In Defense of Politics

The editors of Commonweal have an editorial entitled In Defense of Politics, drawn from Pope Benedict’s new encyclical Caritas in veritate:

Catholics who like the word “solidarity” are sometimes suspicious of the word “subsidiarity.” They worry it’s a euphemism for privatization. Catholics who like the word “subsidiarity,” meanwhile, are often uneasy with the term “solidarity”—unless it refers to a Polish labor movement.

In his new encyclical, Caritas in veritate (or “Charity in Truth”), Pope Benedict XVI writes a lot about both subsidiarity and solidarity, and he writes about them together. According to Benedict, not only do the two principles leave room for each other, they are mutually dependent: “The principle of subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa, since the former without the latter gives way to social privatism, while the latter without the former gives way to paternalist social assistance that is demeaning to those in need” (emphasis in original).

The encyclical’s treatment of subsidiarity, though not always easy to follow, is remarkable in two ways. First, Benedict applies the principle not only to politics but also to economics. If the state should not be allowed to threaten the interests of local communities, neither should the corporation. Economic globalization must not become a way to redistribute wealth from poor places in one part of the world to rich investors in another. “There is no reason to deny that a certain amount of capital can do good, if invested abroad rather than at home,” Benedict writes. “Yet the requirements of justice must be safeguarded, with due consideration for the way in which the capital was generated and the harm to individuals that will result if it is not used where it was produced” (emphasis added).

[snip]

Benedict rejects the claim that political power is essentially suspect and beneath the dignity of Christians. “The institutional path—we might also call it the political path—of charity [is] no less excellent and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbor directly outside the institutional mediation of the pólis.” For some, this is a hard saying. For all, it’s an urgent challenge.

The rest of the editorial is here.