The intersections between religious faith and the worlds of labor and law are numerous and certainly worthy of continued scholarly study. Religions offer the moral language that often clarifies the most central human concerns embedded in public policy issues, providing broad visions of what constitutes dignified treatment of all people, in their capacities as workers and citizens. Oxford’s series Monographs on Labor Law wisely now includes Mark Bell’s very fine Catholic Social Teaching and Labour Law: An Ethical Perspective on Work, tracing the influence of the social teachings of the Catholic Church on the development, at least in much of Europe, of progressive labor arrangements. Bell’s focus is on European Union legislation protecting workers from numerous abuses often perpetuated in labor markets, from sub-living wages to job insecurity to various forms of discrimination. The central project of Bell’s volume (the sixth in this groundbreaking series) is to provide an account and historical review of the development of Catholic labor principles and to document its influence on actual labor law in Europe.

At the risk of over-generalization, it is fair to characterize all major religious traditions as eagerly engaging the workplace and standing up for at least some modicum of justice in the treatment of workers. Religious leaders and faith-based thinkers have long challenged prevailing labor arrangements that harm workers through unconscionably low wages and inadequate agency regarding the terms of their employment. Religious social ethics of many varieties have been among the most important contributors to mechanisms of corporate accountability and social reforms favoring workers and addressing their plight by encouraging full participation and empowerment, such as through expanded guarantees of trade union rights, collective bargaining, and fair wage legislation.

While Bell here focuses almost exclusively on the contributions of Roman Catholicism to overcoming labor abuses, there are a few parallel sources of normative argumentation and the religious affiliations of important agents of reform on labor issues in the West. One prominent example is the Anglican archbishop William Temple (1881–1944), whose bold advocacy for the working class and the expansion of the British welfare state in the early twentieth century built upon several preceding generations of church-based support for the rights of workers in his native Great Britain. On the American scene, the Social Gospel Movement (whose paradigmatic figure is the Baptist preacher and author Walter Rauschenbusch, 1861–1918) that sprung up as a response to rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century reflects a similar narrative, in which the suffering of a new class of factory-based laborers sparked expressions of social concern and eventually political advocacy on the part of religious leaders and institutions. While Bell does well to explicate the Roman Catholic response to these new industrial realities, even a few gestures toward this wider tableau of faith-based reform proposals would have added context helpful to readers seeking a broad appreciation of social reform movements in its full, pluralistic setting.

While it is a straightforward enough task to describe the foundational ethical commitments of Catholicism in regard to human work (the content of its definitions of social justice, human dignity, basic equality and the common good), there remains the more complex task of connecting the dots, that is, applying these rather abstract general principles to actual practices in concrete circumstances. The matter of implementation is of course central to the effectiveness of any intellectual construct. It is in his middle chapters that Bell analyzes these accomplishments, as he details the advance of such Catholic labor principles as the rights to a just wage, to adequate rest and to worker participation. Bell accomplishes much of value here in bridging, on one hand, the level of religiously grounded general principles and, on the other hand, the achievement of concrete pro-worker objectives in particular historical and institutional settings, specifically in the primary case study he offers, namely contemporary labor law in the European Union context.

It is one thing to assert that nobody should be forced to endure degrading or dangerous conditions in the workplace, but it is most illuminating to observe how a consensus was forged over decades of deliberation over the specific protections that workers deserve to be accorded. The reader comes away with an enhanced appreciation of the dynamic interplay of principles and applications, including how the requirements of good labor law reflect commonly held value commitments, such as fairness, solidarity, and social responsibility.

The noteworthy success of this study is to be attributed to Bell’s command of the relevant material and his style of presentation. The volume is meticulously documented, drawing in detail from such sources as church documents, labor regulations and the literature of industrial organizations. Bell’s prose is clear and likely accessible to quite general audiences. Even nonspecialists will benefit from the lucid descriptions of the many challenges to labor rights and the many encouraging ways in which religious social ethics, and the social teachings of the Catholic Church in particular, have provided helpful guidance to the steady progress—at least in the better part of a continent, specifically in the nations of the European Union—toward the full achievement of worker rights and protections.

One particular strength of this volume is the way Bell handles the many tensions on display between religiously grounded principles and the secular and pluralistic environments in which they generally play out in contemporary societies. He handles deftly the dynamics by which religious language, such as the claim that human dignity is grounded in the notion of creation in the Imago Dei, comes to be translated into nomenclature acceptable to the widest audiences, often through the operations of the ancient construct of natural law. But Bell also recognizes the many tensions that remain when church-based beliefs diverge from the prevailing secular conceptions of human rights. Nevertheless, the “translation project” has often turned out to be a great success; without wholesale compromise or utter capitulation, Catholic (and other religious) voices possess a rather strong track record of advocating for fair labor practices and distributive outcomes grounded in confessional principles. Bell’s impressive research into the various institutions, legislation, and legal apparatus of the European Union contributes greatly to each chapter of this volume, weaving a rich tapestry that allows the reader to appreciate how normative principles come to be instantiated in civil law.

Since Catholic Social Teaching and Labour Law was published, certain developments in the Catholic Church have unfolded that would form the basis of an intriguing additional chapter in this volume. When the first American pope was elected on May 8, 2025, he took the papal name Leo XIV, soon mentioning explicitly in interviews that his choice of name was intended to pay tribute to Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Labor”) inaugurated the continuing tradition of papal social encyclicals that address pivotal issues of the day regarding social order, including, most prominently labor relations. In the past 135 years there have been approximately fifteen such Vatican social teaching documents, though not all of them technically in the genre of papal encyclicals. It is a fair characterization to claims that labor justice is the single most prominent throughline in this succession of documents, although popes have also dedicated certain of their social teaching documents to such topics as international relations and environmental sustainability, which are structural issues related to worker justice.

Interestingly, the first encyclical of Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), dated May 15, 2026—to the day, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum—continues this trajectory by taking up ethical issues related to what is often called the latest Industrial Revolution, namely the rapid rise of artificial intelligence capabilities that arguably reshape the labor market just as thoroughly as any previous round of industrial change. While only a fraction of Magnifica Humanitas 245 paragraphs mention labor relations explicitly, Leo XIV solidly engages the threats to employment opportunities and worker well-being in the new economy generated by this latest version of the ever-churning global economy. As several of Bell’s nine chapters document, the introduction of new technologies has repeatedly challenged the shape of labor relations, in general, and necessitated, in particular, new legislation to protect workers in ways congruent with the social principles espoused by Catholicism and other religious communities.