Loretto celebrates farm workers, partnerships with southern neighbors this Labor Day week

What was on your dinner table recently? Perhaps you enjoyed strawberries or lettuce, tomatoes, chilies, soybean products, cherries, corn, carrots, potatoes, avocados, beets and more, all representative of God’s abundant bounty. Credit the farmworkers for helping to put this delicious food on our tables. For more than 50 years Loretto has stood with the National Farm Workers Ministry “to advocate alongside farmworkers in their struggle for just wages and decent working conditions.”

The migrant farmworker sings of earth just as the Psalmist did. “God chose those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith.” We’re invited to learn from the unique witness of those on the margins of our Church and society. We are invited to learn again Catholic social teaching – the basis of our support and prayer for the farmworkers – for labor contracts, fair wages, medical care and housing, for gratitude.

Migrant farmworkers proclaim the Gospel with their lives. Have you ever heard a poor person proclaim the Gospel? Farmworkers till the soil, sow the seeds and harvest the crops. They provide food in abundance for people who live in cities and states but often have not had enough to feed their own children. Read the stories this week of their love of earth, of God and of you. Even if you do not know their names, they know our names.

We receive the wheat and wine of Christ because of farmworkers’ work in the fields and vineyards. Viva la Causa.