It sounds like a joke, but when asked how the date for Easter is determined each year an acquaintance of mind replied in a tone of offended intelligence: “That’s easy, it’s the Sunday after Good Friday!” How easy it is for us to accept things without fully understanding or appreciating them. In the past few years the surge of immigration, legal and otherwise, into our nation brings to mind our tendency to under-appreciate a paramount blessing we citizens enjoy: liberty.
Maybe it’s human nature to take for granted blessings which we do not have constantly to secure, or which are not – ostensibly at least – threatened. If our liberties and opportunities are in fact, as some contend, being gradually eroded or appropriated by ‘big government’ or ‘big tech’, perhaps we are like the proverbial frog in water being brought slowly to boil. We are unmindful of the imperceptible but steady loss. Readers will have their own opinions on this, to be sure.
However, presumably all will agree that the flood of immigrants coming into the country underscores the value those denied them place on these blessings. Perhaps, in turn, we will also agree that interaction with these refugees reminds us of the blessings we enjoy and makes us more appreciative and zealous about them.
There are many organizations around the country that support these new arrivals. Some of these groups are motivated by religious conviction, others by basic human compassion. The support provided includes immediate personal care, English as second language courses, legal recourses, and job training. The efforts of these groups to foster and build on the self-help attitude many of these immigrants bring with them manifests the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. Ironically it is this focus on helping others to help themselves that promotes and reinforces among the rest of us a greater awareness of and respect for this principle.
According to the principle of subsidiarity, decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary. Having its roots in the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the concept of subsidiarity was advanced (though not specifically named) in Pope Leo XIII’s (1891) Rerum Novarum and subsequently formalized in Pope Pius XI’s (1931) Quadregesimo Anno as follows:
“As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still 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. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the member of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them”. (79).
One organization involved in the field of immigration is the Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Associates (VIISTA) featured in the Voices of the Vineyard column below. Readers will agree that citizens who help others become citizens become better citizens themselves.