Volume 25, Number 3    December 2003


Charles Curran: Whatever happened to subsidiarity?

The concept of subsidiarity — that is, that in any complex social system, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level — has had a rocky history in the Catholic Church, Fr. Charles Curran explained during a panel discussion on forgotten Catholic terms that need restoration. Clearly, if subsidiarity had been the norm, the striking centralization of decisions in the Vatican during the reign of Pope John Paul could not have occurred.

The application of the idea was first set forth by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical, “Quadragesimo Anno.” It is “an injury and a serious evil to assign to a higher society what a lower society can do,” said the pope. But Vatican officials did not make haste to alter the way business was done, partly because Pius was mainly referring to the dangers posed by totalitarian secular governments, and partly because theologians in the ’30s accepted the idea that the church was supernatural and “of a different order” from secular regimes — therefore not subject to their norms.

Subsidiarity made a comeback at Vatican II, which insisted that the church had an obligation to learn something about granting basic human rights from the experience of human institutions, said Curran. The idea made further headway at the 1971 synod of bishops, he noted, which said that if the church expects to talk to the world about justice, it must insure that just practices are applied within the church itself. Similar calls for decentralization came from various synods in the ’80s and ’90s, but with no result. Ironically, the agendas and most decisions of the very synods were determined ahead of time not by the bishops but by the Vatican. Recently, said Curran, there has been more talk from the Vatican about “communion” rather than subsidiarity as the guiding rule in decision-making. Communion, he admitted, is an ambiguous and less forceful term.

The next pope
On the one hand, there is hope, he said, since 85 percent of the cardinals who will elect the pope are or have been local bishops themselves, are “closer to the problems in the church,” and have themselves suffered from the experience of centralization. On the other hand, said Curran, the question remains in any disputed situation, “Who decides when subsidiarity does or doesn't apply?”