cozcommunio

The Principle of Subsidiarity is a concept that the Catholic church teaches that many of my freedom loving friends would appreciate. It is also a concept that quit a number of the American Catholic Bishops don’t understand.

The following comments are from a piece David Bosnich for the Acton Institute.

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

As our founding fathers made clear in The Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution was designed to leave many issues of great importance in the hands of the states. The federal government was to do only those things which the individual states could not effectively do for themselves. The subsidiarity principle was at work in the foundation of our nation. But from the New Deal era onwards, there has been a steady growth in federal power at the expense of the states. This has sparked a renewed interest in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves all powers not delegated to the federal government to the states or to the people.

John Paul II wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility.

Link to full essay:

http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_article_200.php

This entry was posted on March 14, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Freedom & Catholicism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.