Pius XI Put Subsidiarity in Writing in 1931, and Washington Should Read It

The most useful sentence about federalism written in the twentieth century did not come from a law school, a think tank or a Founding Father. It came from the Vatican, in a Latin encyclical dated May 15, 1931, and it was written by a pope who was looking at Mussolini's Italy with one eye and Stalin's Russia with the other.

The sentence is long, as encyclical sentences tend to be. Its meaning is short. If a smaller group can do a job, a bigger one has no right to take it. That is an elegant principle, and it is also a principle that American conservatives have been defending for two centuries without having a name for it. Today I want to read the paragraph closely, give it its historical setting, follow it through the popes who developed it, and show how neatly it maps onto the Tenth Amendment, and where it does not.

You do not need to be Catholic to benefit from the exercise. Madison was not a Catholic. He would have understood the principle in a heartbeat.

The text

The encyclical is Quadragesimo Anno, "In the Fortieth Year," issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII's great letter on the condition of labor. The passage that concerns us is paragraph 79, and in the standard English translation it reads:

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.

The next sentence gives the reason:

For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

Let me take it in pieces.

"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals..." The pope begins with the individual. Before he says anything about large institutions, he says that the community has no right to swallow what a person can do through his own effort. That is a rebuke to collectivism, and it comes first.

"...so also it is an injustice..." The word is injustice. Not "inefficiency," not "bad policy." The pope is saying that when a higher body does what a lower body could do, it commits a wrong against the lower body and against the persons in it. That is a moral claim, not a management tip.

"...and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order..." The phrase "right order" is the key to Catholic social thought. Society, in this view, is not a heap of individuals under one sovereign but a structure of nested communities: the family, the neighborhood, the parish, the guild or union, the town, the region, the nation. Each has its own proper work. Confuse the layers and you damage all of them.

"For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help..." The Latin word behind this idea is subsidium, which means help or support. The word "subsidiarity" comes from it. A larger body exists to help the smaller ones, to supply what they cannot supply themselves, and never to replace them. The pope states the principle formally a paragraph later, in paragraph 80, and he calls it a "most weighty principle" that remains "fixed and unshaken" in social philosophy.

The setting: 1931 between two totalitarianisms

The date explains the urgency. Pius XI was writing at the end of what he saw as a disaster in two forms.

In Italy, Mussolini's Fascist regime had spent years absorbing every association in the country into the state. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 had settled the long quarrel between Italy and the papacy, but the regime kept squeezing Catholic organizations, especially youth groups and Catholic Action. In June 1931 Pius XI answered with the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, protesting the regime's attempt to monopolize the education of the young. A state that claims the whole of life leaves no room for a family or a church to do its own work.

In the Soviet Union, the state had gone further, abolishing private property in the means of production and wrecking the family, the church and the village. The 1930s brought collectivization and famine in Ukraine. And the world was in the Great Depression, with many Europeans willing to trade liberty for security.

Against both, Pius XI proposed a third way, not a halfway house between capitalism and socialism but a different principle of order. The state has real duties, he said: to protect, to coordinate, to restrain abuses. But it must leave each lesser body its own sphere. He later condemned Nazism in Mit brennender Sorge (1937) and communism in Divini Redemptoris (1937) on much the same ground: a state that absorbs the person is a false god.

From Leo XIII to John Paul II

Subsidiarity was not invented in 1931. It was drawn out of what the Church had already been saying.

Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891). Leo defended private property and the family against socialism, insisting that the household is a society older than the state and that the father's duty to provide cannot be handed to the government. He also defended workers' associations. The state, he said, should not absorb what families and voluntary groups can do.

Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931). The explicit statement of the principle, as above.

Pius XII. In addresses during and after the Second World War, he insisted that the state is not the source of society's rights, which belong to persons and communities first.

John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (1961), and the Second Vatican Council. Both restated the principle and applied it to a growing welfare state.

John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1991). Issued on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum and after the fall of Soviet Communism, it warned that the modern welfare state, by intruding too far, could lose human energies and inflate public agencies, driven more by bureaucratic thinking than by service to persons. Citing Pius XI's principle, he wrote that 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. The Catechism of the Catholic Church includes the principle, in paragraph 1883.

That is a hundred years of consistent teaching, and it is a teaching on which Protestants and Jews, and Americans of no religion at all, can find common ground, because it is simply a claim about how human societies work best.

The Tenth Amendment, side by side

Now the American parallel. Set the pope's paragraph beside the Constitution's text. The Tenth Amendment, ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, reads in full:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The two texts share a structure. In both:

1. The smaller unit comes first. The states and the people hold the baseline of power. The federal government holds only what was handed up to it. As Madison put it in Federalist No. 45, the powers delegated to the federal government are "few and defined," while those reserved to the states are "numerous and indefinite."
2. The larger body exists to help. The Constitution's Preamble lists the purposes of the Union: justice, tranquility, common defense, the general welfare, the blessings of liberty. These are things that the states acting alone could not secure. That is subsidiarity's test in plain words: the higher body acts where the lower cannot.
3. Taking over is a wrong, not just an error. The Founders did not treat federal overreach as a technical misjudgment. They treated it as usurpation, a violation of the compact. The Declaration lists the king's usurpations as grievances, among them that he had "erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance."

There is a further parallel in the amendment's last two words. "Or to the people." Subsidiarity does not stop at the state capital. It goes down through the county, the town, the congregation, the family and the person. The Tenth Amendment names the people as the ultimate holder.

Where the parallel breaks down

A fair reader should notice the limits of the comparison, and I'd rather mark them myself than have a critic do it.

First, the Tenth Amendment is a rule about government levels. Subsidiarity covers more: it speaks of every association, including private ones such as families, churches and businesses. The American constitutional text restrains governments; Catholic social teaching also covers what a large private organization may do to a small one.

Second, the Catholic principle is two-sided. It forbids the higher body from absorbing the lower, but it also requires the higher body to step in when the lower cannot manage. The word subsidium means help, and it implies a duty to supply it. A pope who wrote the text also wrote, in the same encyclical, about the state's duty to restrain economic abuses. American conservatives who cite subsidiarity should be honest that the principle justifies some action by larger bodies, such as national defense, interstate commerce and the protection of rights, even as it forbids the usurpations.

Third, a Catholic reading does not settle the details of any American policy. The principle says which level should act first, not which problems exist or how a given law should read. It is a rule of presumption and not a replacement for argument.

The strongest objection, answered

The best objection from the other side goes like this: "Subsidiarity sounds fine, but the lower bodies are often the ones that abuse people. State governments enforced segregation. Local power structures protected local tyrants. If we insist that the larger body wait until the smaller one fails, we will wait a long time, and people will be hurt in the meantime."

That is a real point, and the answer is part of the principle itself. First, subsidiarity is not a license for any local body to do anything. A family cannot claim a right to abuse a child, and a state cannot claim a right to deny equal protection. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, authorizes the national government to act precisely where states violate the basic rights of persons. That is subsidiarity at work: the higher body steps in when the lower has failed or acted unjustly. Second, the principle shifts the burden of proof. The national government must show why the matter cannot be handled below, and not the other way around. And third, the question to ask of any new federal program is whether it is helping lower bodies or replacing them. A program that funds a local effort and leaves the decisions local is subsidiary. A program that substitutes a federal office for the local one is not. For an American treatment of this theme, see Subsidiarity, the 1931 Catholic principle every federalist should know.

What it means for a family

It would be easy to leave this as a seminar topic, but the principle is lived at the level of the dinner table. When a school takes over decisions that parents can make, subsidiarity is breached. When a state licensing board prevents a neighbor from earning a living in a trade he can do well, it is breached. When a charity is told by a government grant to drop its religious character, it is breached; see Wisconsin told Catholic Charities it was not religious enough and lost 9-0. When Washington imposes one rule on fifty states that could have tried fifty experiments, it is breached.

And when it is honored, the results are visible: parents who run their children's education, congregations that care for their own poor, towns that decide their own schools and zoning, states that compete with one another to govern well. Tocqueville thought this habit was the source of American strength, a theme in Self-Interest Rightly Understood Was Tocqueville's Answer to Selfishness.

The case in brief

1. Paragraph 79 of Quadragesimo Anno (1931) holds that it is an injustice to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.
2. The principle grew out of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891), was written against Fascism and Communism, and was restated by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (1991).
3. It parallels the Tenth Amendment: the smaller unit holds the baseline of power, the larger exists to help, and taking over is a wrong.
4. The parallel has limits: subsidiarity covers private bodies too, and it requires the higher body to help where the lower cannot, as the Fourteenth Amendment does for basic rights.
5. In daily life it means parents, congregations, towns and states should decide first what they are able to decide.

What you can do: read the Tenth Amendment on our Constitution page, then ask your representative's office in writing which level of government should handle one issue they have voted on.