"Does the Catholic Church's social teaching support collective bargaining rights?"

The question in the title is in quotation marks because I think the question is more interesting than the answer.

Okay, maybe you want to know the answer anyway: unions can be a good thing but are not necessarily so. In other words, no. (If you want more, a lot more in fact, you could begin here.)

But here is the thing: why would you even ask? Here are some possible responses, all of which strike me as perfectly rational.

• The Catholic Church has a position on unions? Does it have a position traffic regulations too?
• How strange, it never even occurred to me to ask what the church says about this.
• I don't care.
• I don't care enough to even figure out if I care.
• Is there anything about this problem that I couldn't figure out for myself without recourse to anything beyond the church's general positions of morality and the dignity of the human person?
• I'm not sure the institution that supported corporatism is really qualified to have positions on economic and social issues.

There is a social shift that has taken place here that is worth noting. Once upon a time, a Catholic priest would have been the most educated people in his town. In such an environment, it made sense that people would turn to the priest for advice in a whole lot of areas. That is no longer the case.

Against that context the, perfectly true, statement that 'The church has authority to teach', no longer means the way it used to mean. If someone still wants to be a moral policeman running around enforcing the authority of church teachings there is nothing anyone, least of all me, can do to stop them.

But we don't need to stop them do we? It's not like anyone is actually listening to them anymore.

You might say, 'It shouldn't be that way'. There have been times in my life when I have been tempted by that approach but I keep coming back to this problem: No one is paying attention and there is no way to get them pay attention without resorting to measures that would completely disqualify the Church as a moral authority.

Is the same true of the Church's sexual teachings? Until recently no. In the future? I don't know but I know which horse I'd bet on if this were a race.