Being Catholic Today. Laurence McTaggart

done in between, and little sense of purpose in it. The other is to be workaholic, to be someone who cannot stop, who stays late at work or even brings it home at weekends. In some senses, work has become his, or her, life. It would be unwise to rhapsodize about the supreme Christian value of work unless it is taken on board that work is for many a kind of trap, in either futility or the hectic pursuit of rewards that the pursuer then has no time to enjoy. An example of the first is the treadmill of industrial production so well documented in Victorian social fiction, and still to be seen in the sweatshops of emerging Asian economies, while the second is a phenomenon recognizable to many a tired commuter.

      What is it that lies at the root of these problems, that has made work a more deadly enemy of the soul than idleness? Perhaps it might be summed up in the word ‘alienation’. The issue can be put very simply. Some people have work which is obviously fulfilling. Take doctors, for example. They spend their day either curing people or helping them to bear their suffering. At the same time they do much to support friends and relatives of the sick, and provide a genuine and real witness of love in society. Their work contributes, and they see the result. While most doctors would seek to diminish the rosy glow about their profession, it remains an example of what the Second Vatican Council had in mind when it said:

      When men and women provide for themselves and their families in such a way as to be of service to the community as well, they can rightly look upon their work as a prolongation of the work of their creator, a service to their fellow men, and their personal contribution to the fulfilment in history of the divine plan.

      Gaudium et Spes, 34

      The same could easily be said of teachers, social workers and many others. But again, if we look around at the majority, it just does not seem to apply. How does a man in a production line turning out, say, sports cars, contribute to society? You might say that he provides necessary means of transport. But who buys sports cars? Not many people, and certainly not the men who make them. A rather disproportionate amount of society’s resources of labour and materials thus goes towards providing a particular, and perhaps unnecessary, means of transport for rather a few people. If we raise the stakes, as Gaudium et Spes