In his June 2 Wall Street Journal column, Jason L. Riley noted a disturbing trend in our American moment: “According to the Department of Labor, 1 in 3 men were neither working nor looking for a job in April.”
That sad state of affairs is multi-causal, to be sure. The hard fact, though, as Jason Riley argued and Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrated in his book Men Without Work, “is that the long-term rise in male joblessness doesn’t stem from an inability to find employment. It results instead from an unwillingness to search for work.”
And that bespeaks spiritual distress. For as Pope St. John Paul II, himself a veteran of manual labor under awful conditions, explained in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), through our work we don’t just make more or earn more; we become more. Work is our participation in God’s ongoing creation of the world, and mastering work’s hardships is our participation in Christ’s ongoing redemption of humanity. Men without work — even worse, men refusing to seek work — are spiritually malnourished.
Which brings us to the embodiment of the work ethic: Baltimore (not Indianapolis) Colts split end Raymond Berry, who died on May 25 at age 93.
A 20th-round draft choice, Berry should never have made it in the National Football League, much less the Pro Football Hall of Fame after setting a record for career pass receptions. He was extremely myopic and, while nimble, would never be confused with today’s hypersonic burners. One of his legs was shorter than the other, and he wore a back brace to minimize chronic pain. What made Raymond Berry great — what made him, with quarterback John Unitas, the men who changed the way America spends Sunday afternoons, thanks to their heroics in the 1958 “Sudden Death” NFL championship — was a fierce work ethic. So in his own way, Berry embodied what John Paul II taught in Laborem Exercens: through our work, we become more the person we were created to be.
Berry and Unitas practiced pass routes and sideline catches for hours after team practices were over. To watch Berry stop a pass pattern at the brink of the sideline and then, with body outstretched parallel to the ground, catch a perfectly aimed Unitas pass was to watch football as ballet. Raymond Berry was also a student of his craft. On December 27, 1958, the day before that epic championship tussle with the New York Giants, Berry walked over every inch of the frozen Yankee Stadium gridiron, strategically surveying soft spots so that he could tactically adjust his routes the next day. That kind of intense preparation for work resulted in what is certainly an unbreakable record: one fumble in thirteen NFL seasons. (Berry insisted the referee called the play incorrectly.)
A gentleman who would no more spike a football in the end zone than swear, drink, or smoke, he was hardest on himself in measuring his efforts. Berry once made a study of the so-called “hundred percent effort.” As he later put it, “people who say they’re giving a hundred percent — they usually say ‘a hundred and ten percent’ — don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t realize how difficult it is to overcome human weakness. Even while doing dramatic things your concentration can stray. I used to pore over the game films … [and] graded myself on every play as ruthlessly as I could.”
The highest grade he ever gave himself was 87.
Raymond Berry was also a thoroughly decent human being whose conversion story speaks volumes about the man. Sitting by himself immediately after the Colts won the 1958 championship in overtime, thanks to a miraculous comeback he and Unitas had engineered in the game’s last minute and a half, Berry said he “became immediately aware that what had just happened was the work of God. … that was a revelation — and I didn’t know how to say thank-you.” Shortly afterward, he became a devout evangelical and a leader in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
Speaking at John Unitas’s funeral Mass in 2002, Berry bore eloquent witness to “the truth of the Scripture — to be absent with the body is to be present with the Lord.” From his current station in the Communion of Saints, I hope Raymond Berry is interceding for all those men without work — men who are being denied, or who are denying themselves, the chance to become more, to be more, through honest labor. And I hope those men learn something about the beauty of the work ethic from the example of the unforgettable #82.
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I am amazed at the number of young men who have taken themselves out of the workforce. They are adrift. They rely on the kindness of others to survive. We can tolerate a very small number of them, but they seem be getting more numerous. What happens when they reach “critical mass?”
My politically incorrect grandfather,who survived the Great Depression and WW2, would have had little sympathy. He would have dismissed them as “bums.”
“I am amazed at the number of young men who have taken themselves out of the workforce. “
(Dis)Incentives matter. The world your grandfather grew up in is gone. I hear 25-year-olds saying they aren’t in Kansas anymore. The culture is soaked in misandry.
First off, too many fathers are absent or unknown. Somehow, we are supposed to treat all “single moms” with reverence, even if they never intended to marry or gratuitously divorced the father. That was not normative in the past. Raymond Berry learned the habits of work by being denied a starting position until his last season of high school, by his father-who was his head coach.
The Elementary school classroom that has existed for over a century rewards the students that are less “rambunctious”, more compliant, passive and approval seeking (all traits exhibited more often by girls). Your grandfather might recognize that, but it’s obviously worse today.
I’m decades away from grade school but remember boys being asked to why they couldn’t be more like the “teacher’s pet”- almost always an obsequious girl by a childless woman. The message: you are a “defective girl” to borrow a phrase. I remember being berated by a nun because I vocally objected to her statement that trains were steered by the engineer. I couldn’t believe any adult didn’t understand the flanged wheel, and really PO’d her when I asked “who steers the Lionel my Dad puts under the Christmas tree?”. I still don’t accept the delusions of dimwits.
By high school, STEM programs targeted or exclusive to girls send a message: Don’t bother, it has been determined there are too many males in certain fields such as engineering -which after decades of effort remains a scandalous “gender gap”, not the product of innate differences in aptitude or interest (Interestingly there is no similar effort to attract men into female dominant fields such as nursing.)
By the time the natural interest in the opposite sex emerges, the polite courtesies of courtship your grandfather knew have given way to the “hookup” culture and the commoditized “swipe left” internet dating where sex is no longer ideally reserved for marriage. Women increasingly treat men who don’t meet their elusive “six sixes” standard with outright contempt, until they get tired of being “run through” by “chads” or lose the bloom of youth and wonder why they aren’t being approached by men.
Males are retreating to the digital drugs of pornography and gaming. If they make it through the modern hellscape of dating and get married, they are far to likely to have the marriage end in divorce and be subject to the voracious demands of so-called “family courts”.
Now of course there are those males that persevere and succeed, even modestly-only to find out from some girl boss HR type that “you aren’t a member of a protected class”, especially if you are of European descent and don’t “identify” as part of the alphabet class.
If you run those gauntlets and really succeed, there’s plenty of envious types who want to tax the hell out of you-and for what, to be a cuckold to the welfare state and its insatiable appetite to spend on enslaving dependency?
People aren’t stupid. When the game is rigged against them, they aren’t going to play.
Sometimes the neighbor kids would be late for high school. The principal demanded an explanation. “Because we’re doing farm chores and sometimes things take longer with animals than normal, even thiugh we get up at 4:30.” “You need to start getting up at 4 then!” Their mother then ran for the school board and won.
There is a fortyish woman who works very hard at the senior facility where I live. She has a 23year old son who has advised her that he hasn’t found anything good enough for him. Instead of pushing him out of the nest to try his wings and become a man, she tells me she “just can’t do that;” she enjoys his company so much. I hope there are not a lot of women who are “bum enablers,” who do more damage to their offspring by allowing this.
You want me to work how many hours? 8? huh?
Beautiful comments by Mr. Weigel. And great story. Right now, I have a part-time employee from an in-house recovery program: he’s got personality, he’s funny, smart, he labors hard at what he does—but it is as clear as day that he has never, along the way, found his “work.” He has found a lot of trouble and swamps through the seductions of drugs and alcohol. How many others have been blasted by that and other things: lying advertisements; the lure of handouts; the queer sense of entitlement that one shouldn’t have to work hard. The big lie of socialism in the air doesn’t help.
The common work field is every day, with a standard work week of 40 hours. I can speak from experience, having worked on all shifts.
To leap to any major sport requires skills beyond most fledgling young people.
I can also attest to my nephew, a 4-handicap golfer playing on PGA-rated courses, striving for his PGA card, with little or no response. I’ve concluded it’s who you know, not how good you are.
The absence of fathers in the home is a big factor. Boys are not taught how to be men. Most teachers are women, so boys are rarely around men. The result is a bunch of 30 year old boys.
I too was taught by nuns. Some were OK, but some were not very bright. And some appeared to be very angry.
Try getting in a US medical school.
Weigel’s story of the football heroics of Raymond Berry due to his work ethics is fine reading. We all try to hone our skills in what we do.
Our majority of workers, although becoming so, are not highly skilled. Most of us were and are sloggers. From construction workers, road and rail maintenance farm laborers. The mainly Hispanic who travel around the country picking crops when in their season.
Hard work that callouses our hands is what made a nation. There’s a rewarding inner feeling from sweat and pain in giving our efforts to make things work, to feed others, to make roads safe. It’s God’s work. Isn’t it of significance that Christ mostly chose hard workers, simple fishermen as the backbone of his Church?
Very well said Fr. Peter.
American business is incentivized to hire anything BUT American men. Give us a break – our crosses get heavy at times.
My mother had a cure for a headache and always used it on my two sisters and me. “Get to work.”
God bless your mother, but she never had a migraine!
How sad their lives will be – our church and our faith teaches us to love each other and care for each other. But there seems to be a malaise that is infecting our church and our world – hope seems to have departed as has caring – I hope and pray for a renewal of both caring and hope. May God help us.Amen