Charity in Truth: Subsidiarity with Solidarity

Pope Benedict made an important change in the discussion of subsidiarity in his 2009 social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate.[1] He described subsidiarity as a particular manifestation of charity, rather than subsuming it under justice, where it had been categorized before. Under justice, subsidiarity played the role of defining the limits of the responsibility of the different levels of society in dealing with their relevant social issues. The encyclical Caritas in Veritate is about the all-importance of Charity in Truth for the development of the person and of people. It is Pope Benedict’s meditation on Pope Paul’s encyclical entitled Populorum Progressio, On the Development of Peoples.

Pope Benedict uses the term “integral human development” to capture the notion that both persons and nations have the vocation to develop fully in every dimension.[2] He finds caritas in veritate, charity in truth, to be the motive force in every development process, placing it at the center of the process, and at the center of Catholic social doctrine itself. Benedict uses the terms gift and gratuitousness to capture this idea of God’s love. This paper will explore his ideas of charity in truth regarding the Social Question. We will see that he views the concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity as complementary; both are rightly seen as gift and aid to accepting responsibility in freedom. If they do not work in tandem, charity in truth is denied.

Cultural, Economic, and Political Critique

Pope Benedict writes because he sees many of the same problems identified by Pope Paul VI, who warned of the dangers of “utopian and ideological visions,” such as the technocratic ideology that Pope Benedict finds prevalent today (CV §14). In fact, Benedict defines alienation in terms of ideology: “Man is alienated when he is alone, when he is detached from reality, when he stops thinking and believing in a foundation. All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies, and false utopias” (§53). He is thinking of our technologically oriented society in the realms of both production and consumption which affect and often dominate our work and social lives. This creates a culture built around technology, especially in the field of bioethics where conscience is simply invited to take note of any new technological possibilities (§75). These scenarios reflect cultural perspectives that deny human dignity and practices that help foster a materialistic and mechanistic understanding of human life. A further danger comes from the social communications media which “effectively support their subordination to economic interests, intent on dominating the market and, not least, to attempts to impose cultural models that serve ideological and political agendas” (§73).

Benedict believes that cultures have weakened and are not as strong and able as in the time of Paul VI to withstand the direct assault by the technological ideology, which has proliferated through rapid globalization (§26). The increased commercialization of cultural exchange has accelerated the separation of culture from human nature, and cultures find it harder and harder to define themselves in relation to a transcendent vocation. When this happens, new risks of enslavement and manipulation ensue (§26). Further, the reductive vision of a practical atheism is exported by the rich nations to the poor nations. In Benedict’s words: “This is the damage that super-development causes to authentic development when it is accompanied by moral underdevelopment” (§29).

Addressing economic problems, themselves inseparable from the political realm, Pope Benedict XVI echoes Pope Paul VI in stating:

Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility . . . Grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution (§36).

Therefore, “the scandal of glaring inequality continues” (§22). He finds that the systematic rise in social inequality both within and across countries brings a loss of social cohesion and places the economy at risk, through “the progressive erosion of ‘social capital’: the network of relationships of trust, dependability, and respect for rules, all of which are indispensable for any form of civil coexistence” (§32). At one point, he points to particularly damaging processes:

The technical forces in play, the global interrelations, the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing, large-scale migration of peoples, often provoked by some particular circumstance and then given insufficient attention, the unregulated exploitation of the earth’s resources: these problems are new in comparison to those addressed by Pope Paul VI, but of decisive impact upon the present and future good of humanity (§21).

The market is not a negative force by its nature, but becomes so by the cultural configurations that define it and give it shape and direction:

Often the development of peoples is considered a matter of financial engineering, the freeing up of markets, the removal of tariffs, investment in production, and institutional reforms—in other words, a purely technical matter. . . . Development will never be fully guaranteed through automatic or impersonal forces whether they derive from the market or from international politics. Development is impossible without upright men and women, without financiers and politicians whose consciences are finely attuned to the requirements of the common good (§71).

This technological danger enters society primarily through the market. He finds two arenas in which the nineteenth-century liberalization processes that were targeted by Rerum Novarum remain with us. The first is in the area of incomes, where inequalities of income seem only to be increasing around the world, including in the rich countries where “new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging” (§22). The second is in the field of technology, where we all too often simply accept that “the capital market has been significantly liberalized, and modern technological thinking can suggest that investment is merely a technical act, not a human and ethical one” (§40). He adds: “The ‘technical’ worldview that follows from this vision is now so dominant that truth has come to be seen as coinciding with the possible, but when the sole criterion of truth is efficiency and utility, development is automatically denied” (§70).

The economic process of globalization has had major impacts on the politics of all nations, but perhaps especially on the less powerful countries. As developing countries have been brought into competition with one another for jobs through the provision of favorable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labor market, the downsizing of social security systems generates grave dangers in developing countries for worker rights, for human rights, and for the solidarity of traditional forms of the welfare state (§25). More general problems regarding rights are that individual rights, when detached from the framework of duties, can run wild . . . while “elementary and basic rights remain unacknowledged and are violated in much of the world” (§43). He states, “A link has often been noted between claims to a “right to excess” within affluent societies and the lack of food, drinkable water, basic instruction and elementary health care in areas of the underdeveloped world” (§43).

The mindset producing these problems is fundamental to the “technocratic cultural perspective” (§70), called “technocracy” by Pope Paul VI (Populorum Progressio §34), which shapes economics and politics and which makes pursuit of the universal common good much more difficult. John Paul II earlier identified two key structures of sin in our day that help to produce this mindset in the “the all-consuming desire for profit, and . . . the thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one’s will upon others,” adding the qualifier “at any price” to stress the absolutizing of human attitudes (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §37). His constant call to change consumerist lifestyles which are deeply alienating to the human vocation and “to create life-styles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness, and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings, and investments” (Centesimus Annus §36) form a backdrop for Benedict’s views of the powerful influence of the technological paradigm in sustaining this mindset.

Benedict summarizes the deepest reasons for the dysfunctions he sees in economics and politics in this way:

The conviction that man is self-sufficient and can successfully eliminate the evil present in history by his own action alone has led him to confuse happiness and salvation with immanent forms of material prosperity and social action. Then, the conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from “influences” of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social, and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise. As I said in my Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, history is thereby deprived of Christian hope, deprived of a powerful social resource at the service of integral human development, sought in freedom and in justice (CV §34).

An associated danger that Pope Benedict sees is what he calls the binary model of market and state. Benedict sees the logic of the market as that of giving for the sake of acquiring, while the logic of the state is that of giving out of duty; the monopoly of these two forms is corrosive of society because solidarity among persons, participation, and actions of gratuitousness do not fit easily into these forms (CV §41). They lack the logic of gift, of gratuitousness, which is necessary to ensure the humanity of the person.

Solidarity

Pope Benedict joins Pope Paul VI in Populorum Progressio in finding the causes of underdevelopment in our neglect of the duties of solidarity, in our inadequate living out of charity in truth. Both thinking and the will are responsible for this neglect and the result is a lack of the necessary “brotherhood among individuals and peoples” (§19). There is urgency in the need for reform, both because of the ongoing injustice and due to charity in truth itself: Christ’s charity drives us on to solidarity (§20). Solidarity, then, is an essential principle in Catholic social doctrine. It is, in the words of John Paul II, “the moral obligation, according to the degree of each one’s responsibility, to take into consideration, in personal decisions and decisions of government, this relationship of universality, this interdependence which exists between their conduct and the poverty and underdevelopment of so many millions of people.” It is, further, “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all” (SRS §38). As John Paul points out, solidarity operates as a principle of political and social organization as well as a virtue (CA §10). Solidarity must operate at all levels; it is to be practiced by the family, the Church, all intermediate organizations, including businesses, the media, and perhaps especially public authorities, within countries and across countries—and especially in relations with poor countries.

Benedict prioritizes solidarity, firmly linking it to the logic of gift: “In the global era, economic activity cannot prescind from gratuitousness, which fosters and disseminates solidarity and responsibility for justice and the common good among the different economic players. It is clearly a specific and profound form of economic democracy” (CV §38). Economic forms based on solidarity build up society; both the market and politics, not just civic society, need individuals open to reciprocal gift (§39). After lamenting that all the technical choices made thus far have yielded such mixed results in fostering the development of peoples (§71), Benedict’s hope is that reciprocal gift permeating all social, economic, and political forms is the path of solidarity which can bring authentic integral human development to fruition.[3]

Regarding economics in the light of solidarity, he is clear. He wants a free market where enterprises pursue different institutional ends.

Alongside profit-oriented private enterprise and the various types of public enterprise, there must be room for commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends to take root and express themselves. It is from their reciprocal encounter in the marketplace that one may expect hybrid forms of commercial behavior to emerge, and hence an attentiveness to ways of civilizing the economy (§38).

The great challenge before us, accentuated by the problems of development in this global era and made even more urgent by the economic and financial crisis, is to demonstrate, in thinking and behavior, . . . that in commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (§36).

Markets need “internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust” for the market to fulfil its proper economic function” (§35). It is a demand both of charity and of truth (§36).

Subsidiarity with Solidarity

Although Benedict’s major focus in the document is on solidarity and communion, solidarity must be coupled with subsidiarity for responsibility to be meaningful. Pope Benedict uses the concept of subsidiarity in his discussion of governance of the process of globalization. This process requires authority since a common good, the global common good, is involved, but the authority “must be organized in a subsidiary and stratified way” (§57). He urges the articulation of political authority at the local, national, and international levels; by this he means a dispersed political authority, effective on different levels, as a way of directing economic globalization and not undermining the foundations of democracy (§41). He discusses globalization in terms of the increasing interconnectedness of humanity and how this will produce benefits as individuals and peoples take up their respective responsibilities, both singly and collectively (§42). Especially in countries excluded or marginalized from the more influential circles of the global economy, it is important to move ahead with subsidiarity-based projects which affirm rights but at the same time provide for the weak and vulnerable to take up their responsibilities (§47). In fact, by a review and reordering of their own welfare policies in the light of subsidiarity, rich countries might be able to free up funds to support Third World development (§60).

It is essential that the principle of subsidiarity work closely with that of solidarity. Subsidiarity without solidarity gives way to social privatism, he informs us, with the individualistic, utilitarian, materialistic, even hedonistic dangers he warns us about throughout the document (§58). At the same time, solidarity without the truth of subsidiarity gives way to a paternalistic social assistance that demeans those in need. The latter kind of aid can lock people into dependence and “foster situations of localized oppression and exploitation in the receiving country” (§58). Aid programs, acts of solidarity, must be supported by the grassroots participation that exemplifies subsidiarity (§58). Subsidiarity is “first and foremost a form of assistance to the human person via the autonomy of intermediate bodies” (§57). It is always meant to foster emancipation of the person “because it fosters freedom and participation through assumption of responsibility, hence respecting the dignity of the person (§57). Both solidarity and subsidiarity stem directly from charity in truth, for charity in truth underpins all gifts.

Perhaps we can begin to see what he means when he describes subsidiarity as a particular manifestation of charity. Benedict’s view is that we cannot be just to someone unless we love that person well enough to know their needs. In Benedict’s words, “To love someone is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it” (§7). We cannot work to help secure what is due to the person unless we know what their needs are, what the person’s good is, and we cannot know that unless we love them, unless we establish a relationship of charity in truth with them. If we act to support other persons and the common good with charity in truth, we will be able to act justly toward them. In Benedict’s words, “While in the past it was possible to argue that justice had to come first and gratuitousness could follow afterwards, as a complement, today it is clear that without gratuitousness there can be no justice in the first place” (§38). Subsidiarity’s true purpose is to play this vital role of gift, complementing solidarity, rather than its more common use to define the boundaries of duties and responsibilities of the various levels of associations, institutions, and political authorities in society. Instead, he insists that subsidiarity, viewed as gift, is a necessary means to support others in taking up their duties to be all they can be in the development process (§43). Viewing subsidiarity as a manifestation of charity erases the tension between solidarity and subsidiarity which we often encounter.

Charity in truth gets us to know and love the weak and the vulnerable, and subsidiarity is a powerful tool that we deploy in its role of enabling the poor and vulnerable to grow in the knowledge and capabilities to manage their own affairs, earn higher incomes, and participate meaningfully in society and politics. However, the growing inequalities and marginalization of many people around the world leads him to talk of charity in truth guiding us to lay the foundations for the proper operation of subsidiarity. We cannot insist on a strict subsidiarity, for example, of a parent exercising responsibility for supporting the family, without caring for the family enough to discover that the process of marginalization has gone too far—perhaps by lessened access to education for children, or less access to jobs, or social support. Charity in truth and solidarity must improve conditions so that subsidiarity may truly function and enable families to take up their responsibilities. The same holds true for nations. Shutting poorer nations out of rich nations’ markets robs them of the main support in order to be able to develop properly. Charity in truth through solidarity must lead subsidiarity. The old expression was that charity must lead justice.

Political development, if it is to be authentic, must overcome the illusion that we are self-sufficient and can eliminate evils of history by our own power (§34). Rather, charity in truth, as the absolutely gratuitous gift of God, must operate in the political arena if both distributive justice and social justice are to be realized (§35). The political community must take its share of responsibility in charity in truth for the pursuit of the common good (§36). He wants both economics, whose underlying spirit is that of giving to acquire, and politics, whose underlying spirit is that of giving out of duty, to be lived out of charity in truth, through the joint operation of solidarity and subsidiarity, so as to reflect in outlook and programs the meaning of the human person and pursue genuine human progress.

Benedict wants the state to regain its competencies and believes that we need a dispersed political authority, with a focus on “consolidating constitutional, juridical and administrative systems in countries that do not yet fully enjoy these goods” (§41). Further, in addition to economic assistance, aid needs to be “directed towards reinforcing the guarantees proper to the State of law: a system of public order that respects human rights, truly democratic institutions” (§41). He follows his predecessors in calling for a world political authority for purposes of managing the global economy, especially during economic crises, to foster disarmament, food security, and peace, and to guarantee protection of the environment, as well as to regulate migration (§67). “Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and commit to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth” (§67).

Always act out of charity in love. Paul VI was rightly known for the slogan, “If you want peace, work for justice.” Benedict’s version of the same slogan might rightly state, “If you want peace, practice charity in truth in all human relationships.” The logic of a particular sphere of action reflects the underlying spirit, and Benedict wants the two currently dominant spheres, economics and politics, to be thoroughly permeated with the spirit of gratuitousness, that is, with charity in truth, so as to reflect the meaning of the human person and guide our actions.

“Development requires attention to the spiritual life, a serious consideration of the experiences of trust in God, spiritual fellowship in Christ, reliance upon God’s providence and mercy, love and forgiveness, self-denial, acceptance of others, justice and peace” (§79). Openness to God’s gift of love in truth will open our souls to being filled with God’s boundless love. The proper response of the soul to this gift of love is the upswelling of gratuitousness, solidarity with subsidiarity, and communion that Benedict wants to see in us in all dimensions of life. All this is essential if “hearts of stone” are to be transformed into “hearts of flesh” (Ezek 36:26), rendering life on earth “divine” and thus more worthy of humanity (§79). Charity in truth leading subsidiarity (via actions of solidarity) must be the essential part of this process.

Living out the Theme of Caritas in Veritate

One way of thinking about what to do is to imagine a spiritual program based on charity in truth, gratuitousness, and development as gift and communion, using Benedict’s hints throughout the document. If society is primarily a spiritual reality, as John XXIII tells us in Pacem in Terris, then a living out of a good spiritual program will more properly “exert a guiding influence on culture, economics, social institutions, political movements and forms, laws, and all the other components which go to make up the external community of men and its continual development” (Pacem in Terris §36).

Benedict points throughout the document to a direction in the spiritual life to which we are called, in living fully and in building our consciences. On the one hand, he points to isolation, alienation, self-sufficiency, ideology, and illusion as causes of underdevelopment; on the other, to communion, solidarity with subsidiarity, and living God’s plan as our vocation to build up the community and as primary sources of development. I present below three possible movements of the spiritual life, each followed immediately by a concrete example that came to mind as I thought of examples of how that movement might be lived.

First, one movement of the spirit would be from isolation to communion. Benedict discusses isolation as one of the deepest forms of poverty, including material forms, stemming from the inability to love. We have a tragic tendency to close in on ourselves, but as persons, we are alienated when we are alone, detached from reality, placing too much faith in merely human projects, ideologies, and false utopias. Rather, “The development of peoples depends, above all, on recognition that the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side” (CV §53).

As spiritual beings, we are defined by interpersonal relations. Benedict’s perspective on communion is illuminated by the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity within the one divine Substance, a relationship to which we are called as well:

In the light of the revealed mystery of the Trinity, we understand that true openness does not mean loss of individual identity but profound interpenetration. This also emerges from the common human experiences of love and truth. Just as the sacramental love of spouses unites them spiritually in “one flesh” (Gen 2:24, Matt 19:5, Eph 5:31) and makes out of the two a real and relational unity, so in an analogous way truth unites spirits and causes them to think in unison, attracting them as a unity to itself (§54).

So we may think of one movement of the spiritual life Benedict intends for us as the movement from isolation to communion. Living such a life can lead us more easily to collaborate with others for the common good. Concrete examples of each spiritual movement point to how actual people have incorporated charity in truth into their working lives.

One of my sustaining memories is of the dinner conversations I grew up with at home. My dad was an automobile mechanic and self-educated man who owned his shop and who worried about the condition of his workers. When work was slack and my mother, the accountant, wanted to let go of a worker or two, my dad balked. Lalo was saving to go to college to become a teacher, Romeo drank and he might harm himself or his family, Higinio had a number of kids, and so on. In the end, my father would first take the hit himself, then if conditions did not improve, he would ration work so that the workers each lost a day of work a week. He worked very hard not to have to release a worker.

A second facet of this movement of the spiritual life can be seen as the movement from the way of self-sufficiency to that of solidarity. Benedict warns us that although I may become wrongly convinced that I am the sole author of myself, of my life and society, that error is a consequence of being selfishly closed in on myself, of original sin, which is present in social conditions and in the structure of society (§34). Our institutions are not sufficient to guarantee fulfillment of the right to development, however much we may have once thought them to be so (§11). Progress of a merely economic and technological sort is insufficient (§23); human knowledge itself is insufficient and “the conclusions of science cannot indicate by themselves the path towards integral human development” (§30).

Early in the encyclical, echoing Pope Paul VI (PP §66), Benedict finds the cause of underdevelopment in the lack of brotherly love between individuals and peoples, something which may not be attained by human effort alone (CV §19). Such development requires a transcendent vision; it requires God because “without him, development is either denied, or entrusted exclusively to man, who falls into the trap of thinking he can bring about his own salvation, and ends up promoting a dehumanized form of development” (§11). Solidarity is required to move beyond our fascination with self-sufficiency, as our young couple demonstrates just below.

In the past few years, a young couple started a restaurant in Denver on Colfax Street and called it SAME, So All May Eat. They were determined that at this little restaurant no one without money would go hungry. Instead of a cash register, there is a box for contributions where one can contribute what one wants or can afford. If a diner has no money, he or she is asked to work for the meal, perhaps by washing dishes, but there is no strict requirement to work. The couple both kept their regular jobs for a while to subsidize the business, then the wife quit her job to oversee the operations more closely. The husband works at the restaurant but has kept his outside job in order to keep the family going and to subsidize the restaurant as well. The business was started in 2006 and is still in operation, relying on the solidarity of the public with the homeless.

A third movement of the spiritual life is the movement from ideology and illusion to the reality of living God’s plan for us in charity and truth. Ideologies oversimplify the reality of life, whereas integral human development, which requires a full understanding both of the identity of the partners in development and of the processes of development, requires a commitment to foster interaction at different levels of human knowledge (§26). The prevalent ideology, the technocratic ideology, threatens to take over the entire development process and hence runs the risk of detaching progress from its moral evaluation and hence from our responsibility (§14). Rather than falling into the grasp of such an ideology or illusion, we are called to find the truth of our lives in God’s plan for us, in the vocation to love our brothers and sisters in the truth of his plan for us. It is in finding and adhering to this truth, defending it, articulating it with humility, bearing witness to it in our lives that we become free (§1).

My third story is of a remarkable realtor from Kansas City I met some years ago when I was on a diocesan study committee. She worked in a company populated with aggressive realtors who easily and quickly sized up the wealthier clientele walking through the door and snapped up their business. She decided that she would not compete with them but rather would view her work as a vocation, that of putting ordinary, middle-class Americans into good homes at fair prices. She voluntarily chose to take a lower return at work, in good measure for the sake of the greater good she was called to by her faith.

We must engage the world in the course of living a deeply spiritual life, and the three spiritual movements discussed above help lead us into communion with the source of the love that will animate and encourage us in such engagement. We are able by living spiritually to accept more fully the gift of grace, “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5). As the objects of God’s love, we receive God’s love and this strengthens the intellect and will to “weave networks of charity” (§5), such as we found in our three examples. The goal is, in Paul VI’s words, to build “a society according to freedom and justice, in the ideal and historical perspective of a civilization animated by love” (§13).

I think of the people above living out spiritual programs such as the one outlined as engaged in the process of erecting local organizations or processes based on the concrete commitment to live a life of charity in truth, with solidarity and subsidiarity working together. The beauty of this is that each of us can do this in our own way, whether in or through our family, any organization or collaborative effort, including our work, we are involved in, or through the creation of a new organization meant to meet a true unmet human need; in short we can do this in any dimension of our lives. Indeed, we are to do precisely that in the spirit of charity in truth because in the economy of charity to which we are called, we are expected to give not only what we have, but who we are. Only through living our lives firmly committed to charity in truth can we begin to attain the integral development of every person and all peoples.