Archbishop Elpidophoros of America marked Labor Day with the following social media post:
On this Labor Day, I am reminded that everything around us was built by someone’s hands. The road, the harvest, the meal, the machine. I am also reminded that the ordinary protections of a working day, its hours and its safety, are the outcome of the pursuit of countless men and women who struggled. We honor all who labor: in the field and the factory, in the kitchen and the hospital ward, at the desk and behind the wheel, and in the home where the work never ends. Our Lord Himself worked with His own hands in the carpenter’s shop before He spoke a word in public.
May the Lord our God, Who sanctified human labor by the work of His own hands, bless the work of your hands, minds, and hearts. We offer this prayer as work itself is being remade. Artificial intelligence and robotics are entering the field, the clinic and the office, and no tool arrives innocent; each carries the purposes of those who built it and decided where it would be used. Let these technologies lighten the burden of human labor. Let them never become the reason a person is treated as a cog to be discarded, nor the pretext for handing to an algorithm a judgment that requires a conscience. The human person is created in the image and likeness of the living God and must never be reduced to something expendable.
