With Church Reopening Plan, Minnesota Bishops Model Solidarity and Subsidiarity

National Catholic Register, 21 May 2020

The state’s role is to support social institutions such as churches in their operation, not to supplant their decision-making.

As bishops decide about reopening churches and the public celebration of the liturgy, the case of Minnesota shows two key principles of Catholic social teaching in action, solidarity and subsidiarity.

Minnesota’s Catholic bishops have decided to permit the reopening on May 26 of those churches that are capable of doing so. The churches that will reopen for Mass must operate at one-third capacity and have various sanitation protocols in place. Minnesota’s Lutheran bishops are doing the same.

Insisting on Religious Freedom

The Catholic bishops acted after the governor amended the state’s “stay-at-home” order to open restaurants and nonessential retail and big-box stores to operate at 50% capacity. The Mall of America is open for business. At the same time, however, the governor chose to keep in place the order limiting religious assemblies to 10 people, even in the cavernous Cathedral of St. Paul. The bishops made repeated proposals to the governor for reopening churches, but they were not accepted.

Minnesota’s bishops consider that the differential treatment of religious houses of worship is a violation of religious freedom.

Liberty, including religious freedom in the first place, is a key principle of Catholic social teaching. But the current circumstances also draw upon other key principles of Catholic social teaching: solidarity and subsidiarity.

Both solidarity and subsidiarity have been at work in the response of the Minnesota bishops to the pandemic.

Solidarity Already Demonstrated

Solidarity is often understood in terms of being “my brother’s keeper,” or the commands of Matthew 25, “insofar as you did it for the least of my brethren.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it a “direct demand of human and Christian brotherhood” and refers to it as “social charity” (1939). It is expressed in working for justice, defense of the rights of the vulnerable, and care for the weak and suffering.

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