By: Patrick McKinley Brennan
The modern state characteristically assumes or asserts a monopoly
over “group persons” and their right to exist; group persons exist
at the pleasure or concession of the state. According to
Catholic social teaching, however, these unities of order—such as
church and family, as well as corporations and schools and
sodalities and the like—are, at least in potency, ontologically
prior to the state. Such group persons both constitute
conditions of the possibility of human flourishing and,
concomitantly, impose limitations on the “sovereign” state.
They are not mere concessions of an unbounded state; they are
ontological realities that must be recognized by the state, and, as
necessary or apt, regulated or assisted according to the principle
of subsidiarity, properly understood.
This Article studies how the current U.S. failure to respect
both the reality of group persons and the proper application to
them of the principle of subsidiarity frustrates the work of
families and church in the concrete conditions of the U.S.
today. In particular, the Article demonstrates how the
Lasallian order, which for centuries has served the poor through
education, has lost its ability to continue that work in the U.S.
today. Law and policy shaped by respect for group persons and
the principle of subsidiarity could, without violating the
Establishment Clause, come to the rescue of family, church, and
poor children.