2025 CHRISTMAS CAMPAIGN
Help Aleteia continue its mission by making a tax-deductible donation.
In this way, Aleteia's future will be yours as well.
Years ago, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan spelled out what he called “Seven ‘Givens’ of Catholic Social Teaching.” His idea was to help Catholics form their consciences about politics. Later, the U.S. bishops echoed these in their own list of “Seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching,” adding the centrality of the family and the need to care for our common home, the environment.
With the partisan polarization in the United States reaching a fever pitch, it is time to remind ourselves of the fundamentals of Catholic social doctrine again — because our faith, and not any ideology or political party, should be our North Star in political matters.
First: The Sacredness of Human Life.
As the Catechism puts it, “Every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred because the human person has been willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God” (CCC 2319).
A human being doesn’t belong to anybody but God — and our job is to recognize each person as sacred, including every “extra” embryo conceived through in vitro fertilization, and every criminal on death row.
Second: The infinite dignity of the human person.
This dignity of every human person is so profound we should consider another person as “another self,” says the Catechism (CCC 1944).
This means not reducing anyone to what pleasure, power, or wealth they can provide — in pornography, politics, or profiteering — but always seeing them as good in themselves.
Third: The Natural Law is the moral order instilled within us all.
“The natural law which is inscribed by the Creator on the heart of every person consists in a participation in the wisdom and the goodness of God,” says the Compendium of the Catechism (No. 416).
There isn’t “your truth” and “my truth,” “religious truth” and “scientific truth” — there is one truth that none of us has a monopoly on. This means being open to each other in our pursuit of the truth.
Fourth: The principle of solidarity is fundamental.
Solidarity, the “sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone” means we are each human being’s friend and brother, says the Catechism; we therefore owe them goods and fair pay; we also owe them truth and compassion (CCC 1939 and following).
But fifth: The principle of subsidiarity is also crucial.
The principle of subsidiarity says that the person or persons closest to a problem should have responsibility for it, or, as the Catechism puts it, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order.”
Putting subsidiarity and solidarity together, Pope Benedict XVI said, “The principle of subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa, since the former without the latter gives way to social privatism,” that is, extreme conservatism, “while the latter without the former gives way to paternalist social assistance” or extreme liberalism, “that is demeaning to those in need” (Caritas in Veritate, No. 58).
Sixth: The preferential love for the poor.
“Those who are oppressed by poverty are the object of a preferential love on the part of the Church,” says the Catechism (CCC 2448).
Then, the Church goes so far as to quote St. John Chrysostom to say, emphatically, that “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs” (CCC 2446).
Service to those in need is fundamental for Catholics, always.
Seventh: Every person has inalienable rights given by the Creator.
I like how one question and answer from the Compendium of the Catechism (No. 512) uses this point to sum up everything.
“What would be opposed to the social doctrine of the Church?” it asks.
The answer: “Opposed to the social doctrine of the Church are economic and social systems that sacrifice the basic rights of persons or that make profit their exclusive norm or ultimate.”
In other words, both left-wing and right-wing extremes are opposed to the faith. As examples of the first, the Catechism lists communism and totalitarian forms of socialism. As examples of the second, it lists self-centered and individualistic forms of capitalism.
In other words, Catholics have clear principles that it is our duty to apply.
Too often, we use our political parties as our North Star, and use their preferences to judge what the Church says. That gets it backwards.
Catholics have to purify our hearts so that we see other people as God does. The right answers in politics will follow naturally from that starting point.
