Subsidiarity

The definition of the Catechism and of Centesimus annus

The reference formulation today is that of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which takes up almost word for word the encyclical Centesimus annus of Saint John Paul II (1991).^[8][9]

"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 in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1883^[10]

Every member of the sentence counts. "Should not interfere... depriving the latter of its functions": that is the barrier against absorption. "But rather should support it in case of need": that is the duty of assistance. "Always with a view to the common good": that is the end which prevents subsidiarity from degenerating into each one's selfish withdrawal onto his own patch.^[11] Subsidiarity is therefore not a principle of abstention, but a principle of order — the just distribution of responsibilities among the levels of a society.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church makes it "one of the most characteristic and constant directives" of social teaching, present "since the first great social encyclical".^[12]

A double face: not absorbing, but rescuing

Subsidiarity is too often reduced to its negative side — "the State must not meddle in everything". That is true, but it is half of the doctrine. The Compendium explicitly lists the two faces of the principle.^[13]

The positive side obliges the State and public authorities to "stimulate, sustain and supplement": economic, institutional and legislative aid for smaller social bodies or those in difficulty.^[14] The negative side requires abstaining "from anything that would in fact restrict the vital space" of the smaller cells of society.^[15]

Subsidium: that word says it all — the higher authority does not replace, it comes as reinforcement. It is the reserve, never the occupier.

This double face explains why subsidiarity can be invoked both against devouring statism and against the abandonment of the weakest. A State that does everything violates subsidiarity by excess; a State that does nothing when intermediate bodies are overwhelmed violates it by default.^[16]

What subsidiarity is not

Neither disengagement of authority (against false liberalism)

Subsidiarity is not the doctrine of the minimal State dear to radical economic liberalism. When a family, a municipality or an association can no longer accomplish its task — through poverty, crisis or injustice — the higher authority has the duty to intervene.^[17] Reducing subsidiarity to "let everyone fend for himself" betrays its heart: the subsidium is first of all assistance owed.

Nor centralism (against collectivism)

Conversely, subsidiarity forbids pushing up to the summit what the base can do. The Catechism is trenchant:

"The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention. It aims at harmonizing the relationships between individuals and societies." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1885^[18]

That is why subsidiarity has been, in the mouths of the popes, a doctrinal weapon against socialism, communism and every totalitarianism: so many systems that confiscate, for the benefit of the State or the Party, what belongs to real persons and communities.^[19][20]

Subsidium: the reserve that comes to the rescue

Before being a term of social philosophy, subsidium is a word of Latin military language. The subsidia were an army's reserve lines, posted behind the front, whose function was to rush to the point where the line was giving way.^[21] Hence the derived meaning: a subsidium is help, reinforcement, support. Subsidiarity inherits exactly this image: the higher level plays the role of the reserve — it intervenes where, and only where, the lower level no longer holds.

The noun "subsidiarity" appears in several European languages in 1931, to translate the Latin of Quadragesimo anno, which speaks of the "subsidiarii officii principium" — the principle of the subsidiary (or supplementary) function.^[22]

Aristotle and Saint Thomas: society as an articulated whole

The intuition is far older than the word. Aristotle already saw the city as a reality composed of nested natural communities — the individual, the family (oikos), the village, the city (polis) — each with its own end.^[23] The family is not a mini-city, nor the city a large family: each community has its own consistency.

Saint Thomas Aquinas deepened this vision: the order of the world reflects the wisdom of a God who governs through secondary causes, conferring on creatures the dignity of acting and of causing in their turn.^[24] God does not do everything directly: He brings it about that His creatures do. That is the metaphysical root of subsidiarity, which the Catechism states in a striking way:

"God has not willed to reserve to himself all exercise of power. He entrusts to every creature the functions it is capable of performing, according to the capacities of its own nature. This mode of governance ought to be followed in social life." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1884^[25]

Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio: the inventor of the modern concept

The true conceptual father of subsidiarity is a 19th-century Italian Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio (1793-1862). In his Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale (1840-1843), he forged the idea of a "hypotactic right" (of hierarchically ordered social order) which requires higher societies to respect the autonomy of lower societies and to do for them only what they cannot do alone.^[26] Pius XI held Taparelli in such high esteem that he explicitly commended his thought in an encyclical of 1929, only two years before formalising subsidiarity.^[27]

The shock of the Revolution: wiping out the intermediate bodies

The principle also crystallised by contrast with a precise historical event. The French Revolution undertook to abolish all intermediate bodies — guilds, confraternities, communities — in the name of a direct face-to-face between the individual and the State. The Le Chapelier Law (1791) forbade professional associations and made the isolated citizen the sole interlocutor of public power.^[28]

That tabula rasa is the exact opposite of a subsidiary society. Alexis de Tocqueville, observing American democracy, saw in it the great danger of modern societies: an "immense and tutelary" central power that infantilises atomised individuals, for want of those intermediate associations that are the school of freedom.^[29] Catholic subsidiarity takes up and grounds this defence of intermediate bodies.

The context: statism, totalitarianisms and "socialisation"

Quadragesimo anno appeared on 15 May 1931, forty years after Rerum novarum — hence its title, "the fortieth year". Europe was then caught between systems which, each in its own way, crushed real communities: Soviet communism which collectivised everything, Italian fascism which gripped society within the corporatist State, and, in the democracies, a growing bureaucratisation that multiplied interventions from above.^[30] Faced with this rise of statism, Pius XI wished to recall a law of social life anterior to the State itself.

The founding text of Quadragesimo anno

The passage has become the locus classicus of the whole doctrine. It deserves to be quoted at length:

"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them." — Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, nos. 79-80^[31]

Three assertions are knotted together in it. First, transferring upward what the lower level can do is an injustice — not merely inefficiency, but an offence against right. Second, it is a social disorder: the living fabric of society is undone. Third, the end of all public action is to help ("furnish help to the members of the body social"), not to "destroy" them nor to "absorb" them.^[32]

Pius XI immediately adds a promise that seals the principle: the more the subsidiary order is respected, the more authority itself gains in strength and effectiveness, freed from subordinate tasks to devote itself to what properly belongs to it.^[33]

The Jesuit drafters: Nell-Breuning and Gundlach

The principle did not fall from the editorial sky. Pius XI had entrusted the preparation of Quadragesimo anno to two German Jesuits, Oswald von Nell-Breuning (1890-1991) and Gustav Gundlach (1892-1963), heirs of the great German social school (Ketteler, Pesch).^[34] It is largely to them that we owe the precise formulation of the subsidiarii officii principium. This scholarly work explains the doctrinal solidity of the text, which has never been contradicted since.

From Leo XIII to the present day, the principle has been taken up, clarified and applied by all the great social documents. The table below summarises this continuity; the following sections detail its stages.

Leo XIII: the roots in Rerum novarum

Forty years before Pius XI, Leo XIII already laid the foundation stones. Rerum novarum (1891) defends the family as a "domestic society" anterior to the State, which cannot be absorbed by it: the family has rights and duties "at least equal to those of the State".^[48] The encyclical also defends the right of association of workers — the future trade unions — as intermediate bodies necessary between the individual and public power.^[49] The subsidiary logic is already whole, even though the word is still missing.

John XXIII: Mater et magistra and "socialisation"

In 1961, John XXIII confronted a new phenomenon which he called "socialisation": the multiplication of bonds, institutions and regulations that enfold daily life.^[50] The pope does not condemn it — it can serve the common good — but he warns: this thickening of social relations must not reduce human beings to mere automatons nor stifle their responsible initiative.^[51] He expressly reaffirms the principle of Quadragesimo anno. In Pacem in terris (1963), he even extends it to relations between States and a possible world authority: the latter should respect subsidiarity toward nations.^[52]

Vatican II and Gaudium et spes

The Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et spes (1965), promotes the active participation of citizens and the vitality of associations as conditions of a society on a human scale.^[53] The defence of intermediate bodies and of local initiative is constant there, in coherence with concern for the common good and the dignity of the person.

John Paul II: Centesimus annus and the critique of the "Welfare State"

It is Saint John Paul II who gives the principle its contemporary formulation and its most discussed application. In Centesimus annus (1991), meditating on the collapse of communism, he warns that the "Welfare State" can, by wanting to take charge of everything, produce the opposite of the intended effect: by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, it causes a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase in public agencies dominated by bureaucratic ways of thinking rather than by concern for serving their clients, along with an enormous increase in spending.^[54] Against this drift, the pope sets the principle of subsidiarity in its now canonical formula, which the Catechism will take up two years later.^[55][56]

Benedict XVI: subsidiarity and solidarity inseparable

Benedict XVI, in Caritas in veritate (2009), brings the decisive clarification against any distortion: subsidiarity can never be separated from solidarity.^[57]

"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." — Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate, 58^[58]

It is the most quoted formula of balance: subsidiarity without solidarity = everyone for himself; solidarity without subsidiarity = infantilising assistance. Pope Francis confirmed this balance in his catechesis of 23 September 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, presenting subsidiarity as a path of social healing and hope.^[59]

Subsidiarity cannot be understood in isolation. It is one of the four permanent principles that illuminate one another.^[60]

With the dignity of the person: everything starts from the person

Subsidiarity is, at bottom, a consequence of the dignity of the person. If the person is the "principle, subject and end" of all social institutions,^[61] then no structure may dispossess her of what she is capable of doing herself without diminishing her. Confiscating a responsibility is diminishing a person. Subsidiarity protects the space in which responsible freedom is exercised.

With the common good: the end of all subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is not an absolute: it is wholly ordered to the common good. The Catechism specifies that the higher authority supports lower societies "always with a view to the common good".^[62] When the common good requires it — security, justice, relief of the weakest — the higher level must act. Subsidiarity organises responsibilities; the common good sets their direction.

With solidarity: the inseparable pair

This is the most delicate articulation. The following table compares the two principles, which Caritas in veritate declares inseparable.^[63]

The two principles do not oppose each other: they correct each other. Subsidiarity prevents solidarity from becoming smothering; solidarity prevents subsidiarity from becoming an alibi for abandonment.^[64]

The family, the first society

The family is the first application of subsidiarity. A "natural and primordial" society, anterior to the State, it has its own rights which public power must protect and support, never absorb.^[65][66] The State helps the family (family policy, fiscal justice, support for families in difficulty), but does not take its place in its proper role — notably the education of children. See The family, the basic cell of society.

School and the first rights of parents

Education is a classic field of application. Parents are the first educators of their children; school and State come as subsidium, to help them, not to dispossess them of this original right-duty.^[67] That is exactly the subsidiary logic: the higher instance (the State, the school) seconds the lower instance (the family) without supplanting it. See School and parental rights.

Intermediate bodies: associations, unions, communities

Between the individual and the State stretches the whole fabric of intermediate bodies: associations, trade unions, cooperatives, religious communities, mutual societies, municipalities. Social doctrine sees in them the natural terrain of responsible freedom and the rampart against the atomisation of individuals.^[68] A society rich in living intermediate bodies is a subsidiary society; a society in which only the individual facing the State remains slides toward totalitarianism or toward anomie.

The role of the State: neither absent nor invasive

Subsidiarity sketches the just role of political authority: neither an absent State that leaves the weak without relief, nor an invasive State that does everything in place of everyone.^[69] The State keeps functions that are properly its own and that no one else can assume — justice, security, defence of the common good, protection of the most vulnerable. But it must "supplement" where lower bodies no longer suffice, then withdraw as soon as they can again. See Political authority according to the Church.

Decentralisation, federalism and political subsidiarity

On the institutional plane, subsidiarity argues for decentralisation: entrusting decisions to the level closest to the persons concerned, moving up toward the centre only what requires broader coordination.^[70] It thus meets, without identifying with them, the traditions of federalism and local autonomy. The principle holds at every storey: municipality, region, State, and up to the international relations that democratic practice and globalisation make ever more pressing.

Remarkably, a principle born in a Catholic encyclical has become a legal principle of the European Union.

Maastricht (1992) and the Treaty of Lisbon

The Treaty of Maastricht (1992) inscribed subsidiarity in Community law for the first time; the Treaty of Lisbon (2007, in force 2009) enshrined it in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union as one of the fundamental principles governing the exercise of competences, alongside conferral and proportionality.^[71][72] The rule: in areas outside its exclusive competence, the Union acts only if the objectives cannot be achieved "sufficiently" by the Member States (at central, regional or local level) but can be "better" achieved at Union level.^[73]

An amputated subsidiarity? What the civil version keeps and forgets

European subsidiarity keeps the idea of organising competences between levels. But it often loses its foundation: in Catholic doctrine, subsidiarity first protects the person, the family and intermediate bodies — not merely the distribution between administrative tiers.^[74] Cut off from the dignity of the person and the common good that ground it, subsidiarity risks being merely a technique for sharing power between administrations, where the Church makes it a requirement of respect for living persons and communities.

"Subsidiarity is neoliberalism in disguise"?

Objection. By limiting the State and valuing private initiative, subsidiarity would be merely a Christian cover for capitalism and public disengagement.

Answer. That confuses subsidiarity with its negative half. The subsidium is first of all assistance owed: the higher authority has the duty to intervene when lower bodies are overwhelmed.^[75][76] Centesimus annus, which criticises the Welfare State, defends in the same movement workers' rights and the necessity of a protective legal framework.^[77] And Caritas in veritate locks the reading: a subsidiarity without solidarity "gives way to social privatism" — precisely what the Church refuses.^[78]

"A pretext for the State to shirk"?

Objection. Invoking subsidiarity would allow the State to offload its responsibilities onto families, associations or the market.

Answer. A subsidiarity that abandons is a subsidiarity betrayed. The principle authorises the withdrawal of the higher level only if the lower level can really do the task — not because it is decreed, but because it is given the means. Where the family, the school or the association are crushed by poverty or injustice, subsidiarity commands relief; it does not excuse it.^[79]

When the top MUST act: the limits of subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is therefore not a principle of inaction. It knows its own limits: faced with a catastrophe, a health crisis, a structural injustice or an attack on fundamental rights, the higher authority must act forcefully — it is then the common good that requires it.^[80] Pope Francis recalled this in 2020: well lived, subsidiarity "liberates" and makes hope grow, but it presupposes the participation of all, from the summit to the base, in solidarity.^[81] Subsidiarity organises responsibility; it never dispenses from acting.

Trust, responsibility and respect for persons

At bottom, subsidiarity is a question of trust. Trusting the person, the family, the community means believing that they are capable — respecting in them the image of God. Conversely, wanting to do everything in their place, "for their own good", is a form of contempt disguised as benevolence. Good government, like good education, consists in making capable, not in making oneself indispensable.

The God who "entrusts to every creature the functions it is capable of performing"

The ultimate root of the principle is theological. The Christian God is not a tyrant who would do everything directly: He governs the world by associating His creatures with His work, conferring on them the dignity of true causes.^[82][83] Human subsidiarity is the imitation of this divine way of governing:

"This mode of governance ought to be followed in social life. The way God acts in governing the world, which bears witness to such great regard for human freedom, should inspire the wisdom of those who govern human communities." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1884^[84]

Respecting subsidiarity is thus imitating the patience and generosity of God, who never treats us as minors, but as sons called to act. It is, in the social order, a form of political charity: loving persons and communities enough to let them grow.

On the kindred principles of social doctrine:

• The dignity of the human person
• The common good
• Solidarity
• The universal destination of goods

On the applications of subsidiarity:

• The family, the basic cell of society
• School and parental rights
• Trade unions and social doctrine
• Political authority according to the Church
• Rerum novarum and social doctrine

On the counterfeits that subsidiarity combats:

• Totalitarianism
• Socialism and its limits
• Economic liberalism