Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

3. Critical Evaluation
Christian social teaching sets out from the following principles in the critical evaluation of the
system of social security:
a) It is „a man’s right and duty to be primarily responsible for his own upkeep and that of his
family“ (Mater et magistra, 55).
b) The smallest community which should bestow on man a sense of social secureness is the
family. Even if the family has lost many functions in the industrial age so that it is no longer
able to guarantee the whole of social security, the family household still offers today a high
measure of security.
c) Of great importance for social security, particularly for the self-employed, are self-help
measures by co-operatives which offer a formation in solidary thinking and action and
achieve with united forces things that the individual is unable to accomplish.
d) Conditions in the industrial society entail the fact that social security can no longer be
guaranteed by individuals, families, and co-operatives alone without the assistance of nationwide
institutions. The system of social security can only be understood against the background
of the violent upheavals that have come upon people through the technological and
industrial revolution. To a large extent, it is a question of adapting the mode of existence and
the way of life of modern man to the changed social and economic conditions of the industrial
society. From this point of view, the general presentation of the system of social security as a
phenomenon of degeneration and as a sign of the loss of individuality and of deficient selfreliance
is untenable. Compulsory insurance and social equalization are indeed being relaxed
owing to the broad dissemination of wealth, but cannot be fully eliminated. Here certain normal
risks can be distinguished according to the three stages in the life of man: childhood and
youth, the prime of life, and old age:
Children and youth enter into the field of vision of social security in three cases: when there is
a failure of the family (a family deficit), when training for and incorporation into a profession
become difficult in consequence of adverse social conditions (a social deficit), and in view of
a loss of social position which threatens families which have many children.
For the prime of life, four normal risks are typical: early disability, sickness, unemployment,
and widowhood. Great importance attaches to prevention and rehabilitation (therapeutic
treatment, professional retraining, etc.) for this stage of life in particular. Such ‘helping others
to help themselves’ strives to put ‘social investment’ in the place of social redistribution with
the intention of leading people, insofar as possible, to personal responsibility for earning their
livelihood.
Special care is to be devoted in modern society to the social security of elderly people. It must
be designated as an important step forward that in different countries since the Second World
War, but especially in the Federal Republic of Germany, the dynamics of economic development
have been taken into consideration in designing the old-age insurance required by law.
The rise in productivity and the growth of the social product are causing the cost of living to
rise continually where the population remains constant or increases only slightly, from which
it follows that a standard of living corresponding to the current state of economic productivity
can be assured for elderly pensioners only if pensions are adapted to the increase of productivity.
e) These considerations, however, should not blind society to the danger that lies in the trend
towards the welfare state, which considers itself primarily and solely responsible for the social
security of all citizens and therefore supplants the insurance principle which rests on the correspondence
between contribution and benefit with the welfare principle which grants legal
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