Catholic historian provides very one-sided history of how Catholicism appropriated May Day in 1955
Christian (Catholic)
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AI transcript of the Radio 4 broadcast
Podcast script
Welcome to the Second Thought podcast. Today we have a quick review of what was broadcast on 2 May 2025 by Catholic propagandist in chief, Catherine Pepinster. That’s a little harsh to be honest, particularly compared to some of the Anglican flagwavers. Pepinster does, though, once again provide a selective and misleading filter on the actions and history of the Roman church.
First let’s run through the more pronounced deviations from fact and logic, of which there were three.
May day is described as a holiday of the European Union. This is pure invention. There are no EU-wide or EU-instituted public holidays. Apparently an innocent mistake. Please see episode six of this podcast, in which Catherine’s form for mistakes is firmly established.
We then have, on May Day, ‘Once it was always linked to the virgin Mary’.
Hmmm.
’Once it was always’ is a screaming contradiction in itself
but claiming May Day as once always for Mary is also false even when accepted on Pepinster’s terms. Catherine nods to the pre-church origins of summer feasts but still makes the ‘always’ claim for Mary. Perhaps I’m being unfair.
Then we are told that Pope Pius changed May Day for Joseph the worker to recognise the worth and dignity of labour – without context, this is revisionist baloney.
So, Catherine, no. No. And. No.
Signs of the times, gets mentioned a couple in Pepinster’s broadcast. For non-Catholics this is perhaps more likely a phrase more associated with the music of Prince rather than whatever might flow from the Vatican. At least, until researching what Catherine was speaking about, I’d no idea that Signs of the times was the poster slogan for the 1960s’ Second Vatican Council. This instigated the most pronounced shift in Catholic teaching and practice since the reformation. Fittingly, from a reformation perspective, what Vatican II broadly did was bring Catholicism in line with the major changes instituted by the likes Thomas Cranmer when various European churches separated from Rome, several hundred years earlier.
When invoking ‘Signs of the times’, though,
Pepinster suggests that the church has a tradition of responding to a changing world. Technically, this is true. To avoid being misled, though, it’s appropriate to note just how rarely this tradition is revived by the Catholic church. It is an organisation that, at best, has updated itself in response to the world around it about once every 100 years. Given what’s happened in the world in the last half century, the response of this church has been glacial is it’s speed.
Back, though, to the most misrepresentation here, which is in Pepinster’s reweaving of why the church chose on 1 May 1955, to make May Day a Catholic feast day for workers.
PEPINSTER: Yesterday was one of the great days in the European calendar – May Day, once associated with folk traditions marking the start of summer, now a bank holiday in the European Union celebrating workers’ rights. Once it was always linked to the Virgin Mary but 70 years ago the Catholic Church announced May 1 as the feast of St Joseph the Worker. You might say that in creating this new feast it recognised the signs of the time: the then Pope, Pius XII, did so in the aftermath of the Second World War, knowing that the world had changed and the Church must change with it. He wanted to make it clear that the Church stood alongside ordinary people and that it recognised the worth and dignity of work. What better way then, than to make May 1 the feast day of St Joseph the Worker, husband of Mary, foster father of Jesus and a carpenter who toiled at his workbench all day?
Oddly, Pepinster make no mention of Pope Pius’ strident anti-communist stance. Yet this is the real reason for the first of May becoming a Roman church feast day. Pius saw Cold-War communism as an existential threat to Catholicism.
The 1955 May Day flag plant for Rome was not principally a celebration of worker’s value and dignity, it was a primarily marketing exercise. By the early 1900s May the first had become internationally recognised as Worker’s Day. It was associated with trade unions. It was inextricably bound to socialist and communist labour movements. Such movements were then very strong in Italy and in France.
The Josephication of May Day by Pius was about mindshare, branding, association and ownership. Communism owned May Day. May the first was marked around Europe with marches and demonstrations, attended by millions, advocating the communist and socialist protection of workers.
Communism was indelibly associated with atheism and with Marxist materialism, both of which were anathema to the Church, running directly contrary to Catholic ideology.
And Pope Pius, well he was pretty candid about it. There was no subterfuge. No sleight of hand.
He said, “We are placing St Joseph in May Day so that Christian workers may have their own celebration, free from influences alien to the Church.”
It was described at the time by Catholic historians as the ‘Counter Feast’.
It was, though, wholesale strategic cultural appropriation. It was ideologically defensive against Marxist atheism. And it was existentially defensive, aiming to preserve church allegiance among working classes who had been drifting in large numbers to secular labour ideals and practices.
Not that the church wasn’t pro-worker. It did see the dignification of labour as an important Catholic objective. It was just a little unwilling to share the branding of this movement with anyone else. Particularly with anyone who regarded a heavenly god no different from garden leprechauns or fire-breathing lizards.
So, no, Catherine the adoption of May Day for the church was not out of sympathy with how the world was changing, it was not a move for social progressiveness. It was a cold war anti-communist move made out of fear and self-interest.
On one other point, though, Pepinster should be praised.
PEPINSTER: At the funeral of Pope Francis, there was a Gospel reading where Jesus told his apostle Peter, who Catholics believe was the first pope, to “feed my lambs”.
We have frequently been asked by Catholic presenters of TftD in the past to believe that Peter was the first Pope. It’s refreshing to hear a nod to logic and honesty in Catherine’s Friday broadcast that this is not claimed as fact but as belief.
If this, though, catches on, I’ll have increasingly less to write about.
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