Catholic Social Teaching, Solidarity

Solidarity is one of the most embracing of the social teachings of the Church and essentially means “we are all in this together”, but a more cogent definition is found in an invaluable two-volume resource just published last year, the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy:

“In its relevant Christian meaning, solidarity is implicit in Catholic teaching about the fatherhood of God and in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ. Solidarity was probably first expressed in that relevant sense in the modern era as applied to the social order by the Spanish political philosopher Juan Donoso Cortes. In his Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism (1851). Donoso referred to “solidarity” as the “responsibility” that all share in common because as sons of Adam they are all children of God. He termed this “one of the most beautiful and august revelations of Catholic dogma.” The German Jesuit economist Heinrich Pesch noted that perceived in that way, solidarity passed easily into the modern social teaching of the Catholic Church.

"Pesch installed the principle of solidarity as the heart of his economic system, which he called solidarism or the solidaristic system of human work. In his five-volume Lehrbuch der Nationalokonomie, he defined it as social interdependence, the actual reciprocal dependence of people on one another. For Pesch solidarity represented an inescapable fact along with a concomitant moral obligation. He indicated its operation at all levels of society from the family, to the workplace, the occupational group, the nation, and beyond to the global community. He also proposed that it becomes more urgent the more complex society becomes.” (Volume 2, pg 1010-1011)