalms.
He was using those to remind himself of truths and discovering in those Psalms new things that he hadn't thought of before.
So it really was an occasion for contemplation for him.
Now, we have to be realistic in this, unless we have a special mystical grace, we're not always going to be able to think constantly of God.
But if the intellect cannot be constantly united with God, because we have to think about what we're doing, the will is not subject to the same limit.
Once the will chooses an intention, that intention remains until it chooses a contrary one.
So if before I begin working, I dedicate my work to God, desiring to do his will, and this remains my intention, even when I'm thinking about my work and not thinking about God.
In this way, one remains united to God, at least with the will, and by acting for a supernatural motive, by acting to do this out of charity for the good of others, we merit our eternal inheritance.
By doing the work, I might realize that my intention has changed.
I've become so pleased with what I do that I begin to do it to be praised or out of some sense of self-satisfaction.
And then when I realize that, I have to stop and rectify my intention, dedicating the work again to God, giving him the glory for all that I am able to do with his gifts.
Thus united to God with the will, we then try to add a union of thought, that is, to God from time to time as our work permits, and there are various ways to do this.
If it's a kind of work that doesn't require a lot of attention, we can do something like, say, the rosary, or we can think of passages from the Psalms, like St. Bernard did.
St. Maximilian used a church bell that rang every quarter hour to remind him to stop and make a spiritual communion, so we can stop periodically during our work, or perhaps not periodically in a mechanical way, every 15 minutes, but rather when there's a natural pause in our work, we stop to say a quick prayer to God or to make, to quickly think of him.
We can think of the Trinity present in our soul.
We could think of Our Lady always present to send us graces.
We could think of the guardian angel who accompanies us in serving God.
Or we can turn our attention to our work, thinking of how by working we are doing what St. Joseph did, we are doing what God did, we are doing what Our Lady did in the Holy House.
And so by uniting ourselves in this way to God, by will and by thought, we will sanctify our work and make it a fitting offering to the glory of the Most Holy Trinity.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.