Mgr George Higgins

George Gilmary Higgins, priest: born Chicago 21 January 1916; ordained priest 1940; died La Grange Park, Illinois 1 May 2002.

It was a supreme irony that Monsignor George Higgins, "the labour priest" who inspired a generation of Catholics in the United States working to put the Church's social teaching into practice, died on 1 May, the day socialists celebrate Workers' Day and the Catholic Church the feast of St Joseph the Worker.

Once described as "the best- informed priest in the United States", Higgins was a powerful advocate of workers' and immigrants' rights and was brought in to mediate in bitter strikes, often on behalf of badly paid, marginalised workers. His mediation began in the 1950s, when he helped diffuse a major steel-workers' strike, later helping to resolve a transport strike in Washington and championing the right of janitors in Los Angeles to organise.

What he called one of his most satisfying efforts was the success in the late 1960s and early 1970s of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (many of whose members were Catholic migrants from Mexico and Central America). Higgins persuaded the Catholic bishops' conference to support a nationwide table-grape boycott. That led to landmark agreements between growers and workers in 1971, although these later unravelled under political pressure.

"I doubt that anybody has done for us as much as Monsignor Higgins has," Chavez declared in gratitude.

Higgins backed the right of Church employees to join unions, not always to the liking of the hierarchy. He was saddened in recent years by the decline in contacts between organised labour in the US and the Catholic Church, which mostly stemmed from social change and greater affluence among Catholics.

Higgins was a close confidant of virtually every major union leader since the 1940s, including John Sweeney, the current AFL-CIO president. From the 1960s to 2001 he chaired the United Auto Workers Public Review Board. In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Higgins the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour.

Higgins served on the staff of the Washington-based National Catholic Welfare Conference, now the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, from 1944 until retiring as secretary for special concerns in 1980. He was director of the conference's influential social action department from 1954 to 1967.

Throughout it all, Higgins called on lay people to support unions and a progressive social policy, drawing on the Church's teachings, especially two fundamental papal encyclicals, Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931).

Describing his role as a "ministry of presence", and himself as a "social-action bureaucrat", Higgins made enemies when he campaigned against the reluctance of major unions to admit ethnic minorities and against corruption and when he took on the Teamsters in his advocacy of the United Farm Workers.

But Higgins's ministry went far wider than the union movement. He backed efforts to mend the rift between Jews and Catholics and was influential in removing a reference to "perfidious Jews" from the Catholic Good Friday Mass.

As a theological expert at all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), he was a member of the preparatory commission which drafted the council's document on the role of lay people in the Church, the first US priest to receive such an assignment. He became one of the best-known interpreters of the Council to the English-speaking world as a member of the US bishops' press panel. He later served as chairman of the Bishops' Advisory Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations and as an adviser to the US delegation to the 1977 Belgrade human rights conference.

Much of Higgins's influence stemmed from his weekly column, "The Yard Stick", which he took over from one of his mentors, Fr Raymond McGowan, in 1945. He continued writing until last September, despite failing eyesight. The column, noted for its strong opinions and directness, was syndicated in hundreds of diocesan newspapers and was often a lone liberal voice amid a sea of conservative Catholic commentary. He took on Southern politicians opposed to Martin Luther King, criticised President Ronald Reagan's administration, especially its Latin American policy, confronted liberals who supported abortion and argued for the morality of universal health coverage.

Higgins began his social education as a schoolboy during lunch breaks at his kitchen table, where his father, a postal night foreman and union supporter, would have him read aloud from the liberal Catholic journals Commonweal and America.

Higgins later attended the Chicago archdiocese's St Mary of the Lake Seminary, where he was strongly influenced by the socially minded rector, Fr Reynold Hillenbrand.

On ordination in May 1940, Higgins was sent to Washington to study at the Catholic University of America, where he completed a doctorate in economics in 1944.

Though assigned to the Chicago archdiocese, Higgins contrived to stay on in Washington, accepting what was to be a temporary appointment at the bishops' conference. He ended up staying 36 years.

He also stayed on at Catholic University, lecturing for the theology and social science departments and living on the campus. He gained a reputation for energetic arguments that would last deep into the night as well as his voracious reading habits.

His finest hour remained his help in securing victory for farm workers. Higgins loved to recount his meeting with a grizzled orchard owner who had been persuaded to yield. "Reverend, I learned I was wrong," the grower told him. "I learned that Cesar Chavez is not a Communist, that he is a God-fearing Christian gentleman. And besides, I can't get anyone to pick my goddamn peaches and plums."

Felix Corley