So it is election time. Someone threw a flyer over our gate. His priorities are
water, roads and refuse collection. Nothing very revolutionary there. Basic
needs. But basic needs not yet met. After all these years. Is the candidate
‘blowing in the wind’? Is there any prospect of these basic things being done?
Are we just ritually marking up one more election? We go through the motions
but nothing changes. The focus of the world will be briefly on us. Then they
will move away to something else.
What we yearn for, year after year, is subsidiarity. Long ago (in 1931) it was
defined by Pius XI as a principle by which every unit in the nation – family,
local council, district, province and central government – performs the tasks
which it can do at its own level. ‘The true aim of all social activity should be to
help individual members of the social body, but never to destroy or absorb
them.’ In other words, no higher body in the state should take to itself powers
which lower bodies can do.
Paul VI commented: ‘To take politics seriously at its different levels – local,
regional, national and worldwide – is to affirm the duty of every person to
recognise the concrete reality and the value of freedom of choice that is offered
to them to seek to bring about both the good of the city and of the nation and of
all people. Politics are a demanding manner – but not the only one – of living
the Christian commitment to the service of others.’
So there we have it. There are jobs to be done – providing water, mending roads,
collecting rubbish – and no shortage of people willing to work. But no one, at
the local level, to say nothing of the national level, is able to exercise their
freedom to organise and carry out these works. So they are not done. Our social
fabric is gridlocked, paralysed. And we are faced with five more years of
inaction while the people languish in poverty and frustration.
It would surely be a simple matter to allow people to develop their social and
economic activity at the level where they are able to do it. But there seems to be
a terrible fear that if the people organise themselves on the local level – and
succeed – it will somehow reflect badly on those at a higher level. And yet is it
not obvious that if people succeed at the local level, it will redound positively
on those at a high level? Parents take delight in the achievements of their
children.
Do the people in the higher levels trust the ordinary people?
15 August 2023
By Fr David Harold-Barry SJ
English