The essay examines the Catholic Church's theology of work, as revealed specifically by two influential encyclicals on human work, Rerum Novarum (1891) and Laborem Exercens (1981). Both documents attracted approval for their espousal of the dignity of the worker, and Laborem Exercens in particular is said to have expounded the establishment of a dynamic new form of economic personalism in which John Paul II attempts to analyse the moral ramifications of economic activity in light of a theological vision of the human person. For all their good intentions of rationalising human materiality, both encyclicals served primarily to redress the imbalances of the employer/employee relationship, rather than to fundamentally question the philosophical and biblical anthropology of the increasingly dysfunctional nature of human work.

The Catholic Land Movement (1929 – 1939), an English agrarian community initiative that embraced the principles of Rerum Novarum, attempted in to create an entirely new theology of human work, around the principles of Distributism, Dominicanism and the arts-and-crafts movement. The ideological progress of the land colonies, and their increasing antipathy to industrialism, led them to challenge fundamentally the presumption of the need for mass employment - a position that significantly undermined the primacy of Rerum Novarum, and consequently compromised hierarchy support for their initiative, leading to the organisation's rapid decline. Despite its failure, the Catholic Land Movement nonetheless gave voice to the theologically significant possibility that the message of Genesis might not be that Man is destined for a lifetime's arduous toil.