While the casual observer — or even the casual Catholic — might think we are one-issue voters,it’s instructive to remember now and then that we aren’t. Joe Biden’s speech last night was a bracing reminder of that.

My own father grew up in Biden’s corner of Pennsylvania, on a dirt road of rowhouses inhabited by Slovak coalminers whose weeky travels took them from the rowhouses to the mines to the church, with periodic stops at the local tavern. I recognized the world he described.

Michael Sean Winters takes note of Biden’s powerful connection to a core element of Catholic thought:

Biden understands something that the pollsters do not: the way to win labor is by emphasizing his Catholicism, and the way to win Catholics is to articulate his beliefs about labor. “My parents taught us to live our faith, and to treasure our families. We learned the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough,” Biden told the assembled crowd last night, linking faith to family and both of them to the dignity of work. He elaborated this later in the speech, saying, “That’s how you come to believe, to the very core of your being, that work is more than a paycheck. It’s dignity. It’s respect. It’s about whether or not you can look your children in the eye and say: We’re going to be all right.”

At first glance, these words are mere commonplaces, rhetorical flourishes designed to appeal to working-class voters. But, when Biden speaks about “the very core of your being,” you know he is not relying on a pollster for what he is saying. Whatever else did or did not take from his Catholic high school education, the Church’s belief in the dignity of work, a central premise of papal social teaching since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 — that took. And, when read a second and a third time, Biden’s words appear defiantly counter-cultural.

In America’s spread eagle capitalist system, work is not more than a paycheck. The system treats us like cogs in a wheel. We are reduced to being homo economicus, our value, our sense of worth tied up precisely with the size of our paycheck. Our children are not taught to struggle and save. They are taught to escape via the glamorous lives portrayed in People magazine or the faux dramas of the inaptly named “reality tv.” Respect comes not from work but from success, success in the sight of the world, success that allows you to go to fancy restaurants and wear fancy clothes.

In Joe Biden’s world, success comes from, as he put it, when “you can look your children in the eye and say: We’re going to be all right.” In Biden’s world, faith, family and work are intimately linked: These are the touchstones of our identity, not our designer clothes or our flat screen tv’s. In Joe Biden’s world, unemployment robs a man or woman of the ability to provide for their family, it keeps a person from participating in God’s on-going work of creation. In short, unemployment is a sin and an economic system that puts corporate profits before full unemployment is not only unjust but unholy. Biden has touched a chord deeper than what most politicians mean when they talk about “values.” He is touching the Imago Dei here, getting past mere questions of right and wrong and addressing what it is to be human and humane.