Father Ed Boyle Fund

Boston and the nation’s labor management community lost a treasure on

November 13, 2007. Father Edward F. Boyle S.J., Boston’s Labor Priest who,

for the past thirty seven years, served as the Executive Secretary of the Labor

Guild of the Boston Archdiocese died of cancer at the age of 76.

The Labor Guild was created in 1946 by Cardinal Cushing to educate

Catholic workers about their rights and responsibilities. Today, the Guild

continues to run a School of Industrial Relations and offers classes to workers in

labor law, collective bargaining, steward training, union governance,

parliamentary procedure, public speaking, organizing, and the philosophy of

unionism. Hundreds of students benefit each year from experts and practitioners

in labor, management, and arbitration who contribute their services. The Guild

also provides a neutral venue for collective bargaining, arbitration, and union

elections. But most importantly, over the years the Guild, under Father Boyle’s

leadership, has grown to become the moral voice for labor management

relations, providing opportunities for the area’s leading union and management

leaders to meet, build close personal relationships, and explore ways to work on

shared problems.

labor management community came together for the annual Cushing-Gavin

Awards dinner to celebrate the contributions of selected leaders. This year’s

“neutral” award went to Father Ed and in recognition of his passing and to honor

his service and memory, the award will be changed to bear his name.

Father Ed was one of the last in a long tradition of Jesuit labor priests, just

as the Labor Guild is the only institution of its kind left in the nation. Yet right up

to the end of his life Father Ed argued with conviction and deep emotion that the

Guild is needed even more today than ever before. As he said in his last Mass,

fittingly televised on Labor Day Sunday, “the labor market climate in almost all

sectors continues to deteriorate; the gap between worker and manager, between

rich and poor, threatens the very moral foundation of our society.” He went on to

say “our economic system has lost its moral compass” and needs to be

redirected to serve the interests of all in society, not just those at the top of the

economic ladder.

True to his and the Guild’s philosophy, however, Ed Boyle stated that “the

only valid opposition to this ongoing situation must be a moral one grounded in

God and God’s will.” Even as his health declined in the last months of life, he led

the Guild’s Executive Board in developing a new vision of the Guild’s role, one

that would continue to be grounded in the best Catholic social teachings but

updated to reflect the critical problems facing workers, employers, and the

economy today. The new vision calls for greater efforts at upgrading immigrant

and other low wage worker rights and dignity, more use of modern media to

surface the moral issues at stake in contemporary debates over worker rights,

union and management and government responsibilities, and the need to engage

people of all faiths and religious traditions in efforts to achieve workplace justice,

harmony, and efficiency. He was immensely pleased with this new vision,

knowing that it would carry on his ministry after he was gone in ways that fit the

needs of the day.

Ed Boyle did not take the standard path to the priesthood. He attended

public schools in Belmont, MA before attending Dartmouth College on an

R.O.T.C. scholarship. After he received his A.B. in Economics from Dartmouth

he served as a U.S. Navy officer for three years. He then received an M.B.A.

and, after that, took a position in finance with Seatrain Lines in New York City. In

reflecting on his experience this summer, he said it didn’t take him long to realize

something was missing. “I was going down the wrong path at 100 miles an hour”

by pursuing a life in which “money and winning is everything.”

After attending several Jesuit retreats Ed surprised many by deciding to

become a priest and he entered the Jesuit Novitiate in 1958. He left the world of

finance and success for the milieu of simplicity and spirituality. He particularly

appreciated being exposed to “the whole new world of the lives of the saints.” He

also encountered the pioneering work in social justice of Frs. John A. Ryan,

George Higgins, Jack Egan, and the Jesuits Phil Carey, Leo Brown, and Phil

Land. He was inspired by the witness to the corporal and spiritual works of

mercy that he saw in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker.

In the course of his studies in philosophy and theology at Weston

Theological Seminary Ed met Father Mort Gavin S.J. who served as Chaplain to

the Labor Guild from 1961 to 1984. Seminarian Ed Boyle was particularly

attracted to Fr. Gavin’s ministry and he began to spend time helping out at the

Labor Guild. Following his ordination in 1969, Fr. Ed taught at BC High for a year

and then formally began his ministry at the Labor Guild in 1970. He was strongly

attracted to the Guild’s mission to promote the “dignity of the individual

person/worker as the cornerstone of a just economic system” through

“democratic trade unionism” and collective bargaining.

Ed was particularly fond of the opening sentence in the 1986 U.S.

Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on Economic Justice: “Economic decisions have human

consequences and moral content; they help or hurt people, strengthen or weaken

family life, advance or diminish the quality of justice in our land.” The word

“justice” was never far from Ed Boyle’s lips; “Justice is central to our spirituality”

_______________________

Joseph J. Fahey is Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College.

Thomas A. Kochan is George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at

MIT’s Sloan School of Management.