By: Gerald J. Russello
Over the past few years, academics have attempted to use the
principles of “Catholic Social Thought” (“CST”) to scrutinize
corporate behavior and governance. According to its
proponents, CST seeks to examine the person and economic power
through the prism of human nature rather than expansive global
capitalism. Specifically, CST criticizes classical liberal
economics and its position of viewing persons as lifeless consumers
seeking to exploit the maximum number of opportunities.
Instead, CST looks for a way to conflate economic concerns and the
Catholic Church’s teachings about the meaning and purpose of human
life so as to provide those Christians employed within corporations
a guide to live up to the uppermost Christian values.
The newly released Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the
Church and other Church documents are filled with references
to corporations and the limits of proper economic behavior.
These comprise, however, only one point of the struggle between the
multinational corporation and CST. Unfortunately, CST has not
spoken with one voice with regard to proper corporate structure and
conduct, and practitioners acknowledge that such guidelines are
still in the very earliest of stages. For example, although
CST does not propose any specific type of economic structure, it
clearly requires limits to some economic activity, even to the
point of state action to defend the poor.
This paper will delineate the three major aspects of the
Catholic understanding of economic life, as described in the
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church and other
documents: the common good, solidarity, and “subsidiarity.”
In addition, the paper will attempt to determine whether
subsidiarity provides a mechanism for CST to take up the
difficulties of the multinational form. In particular, the
paper will break down subsidiarity into three characteristics—size,
structure, and purpose—as the analytic framework, to see whether
CST can offer any guidelines for the multinational.