Fighter with a Heart: Writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh Labor Priest

 Monsignor Charles Owen Rice stands out as one of the most influential religious figures in western Pennsylvania history.  As Pittsburgh’s controversial labor priest, he has had a major impact on the American labor movement.  A radio commentator for for forty years and a newspaper columnist for nearly sixty, he has raised his voice to support workers’ struggles, resist racists, chide the comfortable, and champion the poor, the homeless, and the imprisoned.

Monsignor Rice’s writings form a unique chronicle of an era from a point of view that defies easy catagorization into “right” or “left.”  In fact, one of the most stirring facts about his writings is the degree to which he reflected on and critiqued his own early anticommunism.

Confidant of Phil Murray, John L. Lewis, Mike Quill, Joe Curran, Walter Reuther, and many others great and small, Rice knew the labor movement as few others did.  A marcher with Martin Luther King, Jr., a demonstrator with H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, a defender of prisoners, a provider of food and clothing to the poor, and a tireless critic of America’s Vietnam involvement, Rice consistently articulated a Catholic vision of social justice and responsibility.  Ferociously anticommunist long before Joe McCarthy, this “most influential labor priest of the cold war era” marked the American labor movement as profoundly as any other single person in this century.  In addition, he wrote copiously about his own life and work over the course of sixty years, mostly in Pittsburgh Catholic.