Today’s reflection will focus on three social principles that are identified within the corpus of the Catholic Social Teaching (CSTch).  When considered together, these are also delicately interlaced with one another.  These principles are solidarity, subsidiarity and participation. 

The starting point of these principles is to philosophical premise that humans are naturally social beings.  We come into the world within a community network that begins with a mother and a father who, themselves, are part of a larger network of persons, etc.  Humans can’t survive without the cohesion of a group.  That ‘group’ might be a tribe or a nation, but it is a group defined by some boundary, genetically, biologically or geographically based.  In the CSTch solidarity is the term that denotes this cohesion of a group.  The papal documents presume that humans are also naturally geared to live in harmony with one another, thus making solidarity possible.  The Social Teaching urges that solidarity ought to widen to include more and more…even a communion of nations (Mater et Magistra #153-160, Pacem in Terris #80-93, Gaudium et Spes #77-90).  Solidarity is also to be realized between the powerful and able (“haves”) and the poor and vulnerable (“have-nots”).  Policies and practices that endanger persons or make them and their families vulnerable to economic disaster are denounced.  But how are these principles put into practice?  That’s complicated.  Despite these practical dilemmas, the Popes are not against Liberal market capitalism, only its inability (or desire) to redress unbridled greed or the privilege of concentrated economic power leaving a multitude at the mercy of poverty conditions of working and living.  The challenge to re-think “how to do business” appears in Populoro Progressio (1967) and Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987). 

Any “solidarity” that grabs too much power, like in Leninist or Castro Communism, is denounced by the CSTch.  Besides the bald atheism of Communism, there is the disregard for legitimate local control: the principle of subsidiarity.  Higher political, economic and social authorities ought not usurp local decision-making and execution of action (see Quadragesimo Anno (#79-80).  But Communism is not the only system that can overstep its bounds: monopoly can denude capitalism of its treasured entrepreneurship.  Capitalism has its scientific axiom of self-adjustment, but the encyclical tradition speaks out about the human (moral) cost of an unfettered impersonal force that allows many to be left with a wake of human tragedy.  This caveat is articulated in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus (#42). 

Participation is the underlying principle that persons are agents of their own future.  How and when they can act, they ought to be able to do so.  But action is not unfettered; it is circumscribed by the realities of solidarity and subsidiarity: cooperating with others for the common good.

Throughout all of these observations, CSTch acknowledges that it has no schema of practical solutions or “third way” (alternate to capitalism and communism).  That may seem lame or unsatisfying, but it is honest.  The business of the Church is not to run the world; but it is the business of the Church to call the world to a moral state.  Even the pragmatic foundation of capitalism is not a crass “winner take all” according to one of its adroit spokesmen, John Stuart Mill (see Utilitarianism).  So American Catholics take these things to heart…and hopefully are a voice to an ethical capitalism that enhances solidarity, subsidiarity and participation.  Surely, these days, Catholics can make a difference because we are among the economic elite in the United States.