Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

difficult to comprise Christian social teaching under a determinate heading, be it ‘familiarism’
(Gustav Ermecke), ‘Christian socialism’, ‘universalism’ (Othmar Spann), or indeed ‘solidarism’.
It is advisable to speak simply of ‘Christian social teaching’
§ 2 The Foundations of the Principle of Solidarity
1.Because man is in essence a person and in his personal uniqueness is simultaneously related
in essence to society, the building principle of society rests „on an original and characteristic
state of relation and connection“ between man and society and permits „in no way a simple
reduction to one of the two dimensions.“ From the characteristically dual direction of this tie,
which constitutes the metaphysical essence of society, it follows that persons „are tied to the
whole from an inner fullness of value,“ „but in such a way that the whole only has its own
fullness of value in its dependence on the personal fullness of value of the members.“ 12
2. The German Federal Constitutional Court professed the same principle in its decision of
July 20, 1954: „The image of man that Basic Law represents is not that of an isolated, sovereign
individual. Basic Law has rather settled the tension between individual and community
in the sense of the person’s relatedness to the community and dependence on the community,
without thereby violating his or her intrinsic value.“ 13
The encyclical „Sollicitudo rei socialis“ projects the image of a global society based on solidarity:
Thus it refers not only to the „internal level of every nation” but, analogously, to the
solidarity between nations and peoples as well. This, it says, calls for a fundamental ethical
concept of a human culture in which the quality of the whole can only be derived from respect
for all individual persons, societies and peoples. .“.. There must be complete respect for the
identity of each people with its own historical and cultural characteristics... Both peoples and
individuals must enjoy the fundamental equality which is the basis for everybody to share in
the process of full development“ (SRS 33,7).
CHAPTER TWO: THE COMMON-GOOD PRINCIPLE
The solidarity principle, which begins simultaneously with personhood and sociality, raises
the question whether both poles of the solidarity relationship face one another on an equal
footing, or whether they are superordinated and subordinated to one another. It will be shown
that this question cannot be answered with a simple Yes or No, but requires various distinctions.
Whereas, in a certain respect, priority attaches to the common good, personhood is,
from another and ultimate point of view, the higher value.
§ 1 Priority of the Common Good over the Individual Interest.
1. for more than two thousand years Western social philosophy has tried to interpret the relation
of the individual man to society with the help of the organism analogy - a method that
must be applied very carefully since, as history teaches, it can easily be misused for totalitarian
purposes.
As early as the fifth century BC, Menenius Agrippa is supposed to have reconciled the patricians
and the plebeians of Rome with the fable of the divided members that nevertheless form
one body in a solidary fashion. In The Republic, Plato compared the „well ordered state“ with
a body and its members. Aristotle made use of the organism analogy to gain knowledge of the
12 G. Gundlach, Solidarismus, in: Staatslexikon (1931), IV:. 1614.
13 Entscheidungen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, 4, 120
29