“It’s the economy, stupid.”
That’s what we’ve heard really matters in our elections. Economic growth and the consequent effects on our standard of living. It’s a dangerous train of thought if you think about it. Isn’t the nation’s economy built upon people? Is economic growth always good for people, or can it mask our need for something more?
The Church reminds us that people transcend the economy, for economic goods exist to foster the realization of the common good. Secularism threatens the foundations of society because, without God, we lose sight of anything beyond immediate prosperity. St. Paul teaches us that “there is no authority except from God” (Rom 13:1). Our own wills are not the ultimate foundation of justice and law, for there is a standard of truth and goodness beyond ourselves to which we must answer. Without a transcendent reference, our laws become arbitrary expressions of sheer power, inevitably leading to catastrophe.
The Goal
Society exists so that we can pursue the good together. The Catechism quotes one of the most ancient Christian documents, The Epistle of Barnabas, to lay out the impetus for societal communion: “Do not live entirely isolated, having retreated into yourselves, as if you were already justified, but gather instead to seek the common good together” (§1905). There are goods we all seek, which we can more easily realize together. That includes material needs, but it certainly includes higher ones as well, for unlike animals, we cannot simply fulfill our needs on a bodily level. We want to know the truth, and so we build schools. We want to create beauty, so we build structures that rise to the heavens. And we want to find something that will last beyond this passing life. Throughout history, this has driven society as people have banded together to manifest the most profound truth that together, we are ordered to a Good beyond this world that should be worshipped and celebrated.
Society exists to pursue the full flourishing of the human person— sprung from the family and ordered toward higher goods, such as the pursuit of truth and virtue. The Church has always taught that the family is the foundation of society. Without people, there is no society, and there is no future without children. To act contrary to the good of human life undermines the very purpose of society and the foundation of the rule of law as securing the good. We can never view government as an absolute good because it must respect its roots in the family and the goods that transcend it, including the dignity of the human person. A society that strikes against its own foundations in the dignity of the human person and the family will inevitably fall.
Today, we face such a crisis, with the common good undermined by a culture of death that undercuts our transcendent identity to remake us in our own image. Government has become a leviathan larger than our ability to control, which doles out life and death on its unbalanced utilitarian scales. Technology has facilitated the rise of the Mass State, with its bloated bureaucracy stretching its tentacles into every aspect of our lives, creating passivity to political and economic forces that stretch across the globe. For the first time, society can be managed remotely on a vast scale, taking political direction out of local communities and away from those who know the needs on the ground.
Through the principle of subsidiarity, the Church encourages us to recover local participation in civic life, directing society locally whenever possible. In Centesimus Annus, St. John Paul II teaches us that “the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: 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 coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (48). He calls us to rediscover a genuine political sense rooted in our local communities.
Even amid crisis, we remain political beings, meant to live in communion with others, and we cannot retreat from the problems of modern life in an individualistic fashion. To live the good life, we must learn to depend on one another, not in a passive way, but by building genuine community to realize the many unmet needs of our time. Guided by the principle of subsidiarity, we can reclaim the order of society toward the good of the person and our cooperative dependence on one another to achieve society’s goals. Seeking selfish gain at the expense of others fundamentally undermines the common good.
This is why the Church also lays out the principle of solidarity, which John Paul characterized as “defending the weakest” and “placing certain limits on . . . autonomy” (ibid., 16). Once again, this begins locally, helping families face society’s challenges before imposing government programs: “In order to overcome today’s widespread individualistic mentality, what is required is a concrete commitment to solidarity and charity, beginning in the family” (ibid., 49). If we neglect the principle of solidarity, we also jeopardize subsidiarity, for the leviathan of the State will intervene to address problems that we refuse to face.
Peter Maurin laid out the proper goal we should seek: “To make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good.” What else could we want? Society exists so that we can achieve the good, and the good is realized in virtue, which in turn requires friendship and cooperation. If we do not seek the good in our communities and build local institutions guided by truth, virtue and friendship, we will remain cogs spinning within an economic machine.
It’s time to reorder economic prosperity to higher goods; no longer an end in itself but a means toward greater goods, such as charity, education, the arts and, ultimately, the glory of God.
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Thank you, Dr. Staudt. From a fellow Oblate of Our Lady of Clear Creek.
Interesting piece Dr Staudt. Without the biblical and Catholic (pre New Church 1962) principle of a division between the City of the chosen and the anti-City of the lost, it is impossible to understand the anti-Catholic society with which the baptised rub shoulders? True ordering of Church and wider society is impossible without recognition that Christ is King. All good ordering stems from recognition of His Kingship. In abandonning the reign of Christ the King, Ecumenical Novos Ordo New Church has abandonned the post-Catholic Church and Wider Society to the Prince of this World.
Common good is an elusive principle to meet in its fullness in our vast ever changing world values. The greatest impact on world affairs was executed when high priest Caiphas chided the Sanhedrin that it were better that one man die rather than the entire nation.
That truth has two moral values. One was the unjust sentence of an innocent Man. The other, that it wasn’t that his death on the cross saved the Jewish nation because the Romans annihilated it. Rather his death theoretically saved the world. At least we’ve had the opportunity since. Otherwise the common good must include the good of all persons not simply the overwhelming majority. Marxism [it was actually Friedrich Engels who wrote the Manifesto] bastardized the concept of Christianity’s common good removing the rights of the individual for sake of the State’s concept of what is considered good.
The bellwether for the correct application of the common good is the Catholic Church. When the Church taught and practiced its doctrines revealed by Christ transmitted by the Apostles the world was a better place. Today as Staudt observes the world is a better place technologically and materially although not spiritually. A reflection of the current malaise of the Church.
Dr. Staudt writes against the prosperity gospel and in favor of both Solidarity and Subsidiarity, always together. Yours truly offers, here, a rare economics-related “case study” of possible interest to other policy wonks like myself. But, also, with transferable lesson on how muddled synodality might be handled better…
About Subsidiarity and Solidarity, consider the case of the nation-wide transportation industries, all of which were federal deregulated (!) in the late-1970s and mid-1980s: the privately-owned (not socialized) railroads, trucking, global shipping (container ships), and aviation industries. Routes, rates and schedules were no longer centrally decided by public agencies in Washington DC; and services to the public could be improved and private bankruptcies avoided. Part of real Solidarity and the Common Good. Yes?
WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE, say in the 1990s and beyond, to convene—at a regional scale—a real and public-private (!) Round Table among these competing and sometimes cooperating parties? And, together with all of the still-related federal agencies (oversight over safety and potential monopolies): the Federal Railroad, Highway, Aviation, and Maritime Administrations, plus Homeland Security, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, and even a few local governments and private think tanks, and a few maritime ports as national Gateways serving local economies and global/national supply chains? All dealing with moving every kind of stuff into and out of markets in the continental United States.
An amazing exercise involving many “languages” of commerce as parts of the Common Good. A genuine exercise co-sponsored by public and private entities, both (as in “walk the talk”), and further, also capable of being viewed through the lens Catholic Social Teaching—specifically Subsidiarity and Solidarity. As one involved in this drill, yours truly was asked later to write this thing up for publication for the Society of Catholic Social Scientists (the Catholic Social Science Review, 2014).
TRANSFERABLE LESSONS: One key element of transferable institutional architecture—say, to the muddled Synod on Synodality—is to respect a clear distinction between Consultation and Coordination—as between the round table thing and other related but different actions—internal governance of domains, including brick-and-mortar projects and spending, e.g., by alliances of public agencies accountable to the tax-paying publics; or, instead, by any of the private parties (new railyards, etc.). Synodally, the debated but real line between the baptized and the ordained.
Another transferable lesson, irrespective of lofty letterheads, is mutual personal respect for each other as persons, but also, therefore, for boundaries. Not quite the fluidity of “everybody, everybody” or of any laicized and plebiscite “sensus fidei.” Especially, the distinction between each of the successors of the Apostles (Shepherds “sent” by Christ, cast “primarily as facilitators”?) and everybody else—with roles that differ in both kind and degree (Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes).
And, the still-larger paradoxes, as to whether and when global supply chains create jobs for families or, instead, export jobs from families and endanger the national Common Good? A matter for prudential judgment, finally, by those responsible for the Common Good (Gaudium et Spes). Probably not a flat-footed dicastery edict or an off-the-cuff airplane pronouncement from 30,000 feet. The distinction, too, between natural law and moral absolutes, and those other matters of prudential judgment.
SUMMARY: The distinction between Shepherd’s “sent” by Christ (apostelo: to be sent) and who do not lead from behind, and any “paradigm-shift” church led by a mélange of synodal Shepherd’s Pie study groups.