The Limits of Subsidiarity

D.C. Schindler ( Communio , 2013, 600-1) argues that the Catholic appeal to subsidiarity isn't adequate on its own to meet the challenge of totalitarian liberalism. Subsidiarity assumes “a strong conception of what are referred to as ‘intermediate communities,' such as the family.” The problem that Schindler discerns is that we have to answer the question, “What communities do we designate as intermediate” and “What do we identify as the poles between which they stand?”

The typical answer is that “one describes intermediate communities as those that lie between the individual and the state, and one includes the Church as one of those communities.” But this leaves the state as “the most comprehensive community, which means that the particular good that defines the state provides the context, and therefore in a fundamental way the terms, for all other communities that com within it. To emphasize subsidiarity, in this respect, means to appeal to the state to allow appropriate space for the Church, for the family, and so forth.” But this confuses parts and whole, and “reinforces the absoluteness of the state in spite of all its intentions otherwise.”

Subsidiarity would work better if we turned the framework upside down. Schindler's proposal “simple takes liberalism and its minimalist notion of the limited political common good at its word,” that is, that we accept liberalism's claim to regulate only a part and not the whole. Once we accept these terms we may “take the political community ordered by the state to be an intermediate community, and recognize as most comprehensive the community ordered to the highest, most integral good, namely, the Church.”

To accept that, of course, liberal order would have to cease being liberal order and acknowledge “the authority of the body responsible for the integral good as such.”