National Catholic Register: Subsidiarity Defined: Downsizing Social Programs
There seems to be a lot of confusion in regard to exactly what the Church teaches about economics.
On one side, there are those whose reasoning goes something like this: “The Catholic Church is for poor people, so it is for large governmental social welfare programs and something like socialism.”
On the other, there are those who reason along these lines: “Since the Catholic Church is against socialism and communism, therefore it is unabashedly for capitalism. Government should therefore stay out of economics — as should the Church — and leave the whole money-making thing to market forces.”
And then in the middle there are large numbers of Catholics who don’t know what the Church actually thinks on this issue, because they hear seemingly contradictory things from polar opposite sides, which both claim to be touting Church teaching.
There is some truth in both points of view, but neither of these sides expresses the Church’s central economic principle, subsidiarity. And it’s likely that the folks in the middle haven’t heard a whole lot, if anything, about it.
Since I can’t do everything in one short blog post, I’d like expound on the principle of subsidiarity in this post, and then, in the next two, show how subsidiarity corrects both the polar views noted above.
The principle of subsidiarity is both simple and far more profound than it seems at first sight. “Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which ‘a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good’” (Catechsim of the Catholic Church, 1883).
This is both a moral and, we might say, a cosmological principle.
Let’s begin with the cosmological part. …
… So, what does that mean for those leaning to the “left” and “right”? We’ll have a look in my next posts.
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