Spirituality

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Friday, June 13, 2025Spirituality

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"Rerum Novarum" calls the family "a true society, and one older than any State." "Consequently," Leo XIII says, "it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State."

Michael
Pakaluk

Subsidiarity is regarded as one of the four chief principles of Catholic Social Teaching, besides the dignity of the human person, the common good, and solidarity.
Typically, the principle of subsidiarity is explained in terms of structures and organization: in a complex and organic society, it is said, functions should be carried out by the lowest-level entity suitable for carrying it out, and a higher entity should intervene in the function of a subsidiary entity only in cases where the latter has patently failed, and only in such a way as to restore ultimately the sound functioning of the latter.
Subsidiarity understood in this way is continuous with a tradition of social thought that comes from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. The family is the basic cell of society. In those respects in which families are insufficient for supporting themselves easily and well, they devise "intermediary structures" in "civil society" for their mutual support. The market with its division of labor and trade is an important such structure. Militias are another. Finally, when the whole mass of such institutions has grown so that the whole is easily self-sustaining, one has "political society." Such a complete society, conceived of as governed, is "the state."

But subsidiarity can also be framed in terms of priorities in the application of resources, and who has the first claim on resources. Roughly speaking, if the family is the basic cell of society, then families must have first claim on the use of their own resources.
Let's make this point concrete. Parents are the primary educators of their own children, by natural justice and by the teaching of the church. Subsidiarity, then, would imply, not simply that the education of minors should be kept "as close to the family as possible," but also that the first claim of the resources of a family, for education, is held by the children of that family.
In general, it would be a violation of subsidiarity and natural justice, for the state to take away resources for education, which parents need to apply for the basic education of their own children, and transfer these resources to a higher level association, such as a public school, for the education of someone else's children.
Such a violation would not occur, of course, if the parents regarded the public school as a suitable "agent" for their responsibilities as "principals" overseeing the education of their children. But the violation most emphatically does take place when parents rightly seek a religious education for their children.
A principle is an ideal, and therefore it should not be surprising if there are resolutions, or "policies," that realized the ideal of subsidiarity to a greater or lesser degree.
Some countries support religious schools with tax dollars. Such a policy removes the egregious violation but does nothing to bring education "as close as possible to the family." A better policy, from the point of view of subsidiarity, would be vouchers for school choice. However, even this option is unsatisfactory and incomplete, because vouchers are conceived of as a "grant" or "concession" from the state, whereas the state, in natural justice, it seems, does not even have a claim on the family's resources for the education of its own children in the first place.
An even better solution would be that parents who desire a religious education for their children are made exempt from paying that portion of their property taxes which goes to support public schools, while they receive from the community whatever additional assistance is provided in common to parents in the education of children. Subsidiarity dictates that that portion belongs to the family before the state can claim it, and if it is properly applied by the family, the state has no right to claim it.
If what I am contending seems strange to you, I urge you to turn to Leo XIII's encyclical, "Rerum Novarum." Given that we have a new pope named Leo, people are turning to that encyclical. But most offer reductionist interpretations. Indeed "Rerun Novarum" is the encyclical that endorses collective bargaining by employees and which insists upon a "living wage."
Yet both of these teachings depend on the encyclical's teaching on the family. "Rerum Novarum" calls the family "a true society, and one older than any State." "Consequently," Leo XIII says, "it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State."
In "Rerum Novarum," Leo XIII interprets "socialism," which he construes as the idea that all the wealth of a society is in the first instance open to being commanded by the state, as a position which, at the same time, denies the natural society of the family and the natural authority of the father within the family. Most Americans today would seem to be "socialist" in this sense.
We would do well to ponder Leo XIII's warning that, "Inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. ... If the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire."

- Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His latest book is "Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew's Gospel."