"America's great witness to the world has always been its legacy of freedom." Archbishop Charles Chaput, Render Unto Caesar

"American belief in the sanctity of individual rights depends on a God who guarantees those rights, and to whom the state is subordinate and responsible."    Ibid.

"Like it or not, American Catholics are part of a struggle over our country's identity and future." (p.12)    Ibid.

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"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic."    Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), Truth and Tolerance

"... Socialism ...cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth."  Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, #117, 1931

" ... no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist."    Ibid  #120 

" ... no Catholic could subscribe even to moderate Socialism."  Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra #34

" The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person -- every person -- needs: namely, loving personal concern."   Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est #28, 2005 

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Utopias: "All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, idealogies and false utopias (126)."        Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, #53.

"The dream -- utopia -- leads to the denial of God and self-divinization --- the heresy." Thomas Molnar, Utopia: the Perennial Heresy

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Subsidiarity is a principle whereby decisions and functions are best managed by the most local and least centralized authority, by those entities 'closest to home.'  In practice, this means that the individual and family are primary in a society's order, followed by the Church and intermediate associations, local and then state governments, and finally the federal government.

"Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative.  The teaching of the Church has eleborated the prinicple of subsidiarity, according to which 'a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions."  CCC, #1881    

 Referring to 'subsidiarity' Pope Pius XI wrote: "... that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do." Quadragesimo Anno, #79, 1931

Subsidiarity is defined "... as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level."  Oxford  English Dictionary

"The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention." CCC, #1885

"...(S)ubsidiarity is the most effective antidote against any form of all-encompassing welfare state."      Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas In Veritate, #53, 2009

Author unknown --

 "When we die to something, 

Something comes alive within us.

If we die to self, charity comes alive;

If we die to pride, service comes alive;

If we die to lust, reverence for personality comes alive;

If we die to anger, love comes alive."