New York, NYMsgr. George Higgins was the unsurpassed standard-bearer of his Church's solidarity with underprivileged and average working families, the 20th Century's leading advocate of a religion/labor alliance on their behalf, and the inspiration for a new generation of faith champions of worker rights.
Untold numbers of American working families who never even heard the name “George Higgins” benefited from his sixty years of leadership on Catholic social teaching.
The many union organizers and leaders who were privileged to know him and were aided directly by his counsel revered him for his intellect and tenacity B even if some days we were on the receiving end of a lesson or two.
Msgr. George Higgins was always delivering a message - sometimes welcome to his listeners and sometimes the other kind - and so he seemed to be doing one last time in life when he passed away on May 1st, the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker and International Workers' Day.
Both here and in other countries, George Higgins was consistently at the side of workers, be they farm workers, auto workers or hospital workers, when they needed a clear, strong, strategic voice calling for respect and dignity on the job.
Through it all, he spoke authoritatively, forthrightly and courageously on behalf of the rights and needs of working families, often in situations that made him very unpopular with the powerful and well.
George Higgins' place within the American Catholic Church was as its leading voice and its conscience on social teaching from the New Deal to the present time. The very center of over 100 years of this teaching were the rights of workers.
Msgr. Higgins was widely and accurately known as "labor's priest." The labor movement and his church were similar communities for George Higgins: he loved them both, defended and served both, and would call each to account, always from within the community.
As his long time friend and eulogist Fr. Brian Hehir put it, "George Higgins dedicated his life to forging strong, public, effective bonds between labor and the church. From the factories of Detroit to the fields of Delano to the shipyard at Gdansk, this priest was there when dignity was denied, rights were suppressed or organizers were harassed and beaten; he was there to provide moral witness, the voice of effective arbitration or simply good arguments so that the views of workers received a fair hearing. We need to remember this lifetime carefully, not simply as a memory to be honored, but a legacy to be continued. What is needed now are concrete commitments for the future: personnel, resources, support and strategic planning to build upon the relationship George constructed and maintained through unique example. Today, when the right to organize remains under assault here and abroad, when minimum wage laws are weakened or eroded, when globalization of the economy creates wholly new questions of social justice, the labor movement should expect and be able to count upon a firm alliance with the Catholic Church."
Labor also will continue the legacy of George Higgins. And we will honor and memorialize him in struggle.