The principle of subsidiarity concerns how participation and decision
making should be organized. Responsibility should be kept as close as possible
to the grassroots. The people or groups most directly affected by a decision
or policy should have a key decision making role in it.
More encompassing groups should only intervene to support smaller, more
local groups in case of need, and where this is necessary in order to coordinate
their activities with the activities of other groups in order to promote
the common good. It is from this aspect of help offered by larger to smaller
groups that the term subsidiarity (from the Latin subsidium for help or
assistance) comes.
This is perhaps the most widely misunderstood of the
four key principles. The Pontifical Council for Justice & Peace explains
it in this way:
“On the basis of this principle, all societies of
a superior order must adopt attitudes of help (‘subsidium’) – therefore
of support, promotion, development – with respect to lower-order
societies. In this way, intermediate social entities can properly
perform the functions that fall to them without being required
to hand them over
unjustly to other social entities of a higher level, by which they
would end up being absorbed and substituted, in the end seeing
themselves denied
their dignity and essential place.”
Pontifical Council for Justice & Peace
Compendium
of the Social Doctrine of the Church, n 186
