Mark Shea
Picture Catholic social teaching as a throne. Seated on that throne is any and every person. Just as a throne requires four legs of equal length and strength, so the four legs of Catholic social teaching are equally important. They are:
And they exist in harmony, not in competition, with one another.
1. The dignity of the human person
The dignity of the human person flows from two basic biblical facts:
- Human beings are made in God’s image and likeness.
- Jesus Christ was crucified and raised for the salvation of every human being without any exception whatsoever.
In short, human beings, made in the God’s image and likeness, are sacred from conception to natural death and intended for eternal happiness with him. Therefore, we possess dignity for one reason only: not because of what we do, but because of what we are.
Since our dignity does not proceed from anything we do, it cannot be taken from us by anything we do, either. And because our dignity owes to the fact that we are, alone in creation, made in God’s image and likeness, it follows that Gaudium et Spes was simply right when it articulated the twentieth-century’s single most shocking development of doctrine (a development that the Church’s members have barely begun to grasp): Man is “the only creature on earth which God willed for itself.”
This means that no human being is a means to an end. No human being’s good can be subordinated to any human system. Therefore, all systems—political, military, economic, scientific, religious, philosophical, and ecclesial—are made for the human person, not the human person for the system.
The problem is that, as G. K. Chesterton said, “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”1
And the result is that enormous pressure is placed on us to find different classes of people who can be thrown away in the service of some human system.
So, for instance, abortion is commonly perceived as a “conservative” issue and gun violence as a “liberal” one, prompting a prominent Catholic culture warrior to respond to the massacre of children in Uvalde by tweeting “Is gun violence a pro-life issue? My answer is ‘No.’” In contrast, those who think with the Church see anything that kills people, born or unborn, as an assault on human life.
That’s why there are twenty-six other things the Church insists (in Evangelium Vitae) are also pro-life issues:
- War
- Torture
- Bodily mutilation
- Coercion of free will
- Violence
- Murder
- Arbitrary imprisonment
- Mistreatment of the environment
- Capital punishment
- Deportation
- Disease
- Lack of health care
- Drug abuse
- Hunger
- Poor working conditions
- Poverty
- Slavery
- Subhuman living conditions
- Suicide
- Euthanasia
- Prostitution
- Artificial contraception
- Responsible procreation
- Sexual abuse
- Sexual promiscuity
- Sterilization
If somebody wants to focus on defending the unborn, fine. But we cannot pit the unborn against all forms of human life threatened by these other evils as though those other lives did not matter.
2. The common good
It therefore follows that the dignity of the human person leads inexorably to the second leg of Catholic social teaching: the common good. This teaches that because each person is made in the image and likeness of God, therefore all persons are. Therefore, we are to be more pro-life, not less.
Two useful images for illustrating this concept are:
- Abraham
- The Body of Christ (1 Cor 12)
Abraham
Abraham is chosen by God so that “In you shall all the nations be blessed” (Gal 3:8). The “nations” are the Gentiles: All those peoples who are not the Chosen. In short, the Chosen are chosen for the sake of the unchosen. This truth is most profoundly consummated in Jesus, the Chosen One who, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). So Paul calls us to imitate Jesus by seeing ourselves as members of his Body and regarding all we have, material as well as spiritual, as a gift entrusted to us for the good of somebody else.
The Body of Christ
Jesus’s teaching is equally shocking and radical. He urges us not only to “give to him who begs from you” (Matt 5:42), but to make certain that “they cannot repay you” (Luke 14:12–14). Stunningly, Jesus teaches us to view our possessions as primarily valuable insofar as their use is directed toward others who need them more than we do. As St. John Chrysostom puts it, “The rich exist for the sake of the poor. The poor exist for the salvation of the rich.”
Thus, the common good most commonly concerns justice rather than charity. Justice means giving people their due. If I hand you ten bucks I don’t owe you, that’s charity. If I walk past you as you are bleeding on the sidewalk, I sin against justice, not charity, just as the priest and the Levite did in the parable of the good Samaritan. That is why the state exists: to do justice, not charity. Because you are owed your life. It is justice, not charity, to see that people have things like food, water, shelter, health care, and education. That is why taxes are not theft, but the due we owe to the common good.
The primal school of the common good is the family, so much of Catholic social teaching can be summarized as “If it’s good for the family, it’s good.” But though the family is the basic building block of society, the gospel adds one crucial point: Building blocks are for building. So Jesus insists that the family is subordinate to the kingdom of God, and the gospel (and experience) warn of what happens when we put blood, kin, race, and nation ahead of the demands of the gospel.
3. Subsidiarity
To serve the common good, it is vital that each human being be personally involved as sacraments of God’s grace and provision to our neighbor. That is where subsidiarity comes in.
Subsidiarity means that those closest to a need should handle that need, and we only go up the ladder of power and authority a step at a time when they can’t or won’t. Most children are housed, most naked people clothed, most students taught, most bellies filled, and most neighborhoods kept in good order by ordinary people going to work, caring for their families, and doing the ordinary things people do.
So if you need a loaf of bread, you don’t phone the White House and ask the 101st Airborne to airlift you bread. You make it or buy it yourself.
But suppose a grocer says, “We don’t serve your kind here.” At that point, you move up the ladder of authority and phone the cops to say you are being denied your constitutional right to shop. Usually that does the job.
But suppose the cops side with the bigots, as they sometimes did during the civil rights struggles of the early 60s? Then you go higher still, and keep going as high as it takes to serve justice. In the 60s, that eventually meant passage of the Civil Rights Act at the federal level.
The point is that we are to try to keep participation in the love of neighbor in as many local hands as possible, so that we can all participate in the work and not just pass the buck to some faceless bureaucracy while avoiding personal responsibility. Additionally, there are indeed some matters that require responses from higher and more powerful authorities.
Indeed, three popes have (shockingly, to many Americans) noted that there are some matters that require a “true world political authority” to address. So, for instance, as global pandemic, climate change, and superpower threats to peace proliferate, the Church would regard global responses, not as a violation, but as a fulfillment of the very same principle of subsidiarity which holds that you, and not some remote bureaucrat, are the one responsible to make your kid his peanut butter sandwich.
The sole exception here is in the use of violence. Subsidiarity urges you and I to take it upon ourselves to deliver mac and cheese to our sick neighbor. But it absolutely forbids us to hold our neighbor prisoner in our closet or inflict the death penalty on him because we decided he had it coming. Violence is restricted to the state, and the bigger the act of violence, the higher up the ladder of authority we must go. So Seattle can’t declare war on London. War is declared by nation-states and, if the Church had its way, would be declared only by the United Nations. This is because violence destroys the last principle of Catholic social teaching: solidarity.
4. Solidarity
Solidarity means we are all in this together and none of us can say, “Your end of the boat is sinking.” Because, as Pope St. John Paul II put it, “we are all really responsible for all.”
Solidarity has deep biblical roots. Paul summarizes those roots nicely when he says that God “made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27). There is only one race—the human race—and each is connected to all. That connection is only deepened by our baptism, which extends our solidarity into eternity with the truth that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
Several things spring from this. For instance, as Pope Francis points out in Laudato Si’, what happens to creation inevitably affects what happens to us. Poisoned air suffocates us. Polluted water makes us sick. Climate change affects us all.
Likewise, our solidarity with one another is both global and intergenerational. The global nature of solidarity is experienced by millions every day on the internet, but also through international commerce—and international spread of pandemic. Solidarity’s intergenerational nature is reflected in the immense debt we owe our ancestors and in the equally immense debt we owe our children to pay it forward by doing what we can to leave the world for them better than we found it.
Another implication of solidarity is our obligation to challenge and reform “structures of sin.” An example of this is found in Acts 19:23–41. When Paul went to Ephesus to preach the gospel, he did not simply threaten a religious system that worshipped Diana, the moon goddess. He threatened an entire socio-economic and political system organized around her temple, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Consequently, it was not just a gaggle of random members of the cult of Diana that attacked him. It was a mob organized and spurred on by the silversmiths of Ephesus who made their living selling Diana trinkets to pilgrims. The gospel threatened (and in good time would eventually dismantle) a religio-economic-socio-political structure of sin in Ephesus that stood opposed to the kingdom of God. The analogy of this to such modern ills as gun violence, human trafficking, or our abortion regime is not hard to see.
Conclusion
The point of Catholic social teaching is to draw on the fullness of the Church’s Tradition and to be formed to live that Tradition harmoniously, not in conflict and competition. It is possible to do this with the help of the Holy Spirit, the grace of the sacraments, and the guidance of the Magisterium. Let us move forward as the Body of Christ with minds and hearts formed by Christ and not the traditions of men, so that we can help sanctify ourselves and our neighbors and renew the face of the earth.
Read more on Catholic social teaching
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