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S i d e b a r
The Foundations of the Tradition
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This Rock
Volume 17, Number 4
 April 2006 
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The word subsidiarity comes from an ancient Roman military term. A main army that would lead the attack and another, smaller group, a subsidium, would "sit behind" and lend support and aid if needed.
The leaders of late ancient Rome had become corrupt and were more concerned with pleasure than with the good of the republic. The virtues of courage, generosity, and justice, formerly praised by Cicero and the Senate, had deteriorated into vice and vanity. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, emerged as a great orator and writer and produced a literary masterpiece, The City of God, which served as the gravestone for the collapsing republic. Greek and Roman philosophers thought that politics was the highest pursuit and that the republic was the ultimate social institution. Augustine disagreed. He wrote that there is also a heavenly city, whose citizens are on a pilgrimage toward union with God and the angels and saints in heaven. The earthly and heavenly cities co-exist, and it is possible to belong to both. Augustine concluded that it was inappropriate for the state to run the Church or for the Church to run the state.
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas defended the system of private property. Thomas noted that as God is the ultimate sovereign and creator of all, in one sense, only God can "own" property. But God has ordered the material goods of this world for the well-being of humans and has given them reason and freedom so that they might "use" what is properly God’s. Since social life is more orderly when there is responsibility, social systems must be respectful of this capacity for self-determining freedom.
In 1848, Karl Marx issued a "manifesto" that claimed that the injustices in modern industrial Europe had material causes and that they could be overcome through revolution. Two German leaders were murdered in one of that year’s many riots, and a young priest, Fr. Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, delivered the eulogy. His bishop then asked him to deliver a series of talks during the Advent season. His sermons drew on Scripture and the thought of Aquinas and paved the way for the Church’s later criticism of communism and materialistic individualism. Ketteler proposed an emphasis on the family and local social associations devoted to works of mercy. He later became the bishop of Mainz, Germany, where he defended parental choice in education against those who wanted state-run secular schools, arguing that parents have the primary responsibility to decide what kind of education their children receive. The state, he said, must hand over to the local municipality the right to make decisions about the public school. The state could play a subsidiary role by helping to determine a minimum standard for such schools. Years later, Pope Leo XIII would call Bishop Ketteler his "great teacher."
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