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Quadragesimo Anno

DECENTRALISM FILE

Pius XI

Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) (original name Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti) , was born in  Desio, Lombardy, Austrian Empire [now in Italy]. His father owned a silk factory. He was ordained a priest in 1879 and embarked on an academic career within the Church. He obtained three doctorates (in philosophy, canon law and theology) at the Gregorian University in Rome, and then from 1882 to 1888 was a professor at the seminary in Padua. His scholarly specialty was as an expert paleographer, a student of ancient and medieval Church manuscripts. After many years as a researcher at a Catholic library, Ratti was made Papal nuncio to Poland in 1918, then cardinal and archbishop of Milan in 1921, and then Pope in the following year.

Among his papal encyclicals, Pius XI is most remembered for lending the support of the Church to Distributism and Subsidiarity in Quadragesimo Anno. It was promulgated in 1931 to mark ‘forty years’ since Pope Leo XIII’s (1878–1903) encyclical De Rerum Novarum. It  restated that encyclical’s support for intermediating social associations and warnings against both socialism and unrestrained capitalism as enemies to human freedom and dignity.

The following excerpt defined the principle of subsidiarity that has been a feature of Catholic thought ever since:

“The State authorities should leave to other bodies the care and expediting of business and activities of lesser moment, which otherwise become for it a source of great distraction. It will then perform with greater freedom, vigor and effectiveness, the tasks belonging properly to it, and which alone it can accomplish, directing, supervising, encouraging, restraining, as circumstances suggest or necessity demands. Let those in power, therefore, be convinced that the more faithfully this principle of subsidiarity is followed and a hierarchical order prevails among the various organizations the more excellent will be the authority and efficiency of society, and the happier and more prosperous the condition of the commonwealth.”

In Centesimus Annus (1991) John Paul II formulated the principle with a different emphasis:

“A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

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