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

By Ed McCollester

Monsignor Charles Owen Rice stands out as one of the most influential religious figures in western Pennsylvania history. As Pittsburgh\u2019s 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\u2019 struggles, resist racists, chide the comfortable, and champion the poor, the homeless, and the imprisoned. Monsignor Rice\u2019s writings form a unique chronicle of an era from a point of view that defies easy catagorization into \u201cright\u201d or \u201cleft.\u201d 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\u2019s Vietnam involvement, Rice consistently articulated a Catholic vision of social justice and responsibility. Ferociously anticommunist long before Joe McCarthy, this \u201cmost influential labor priest of the cold war era\u201d 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822956195
• ISBN13: 9780822956198
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.8" x 10.4"

Customer Reviews

Great book

Through Rice's own writing the book gives a nice history of one our centuries great leftist-Catholic activists, sampling Rice's writings from the thirties through the nineties. It has given me a sharp sense of the issues that were in the minds a generation of Pittsburghers who, like my working class grandparents, hung on Father Rices' words during his regular radio commentaries, and looked to him as a defender and educator through a period of great change. The paperback is nicely put together in a large format and includes many black and white illustrations.