Religion & Law

A very perceptive person I was talking with today opined that most Americans oscillate between bald individualism, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other, leaving little (or only awkward) conceptual room for what Catholic social doctrine prizes in the terms of subsidiarity and solidarity.  I hadn't thought of it quite that way before, but it immediately struck me as right on the money.  The Church's claim is that there must be -- in that marvelous phrase of Caritas in veritate, which phrase I am told comes from the Missal of Pius V --  "breathing space."  The liturgical source of the phrase underlines the shared or associational nature of "breathing space."