Cover story:

Seminary Summer seeks to inspire parishes

His work was part of the AFL-CIO’s fledgling Seminary Summer program, run by the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. The mission is to inspire religious leaders to take up causes of the workforce, particularly issues of the working poor. Participants work with local religious groups and labor-religion coalitions.

The New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, of which UUP is a longtime member, has participated with Seminary Summer and sees it as a program with far-reaching affects, according to director Brian O’Shaughnessy. Last summer, the state and city coalitions worked together to have two seminarians in New York City help several union campaigns to organize hotel and restaurant workers.

“The program affected both the labor and the religious aspects of the seminarians’ lives,” O’Shaughnessy said. “They really got to meet workers who are struggling; who find it almost impossible to make ends meet on $5 or $6 or $7 an hour wage in New York City. They got to talk with them and hear why they’re trying to come together for collective bargaining.”

Most of the seminarians report they do not feel the same after the program, O’Shaughnessy said. “To meet the workers on that level changes people’s lives. They are much more sensitive to worker issues, to questions of economic justice.”

This year, Symington was one of those seminarians who gathered in Chicago for a week of intensive training before heading to different cities. A graduate of Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, he is now working to get into a Ph.D. program with a goal of becoming a college professor of philosophy.

To carry out his duties in Rochester this summer, he used quotes from Scripture to show religious leaders how workers figure into religion. There are also many quotes from Scripture relating to seeds, including the well-known call reminding followers all they need is faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains.

Moving mountains is not a far reach to describe what Symington was trying to do this summer. The city:

Rochester. The task: contacting 300 parishes. The goal: helping religious leaders and parishioners believe that matters of labor belong in the pulpit.

Working out of the Catholic Family Center in downtown Rochester, he relied heavily on the telephone, the Internet and the U.S. mail for his tools of trade. Sidewalks were the next tools, which Symington used to make personal visits when he could get them, moving through the rough downtown area where he works. On his way to one church, a group stood on the corner, cursing in loud voices that stained the air around them.

Symington admits having a difficult time getting an audience inside many churches.

“They look at helping the poor more as charity, not advocacy,” he said. “Advocacy can mean being political, and they look at anything political with wariness.”

At one church, he asked the minister if he could do a presentation at the church’s district meeting. Symington said the minister told him it was his job to protect his flock from lobbyists.

“A lot of getting things into churches has to be with building relationships,” said Symington, who worked with the Rochester Labor-Religion Coalition. “Now at least they know there’s an entity to help them.”

Foremost on the agenda this summer was trying to gain support for a Monroe County Living Wage campaign, which has already passed in the city of Rochester. Living Wage pays workers according to the cost of living where they reside; in Rochester, it is $8.52 per hour with benefits and $9.52 per hour without benefits.

The campaign got a boost in early August, when Suffolk County passed the first countywide Living Wage bill in New York, Symington said.

In the meantime, Seminary Summer participants can go back to their studies in the seminary and make sure that worker justice is incorporated into the curricula. An ethics course that may have traditionally focused on canon law or private morality can now be a forum to make students aware that economic justice is a form of social morality, O’Shaughnessy said.

Symington, as a future professor, sees that possibility in himself — from a lectern, not a pulpit.

“With the research I’ve done and my future vocation of being a professor, I really see a strong way I can integrate social teaching, helping the poor and social theory into teaching and, hopefully, get more students involved in social issues,” he said.

O’Shaughnessy has the same vision for religious leaders who are taking part in programs like Seminary Summer. “Down the line, their own preaching cannot ignore this experience,” he said. “It’s an extremely valuable program that has implications for years and years and years.”

— Liza Frenette