At 77 and Retired, He Battles for Unions, Civil Rights, and the IRA : ‘Labor Priest’ Can’t Retire From War for Justice

After 50 years as a champion of organized labor, civil rights, the Irish Republican Army and other causes, 77-year-old Msgr. Charles O. Rice is still spoiling for a fight.

Rice, at home on the pulpit or the picket line, is known as “Pittsburgh’s Labor Priest” for his support of the labor movement and devotion to the blue-collar workers of his parishes in industrial western Pennsylvania.

“I had the feeling that the labor movement was more than just that,” Rice says, “that it had a reform element to it, that trade unionism could lead to a reform of society and a general justice, and that it would bring freedom to the working class.”

On other fronts, Rice has led sit-ins in opposition to U.S. involvement in Central America. He decried the bombing of Libya and voiced support for the Irish Republican Army.

Rice, who grew up in Ireland after his mother died when he was 4, still has an Irish brogue that becomes more pronounced when he defends his pro-IRA stance.

“The IRA has not indulged in the indiscriminate killing of civilians,” he says. “They are in a frightfully unjust situation.”

Has Plenty of Causes

Although he retired June 15 as pastor of St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church in this Pittsburgh suburb, Rice says he is only giving up the administrative tasks of running the 7,000-member parish. There are still plenty of causes to keep him active, he says.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt led a revolution for compassion,” he says. “Now it’s gone the other way, led by President Reagan and his advisers. He’s undoing the New Deal.”

Modern labor unions were in their infancy and Roosevelt’s New Deal had just started to pull the nation out of the Depression when Rice was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1934.

Sense of Social Justice

Rice says labor organizers such as John L. Lewis, the mine workers leader who later became president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, preached an idealism that appealed to his deep-rooted sense of social justice.

“The whole business of the church being involved in labor started right at this time and I suppose I was one of those on the cutting edge,” he says.

Rice says he told workers that they “had a right and a duty to be a union man and that the church supported their aspirations and was opposed to exploitation.”

His pro-union stance caused a stir in the Roman Catholic community, he says, particularly when labor-management disputes erupted into bloody battles.

Talked ‘Nice and Loud’

“The older priests didn’t like it because they were naturally conservative and I expressed myself, nice and loud,” Rice says. “I made no attempt to take a middle road between management and labor. I’m for labor.”

Rice didn’t confine himself to picket-line preaching. He hosted a local radio show for 40 years and he still writes a column for a weekly Roman Catholic newspaper in the Pittsburgh area.

He took on the powerful, even in the church. When Cardinal Francis Spellman ordered seminarians to cross a Teamsters picket line during a New York grave-diggers strike in 1948, Rice wrote: “A scab is a scab, whether in denim blue or cardinal red.”

Bishop Vincent Leonard, retired leader of Pittsburgh’s Roman Catholics, laughed when he was reminded of Rice’s sometimes-irreverent outbursts.

“But he is an excellent priest,” Leonard says. “He was very sincere and was not intolerable in his views.”

Supporting the Underdog

Robert Flannery, 63, retired assistant to David McDonald, former president of the United Steelworkers union, said Rice was “a Young Turk” who “always seemed to support the underdog. When unions were the underdog, he fought hard for them against business. When unions got big, he took the sides of the union dissidents.”

In the steelworkers’ 1965 presidential election, for example, Rice supported dissident Edward Sadlowski, a Chicago district director, who was defeated by I.W. Abel, a well-known steelworkers union pioneer.

Abel remembers Rice well.

“He wanted to congratulate me after the election in the dining room of the Pittsburgh Hilton,” Abel recalls. “What I said wasn’t printable.”

Admirable Courage

“When I think of him, I’m reminded of the man who said, ‘I admire your courage, but I question like hell your judgment,’ ” Abel adds.

Abel, now living in Sun City, Ariz., is the same age as Rice, but says, “That’s about the only thing we have in common.”

Rice shrugs at his critics.

“I think I’ve been consistent but other people don’t,” he says. “Many people do not see someone who is traditional in religious matters being so strong in social matters, almost radical. I take strong stands against war, against the government, in favor of unions. I think that is consistent with my religious convictions.”

The labor movement was not his only passion.

Opened Shelter for Homeless

In 1937, he opened the St. Joseph House of Hospitality in Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood, which provided food and shelter for homeless men. It still operates today.

“One night, we had 865 people there, and beds for about 300. I never got used to the rats or the bedbugs,” Rice recalls.

When civil rights and the Vietnam War became issues in the 1960s and 1970s, Rice planned protests and marched in Washington and New York City alongside the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Norman Mailer and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

“That was around the time I said that nasty thing about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the radio,” Rice says, laughing.

Hoover: ‘Punch-Drunk’

“He said King was a communist and I said J. Edgar Hoover was an unreliable old man and punch-drunk,” Rice recalls. “The FBI didn’t like that. I recall the bishop was a bit disturbed too.”

He said his anti-war protests and march on the Pentagon cost him friends among the more conservative in labor. But his civil rights activities nearly cost him his life.

In 1971, police in Akron, Ohio, uncovered a plot by members of the National Socialist White People’s Party to blow up Immaculate Conception Church in Washington, Pa., where Rice was pastor.