ORDO WEEK 30 SATURDAY MORNING PRAISE
Rescuing Catholic social teaching from the textbooks
Timothy Kirchoff
Traces of the very technocracy they oppose are also evident in Macedo and Lee’s tendency to assume that the true actors of policy are an elite set of elected representatives and that it is the job of these—and only these—elites to check other kinds of elites. They argue, for instance, that scientific and public-health experts need “to be checked and balanced” by “members of Congress” who “play a vital role in representing the interests and perspective of ordinary people.” They claim that “elected representatives [and] members of Congress are generalists, not policy experts” and can also serve in “balancing” between “profound class and cultural divisions.” This is true as far as it goes, but it narrows democratic agency to members of one branch of the U.S. government. It elides the role of local deliberative assemblies at the city and town levels. It overlooks the possibility that ordinary people could create policies for their own communities. As Catholic social teaching reminds us, subsidiarity can be a potent antidote to technocracy.
How Catholic Social Teaching Can Help
Catholic social teaching can help us understand, and perhaps correct, the failure of both parties to address this issue. The problem is not that each party fails to balance solidarity and subsidiarity—as if some fifty-fifty compromise could be worked out. Rather, neither party understands the way solidarity and subsidiarity ought to be related to each other. That relation is one of means to ends. Solidarity is meant to govern the end of social action, while subsidiarity is the principle that determines the best means to that end. As John Paul II puts it in Centesimus annus, subsidiarity means that “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…always with a view to the common good.” Understood in this way, subsidiarity is not just another name for libertarian individualism; rather, it is about the importance of genuine participatory structures for achieving solidarity.
Too often subsidiarity is reduced to questions about the necessary level of government: Should a given issue be dealt with at the state or municipal level, or does it require federal or even global policy? That is certainly one aspect of subsidiarity, but it’s not the only one. The importance of not interfering unnecessarily in family life, for example, is no less an application of the principle than the importance of not interfering unnecessarily with local governments. Communities “of a lower order” include all sorts of groups—churches, civic associations, colleges and universities, and businesses—as well as smaller units of government. In effect, subsidiarity rightly understood is an argument that the primary way to build social change and solidarity is from the bottom up, not from the top down. The imposition of solidarity is a contradiction in terms.
From this perspective, the argument over the scope and funding of paid family leave should not be between an overly expansive federal benefit and an each-worker-for-herself wage-borrowing program. Instead, we should be asking two questions: What can be done to encourage solidaristic practices of care “on the ground” in existing employer-employee relationships? And what gaps and failures in those practices might require redress “from above”?
The first question is especially important when we consider occasions of caregiving other than parenthood. In contrast to paid family leave, elder care is treated in many different ways in other countries, not least because it deals with many contingent variables. How much time will a worker need to take off? This isn’t always clear in advance. Many systems distinguish between short-term and long-term leaves. The current FMLA rules do not. What kind of care will the person on leave be providing? Moral support and companionship or nursing? The complexity of elder care is not an argument against providing paid leave for it, but it might suggest that arrangements for such care require greater flexibility than a one-size-fits-all federal law could provide.
As for what gaps the federal government should try to fill, it might start with those working low-pay, low-skill jobs—these are the workers who most need paid parental leave and are least likely to have it.
Some may argue that expecting employers to do the right thing is naïve. Yet the Catholic social vision, from Rerum novarum onward, has rejected a view of society in which employers and their employees are inescapably at odds. If they were, true social solidarity would not be possible, and there could be no genuinely common good. All that would be left is what Pope Benedict called “the market-plus-state binary,” a struggle between two behemoths that eventually squeezed out all the “quotas of gratuitousness” on which human social life ultimately depends.
In their current approaches to paid family leave, our two major political parties display their failure to understand that solidarity and subsidiarity work in tandem. Democrats try to impose solidarity, while Republicans try to escape it. Republicans confuse subsidiarity with atomistic individualism, while Democrats ignore the appropriate complexity of shaping a civil order in pursuit of genuinely shared goods. It is not that Democrats are the “solidarity party” and Republicans the “subsidiarity party”; each misunderstands not only the other’s principle but also the one it pretends to own. The overall result is a lack of action that hurts the most vulnerable. Catholic social teaching might suggest a way out of this impasse, but it would require a fundamental reorientation on the part of both sides of our polarized country.
Immigration & the Catholic Church at this moment
To state it clearly, the actions that I have described to close the border to the vulnerable, to deprive hundreds of thousands of persons of legal status, to broaden the state of exception and deny due process, and to move in the direction of mass deportations, are all morally indefensible from a Catholic perspective. These actions will divide families, divide communities, undermine the rule of law, and increase the numbers of those dying at borders.