Strike in the Graveyard

I admit to the accusation of strikebreaker, said the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Francis J. Spellman, "and I am proud of it. If stopping a strike like this isn't a thing of honor, then I don't know what honor is." For three days last week, Cardinal Spellman walked about the 550-acre expanse of crowded Calvary Cemetery in New York City's Queens supervising his corps of 100 amateur gravediggers. All of them were young students for the priesthood, recruits from St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y. Cardinal Spellman's troubles as an employer of labor began in January. The 200-odd union workers of Calvary, one of the country's largest Roman Catholic cemeteries, were bargaining for a raise of about 20%--a five-day week for the same wages ($59.40) they now get for a six-day week. Their employers, the trustees of Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral, offered them a raise of about 3%. The gravediggers turned the offer down, and negotiations came to a stop. On Jan. 13, they went out on strike, and the coffins began to pile up at Calvary. After burial services, the coffins were laid down in shallow uncovered trenches. Last week when the number of unburied dead topped 1,000, the cardinal called out his seminarians. Tightlipped, he rode his gravediggers through the cemetery's picket line, while a silent union man respectfully touched his hat to his cardinal arch bishop. It was a serious decision that the cardinal had made. Many a Catholic union man was troubled and angry at the sight of the young strikebreakers who would soon be priests--many of them pastors of workingman flocks.

Union Buster? Francis Spellman had two explanations for the decision that he made. First, he pointed out, the gravediggers' union was affiliated with a Communist-dominated international (C.I.O.'s Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers of America). Second, the strikers' action was "an unjustified and immoral strike against the innocent dead and their bereaved families, against their religion and human decency . . ."

The gravediggers--Catholics almost to a man--promptly charged that the cardinal's methods were "high-handed, arbitrary, and suggestive of the tactics used by anti-union employers ten years ago." The union also claimed that Cardinal Spellman and the trustees of St. Patrick's had "sought to break the union" by appealing to the workers as individuals in two letters and a telegram. They passed a resolution condemning "the union-busting tactics of any employer, including the Catholic Church when it acts as an employer." To dispose of the Communist implication, they cut loose from the international, and each member swore a solemn oath: "We here as Catholic gentlemen solemnly declare that we are opposed to Communism and all it means in all walks of life . . ."

The Living or the Dead. The cardinal was unmoved. "They're getting repentant kind of late," he said, and added, "Actions speak louder than words." Meanwhile, St. Patrick's trustees filed a motion in the New York Supreme Court for a temporary injunction against the strikers. "If the judge rules that the strike is illegal," said Cardinal Spellman, "those men who apply will be taken back with full pension and seniority rights"--but not the leaders of the strike.

Had the cardinal overreached himself on the subject of unionism? At least one powerful group of Catholic laborites, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, last week took sharp issue with His Eminence. Said A.C.T.U. Counsel John Harold: "With all reverence and respect for the cardinal, it is more important to recognize the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively in unions of their own choosing, and to pay the living a just wage, than to bury the dead."

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