What happens when you teach subsidiarity

The revolution of a postlib theology curriculum

My first year back in a classroom after teaching virtually for nearly a year and a half was…“a moment,” as my then-students might have called it. In addition to having to figure out how to get back into the groove of teaching actual humans in a classroom, I had to learn how to face the new set of psychological needs my students brought with them, as well as a new and rather intimidating set of ideological barriers I never encountered before.

The summer of 2020 did a number on all of us, especially young people—many of whom were cooped up alone in their rooms absorbing conflicting information from TikTok videos having to do with social issues ranging from the vaccine and presidential politics to racism and police brutality.

It was easy for a theology teacher to have approached such a tumultuous cultural moment with a curriculum centered on moralistic and sentimental platitudes about how Jesus loves us and wants us to be kind to our neighbors. Of course these claims are true, but when their concrete implications aren’t clearly articulated, they run the risk of being dismissed as mushy, useless abstractions. They are rendered easy to dismiss, the same way one swipes up a TikTok video that doesn’t immediately stimulate them.

Thanks to the enormous amount of freedom afforded to me by my then-school’s administrators, I made the executive decision to teach Catholic Social Teaching in my senior religion class. Seeing the types of political and social ideologies they were being bombarded with, I felt it would be most prudent to attempt to go to the root of “the social question” and understand, firstly, what does it mean to be human, and how we might go about building social structures that have a deep regard for human needs.

Of course, offering a course on CST is standard at most Catholic secondary schools. But a brief glance at the table of contents in most CST (or “Catholic Social Justice”) texts books reveals the rather reductive rendering of CST that is offered to students. Boiled down to seven key principles (which end up coming across as sentimental buzzwords and sloganeering), the real intellectual and radical depth of the Church’s proposal is lost. This is even worse when CST is lumped in with Fundamental Moral Theology in “Morality and Justice” classes, where CST is reduced to “the issues” that Catholics are supposed to care about (abortion, euthanasia, poverty, racism, immigration, etc.). And more often that not, this amounts to adopting either the mainstream Democratic or Republican platforms while sprinkling these buzzwords on top.

Of course, teaching high school students the roots of CST is difficult considering most schools’ curricula don’t offer solid content on philosophy or intellectual history (let alone regular history). I understand the impulse of curriculum developers to simplify CST so as to not go over students’ heads. But such a mentality runs the risk of depriving them of what’s most essential, and thus what’s most fascinating, about CST…that there’s a comprehensive vision that could possibly be so concretely resonant with both their hearts and their experience of the society they live in.

My students would regurgitate things they’ve heard AOC or Ben Shapiro say about socialism and capitalism, or what they’ve heard on TikTok about Critical Race Theory and the role of men in the “Bronze Age.” They rarely espoused original ideas, nor seemed capable of grasping nuance or developing any sense of intellectual consistency. And so, before looking at the Catholic Church’s proposal about society and politics, I decided it would be necessary to zoom out.

We first took a close look at the origins of the political ideologies that make up mainstream American discourse. We started by reading Adam Smith and Karl Marx, along with commentaries both for and against the Free Market and Communism. We then did some brief historical research into the shift from feudalism to the Industrial Revolution, and how it prompted the emergence of the “social question” and the issue of labor. In doing so, we looked not only at the economic and political factors involved, but also the existential and spiritual ones: how did the changing role of the worker effect his sense of purpose, dignity, and vocation?

We then dove into the origins of CST, reading Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and exploring his emphasis on subsidiarity, the role of the family, and the dignity of the worker, as well as his critiques of free market capitalism and socialism/communism. We spent a considerable amount of time digging into the anthropological assumptions of his social positions, and compared them to those of Smith and Marx. I found it to be essential to keep this question of what it means to be human at the forefront of our discussions on social, political, and economic issues.

We went on to read Dorothy Day’s autobiography, paying close attention to how her conversion to Catholicism demonstrated the synthesis between the personal and the social, and how her rejection of Marxism for the Church didn’t imply a turning away from her desire to respond to social injustices, but a fulfillment (and deeper radicalization) of this desire. What was most lacking from the secular leftist discourses she was initially drawn to was a sense of the person’s existential need for salvation, that “man does not live by bread alone,” and thus that any political revolution without a “revolution of the heart” was bound to fail.

Dorothy’s synthesis was in a way prophetic of the Pope Francis’ orientation toward evangelization—that in going to the “material” periphery, we are made to encounter our own “existential” periphery. Being concerned with the economically poor ought to provoke us to look at our own spiritual poverty and to look to Christ, whose promise of redemption is primarily spiritual, but spills over into the material. To be concerned with only the one or the other reduces the fullness of the Gospel.

After reading about Day and visiting the Catholic Worker houses in NYC, we read works by more contemporary writers like Cornel West, Christopher Lasch, DL Mayfield, Obiajunu Ekeocha, Robert Sarah, and Chris Arnade, looking closely at their critiques of the bourgeois neoliberal paradigm and its psychological and spiritual effects on local communities and individual people. We also watched J. Cole’s documentary on small Black communities and engaged in charitable works together.

We saw this synthesis come to life when learning about initiatives that sought to feed both the heart and the body, not only answering to systemic social needs but also to the need for community, beauty, education, and belonging—including the CW, the APAC prison system, and Homeboy Industries. We also sought to build up our local communities through assignments involving writing letters to our local politicians, going out to interview our neighbors about their lives and political concerns, and building intergenerational dialogue by interviewing our elderly family members and neighbors.

I was amazed by how the content was able to cut through the students’ ideological convictions and generate meaningful dialogue. The emphasis on entering into politics from our shared humanity as a point of departure made it possible for students with polarized political views to exchange ideas with each other, even if they arrived at different conclusions.

I began to see that what’s most radical about CST is that it brings those of us living in a discourse of ideological abstractions into contact what the concrete. It impels us to “touch grass,” to come to our senses and use our common sense. The Church’s commitment to subsidiarity and emphasis on starting at the local level forces us to look at our family members, classmates, and neighbors in the face and ask whether we love them—whether we even know them—as well as we do whatever political “causes” we stand by.

This logic of encounter (which was Jesus’ own method) accounts for the uniqueness of each individual and the totality of his or her needs. It recognizes that change is most likely to occur when we build a society that is conducive to such encounters on the interpersonal level, which ignite the individual’s recognition of her dignity and her capacity to love and be loved, her rights as well as her responsibilities. It is at this concrete, local level that one can be truly known in all of the depth of who she is and discover her agency to make changes in favor of the Common Good. The concrete focus of subsidiarity was a breath of fresh air for young people trapped in the ideology and abstractions of the TikTok era.

I was particularly surprised by how seriously my students took Pope Leo’s assertion about the family being the cell of society. After reading Rerum Novarum, one rather left-leaning student expressed that she felt hypocritical advocating for social justice causes without first trying to amend the rifts in her family, and started seeing a therapist to get help to learn to “have more charity for” her parents. Other students explored fascinating and deeply personal topics in their final papers: a student whose father left his family wrote about the cultural and economic emasculation of black men; another who has lost touch with his Cuban roots wrote about his desire to recover his ethnic identity and how his bourgeois suburban upbringing made it difficult for him to do so; and a rather staunchly pro-choice student wrote about the ideological colonization of the Gates Foundation pushing abortion and birth control on West African countries as a “solution” to their poverty.

These examples demonstrate the great “both/and” of CST, how all factors…all the pieces of the puzzle, are taken into account when deliberating on political issues. We all have a collection of needs: the need for truth, beauty, justice, love, community, food, shelter, meaningful work. When we reduce or ignore any of these needs, there are negative consequences.

And so, while remaining cautious not to propagate my own political convictions, I did try to highlight some of the fundamental problems within the American (and more broadly, the Western) political paradigm. Neoliberalism of both the mainstream left and right tends to gravely misrepresent the needs of the person. The left rails against consumer capitalism, but fosters a vision of sexual freedom that feeds on a consumerist mentality. The right claims to defend the sanctity of the family, but supports economic policy that weakens it, encouraging instead individualism and amorality. Cognitive dissonance under neoliberalism is legion.

Again, while never implying what the “right” way to vote was, I did try to impart to them a criterion to discern the most prudent way to enter into politics: starting from a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be human, and the imperative to take into account the entirety of needs that constitute our personhood. Surely most of the students left the class with drastically different conclusions than mine, but I was deeply encouraged by the level of discourse we were able to share with each other. Teaching subsidiarity is nothing short of a revolutionary act—it becomes a beacon of hope in our bleak times.

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