Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

intended; it is the totality of institutions and conditions that render it possible for both the individual
man or woman and smaller groups to strive in an orderly co-operation towards the
fulfillment of the divinely willed purpose - the development of personhood and the building
up of cultural domains. It must be noticed here, of course, that in the age of worldwide intertwinement
the bonum commune that was one hitherto accustomed to limit to the state „takes
on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with
respect to the whole human race“ (Gaudium et spes, 26,Cf.also 74).
§ 2 Preservation of Personal Dignity
1. It would be a fatally wrong course to misuse the common good principle for the annihilation
of the freedom and dignity of the person by exaggerating the organism analogy. An organic
living being and society belong to two specifically different realms of being. The cell is
wholly exhausted in the service of the organism; man, however, must remain the subject of
social processes.
Since the nineteenth century a good many sociologists have in fact let themselves be misled
into misinterpreting the organism analogy in a biological way. Auguste Comte called sociology
a ‘social physics’ and spoke of ‘social anatomy’. Paul Lilienfeld saw in society a real
organism with a social nervous system, a social intercellular matter, defective developments
and regressive phenomena. Even Christian scientists have, in the struggle against the individualistic
conception society let themselves be carried away to formulations that are misleading
and suspect. One will still understand correctly when Matthias Scheeben speaks of the
‘quasi-substantial’ unity of the human race 16 or when Dietrich von Hildebrand does indeed
deny the community the character of substance, but gives it a ‘substance-like being,’ 17 although
these expressions are somewhat bold. It is, however, untenable when Rudolf Kaibach
calls the social realm a ‘substantive being’ and a ‘complete substance’. 18
2. In the face of these misleading formulations, three principles should be put forth for the
protection of personal dignity:
a) Only the individual person is a substance; society, however, is a real unit of relation and
order (relatio realis). Apart from individual people and independently of them, society does
not exist. In the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, the unity is of a particular incomparable
kind. For Christ lets the Church participate in his supernatural life, penetrates his whole body
with his divine power, and nourishes and preserves its individual members, so that the designation
„mystical body“ excludes every natural body, be it a physical body, be it a so-called
moral one (Cf. Mystici Corporis, 62). It is therefore inadmissible to draw conclusions from
the structure of the mystical Body of Christ for the interpretation of natural social bodies.
b) The priority of the common good over the individual good holds only insofar as man is
obligated to a given social organisation as its member, for instance, a staff member in a company,
a member in an association,, a citizen in a state, and so on. No company and no state
may see only the staff-member (the ‘total’ company) or only the citizen (the ‘total’ state) and
want to confiscate him with all that he is, thinks and does for itself. For man is more than the
employee of a company or a citizen; he is man and is in no way „ordained to the body politic
according to all that he is and has“ (Thomas Aquinas, I-II, 21, 4 ad 3). Only insofar and as
long as man works as a staff member in a company must he subordinate himself to the objective
necessities of the company; and only insofar as it is a question of one’s citizen status does
16 M. Scheeben, Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, (1880) II: 626
17 .D. v. Hildebrand, Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft. 2nd ed. (Regensburg 1952). 179
18 . R. Kaibach, Das Gemeinwohl und seine ethische Bedeutung. (Düsseldorf 1928), 44.
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