Some Principles of Catholic Social Teaching

04-12-2026Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

What is the role of the free market (private sector)? There are good reasons to hold that in many circumstances the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. A truly competitive market is an effective instrument for attaining important objectives of justice: moderating the excessive profits of individual businesses, responding to consumers’ demands, bringing about a more efficient use and conservation of resources, rewarding entrepreneurship and innovation, making information available so that it is really possible to compare and purchase products in an atmosphere of healthy competition.

The market cannot supply every category of human goods hence there cannot be an idolatry of the market. Human needs require goods that go beyond commodities and consumerism. When man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a human person who produces and consumes to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relation to the human person and ends up alienating and oppressing him. In other words, man does not live for things, does not live for bread alone.

What is the principle of subsidiarity? Subsidiarity is among the most constant and characteristic directives of the Church’s social teaching. It is impossible to help people without showing concern for the family, local groups and associations. Subsidiarity requires that assistance to individuals should be accomplished at the level closest to them so that a higher or more centralized form of government ought not to usurp what can be accomplished by a lower level of government. 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 grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater association what lesser and subordinate groups can accomplish.

This principle is opposed to certain forms of centralization, bureaucratization, and welfare assistance and to the unjustified and excessive presence of the State in public mechanisms. By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, The Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. For subsidiarity to be practiced there must be respect for the human person and the family; greater appreciation of intermediate associations, the encouragement of private initiative, safeguarding human rights and the rights of minorities, decentralizing bureaucracies and administration.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church indicates that it may be necessary for the State to “stimulate the economy” because it is impossible for civil societies to support initiatives on its own. But subsidiarity requires that this may not continue longer than absolutely necessary because justification for this is based on notions of exceptional nature. Of course, this rests on the question what better stimulates an economy, enormous public spending at the federal level requiring a great increase in taxes or cutting people’s taxes to put more capital into play in the economy? That is part of a current debate.

In the current palaver about socialism keep in mind the teachings of Pope Pius XI: For, according to Christian teaching, man, endowed with a social nature, is placed on this earth so that by leading a life in society and under an authority ordained of God he may fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by faithfully fulfilling the duties of his craft or other calling he may obtain for himself temporal and at the same time eternal happiness.

Socialism, on the other hand, wholly ignoring and indifferent to this sublime end of both man and society, affirms that human association has been instituted for the sake of material advantage alone. If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.