Ask a well-read critic from the right and one from the left to describe Catholic Social Teaching, and you will get two contradictory descriptions delivered with equal confidence. The first will tell you CST is a slow-motion capitulation to socialism, importing redistributionist politics into the sanctuary under cover of “solidarity.” The second will tell you CST is a fig leaf for capitalism, talking movingly about the poor while leaving the structures that impoverish them untouched. Both critiques are watching for something real — a churchy way of avoiding hard questions by splitting every difference down the middle. That is not what CST is, and the way to show it is to read the documents rather than protest.

Catholic Social Teaching is the body of doctrine the Church has developed, especially since 1891, applying the Gospel and natural law to economic and political life — private property, labor, the state, the market, international justice, care for creation. It rests on a claim more basic than any policy conclusion: the human person is made in the image of God, is by nature social, and is owed both freedom and solidarity because of what he is, not because of what any ideology says he is worth. Two words anchor the whole structure — subsidiarity and solidarity.

Subsidiarity holds that social functions should be performed by the smallest, most local body competent to perform them, and that higher authorities exist to assist lower ones, not absorb them. Solidarity holds that human beings are genuinely responsible for one another — that the suffering of any member of the human family is a claim on the rest, not merely an occasion for private sentiment. Held together, these two principles are why CST cannot be filed neatly into either camp: subsidiarity brakes the state in a way the left finds uncomfortable, and solidarity obligates the wealthy in a way the right finds uncomfortable. A doctrine engineered to flatter one side would drop one of the two; CST keeps both.

The tradition begins in 1891 with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, written into an industrial world where socialist movements were gaining ground with a straightforward proposal: abolish private ownership of productive property and vest it in the state or the collective. Leo’s answer is unambiguous, and any argument that CST is crypto-socialism has to explain it away rather than around it. “Every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own,” Leo wrote — adding that this is “one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation.” Private property is not a concession the Church tolerates; it is grounded in human nature itself. A man who has justly acquired property through his labor has a right to it “without any one being justified in violating that right.”

That is about as far from socialism as a document can get. So the libertarian-conservative critic has a real text to stand on when he says CST defends private property — he is simply wrong to conclude the encyclical stops there. Because in the very same document, Leo refuses to leave wages to the unregulated verdict of supply and demand: “There underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner.” This does not abolish the wage contract or the employer’s property right — but it insists a freely negotiated wage can still be unjust if it starves the man who agreed to it. Justice here outranks consent; a contract is not automatically fair merely because both parties signed it, if one had no real alternative but destitution. That is the seed of everything CST has said since about a living wage and the right to organize — there from the first page, not smuggled in later.

So the founding encyclical defends private property as a natural right and insists wages must meet a standard of justice beyond mere agreement, on adjacent pages, with equal force. Anyone who quotes only the property passage to prove CST is libertarian, or only the wage passage to prove it is socialist, has read half the encyclical.

Subsidiarity received its classic formulation forty years after Leo, in Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and the paragraph deserves to be quoted rather than paraphrased, because paraphrase is where most misunderstandings of the principle begin. Pius calls it “that most weighty principle… which cannot be set aside or changed”: “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.”

Read that carefully and it cuts in a direction conservative readers welcome and progressive readers resist: centralizing power in a state or supranational body, when a family, parish, or local community could do the same work, is not merely inefficient — it is unjust. This is the principle that makes CST allergic to totalizing state solutions. Here the libertarian-conservative critic is onto something real, and CST does not pretend otherwise.

But subsidiarity is not libertarianism. It does not say the state should do as little as possible; it says the state should do what only it can do, and should actively support — not merely tolerate — the smaller institutions beneath it. Pius XI’s very next paragraph makes this explicit: the state’s role is “directing, watching, urging, restraining, as occasion requires and necessity demands” (§80), not vanishing. Sometimes the competent level is quite high — regulating international capital flows or arresting transnational trafficking are tasks no family or municipality can discharge. Subsidiarity is a principle about the right level of action, not a mandate for the smallest possible state — a common misreading, but a misreading against the text.

One honest limit on this “win” against the socialism charge: the same subsidiarity paragraph, taken in its full context (§§80–93), goes on to commend corporatist and guild-like “vocational groups” organizing whole industries — a vision of intermediate economic bodies a strict libertarian reader would find just as uncongenial as state control, since it still constrains free contract in the name of order. Conceding this does not undercut subsidiarity itself, which remains a brake on centralization; it only means the principle was never designed to deliver a laissez-faire economy either.

If subsidiarity is the principle that most comforts the right, solidarity is the principle that most unsettles it — and the spine text is not a papal document at all, but the Lord’s own words. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Christ describes the final judgment of the nations in terms that leave no room for a purely private, individualist account of charity. To those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned, He says: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). To those who failed, the verdict is reversed in the same terms: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me” (Matthew 25:45) — and the chapter ends starkly: “these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just, into life everlasting” (Matthew 25:46).

This is the single most important text behind what CST calls the preferential option for the poor — John Paul II’s phrase for “a special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §42). Christ identifies Himself with the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner so completely that neglecting them is neglecting Him. This is where the progressive-left critic has a real point of contact with the tradition: CST is not indifferent to structural injustice. John Paul II wrote of “structures of sin” — patterns “rooted in personal sin, and thus always linked to the concrete acts of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them and make them difficult to remove,” driven by “the all-consuming desire for profit” and “the thirst for power.” That is a direct claim that sin can become embedded in economic and political arrangements, not only in individual hearts — and that those arrangements are morally answerable.

Solidarity, then, is not private charity that leaves structures alone. John Paul II defined it as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good… because we are all really responsible for all” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §38) — aimed at the structures themselves, not merely at individual almsgiving within them.

So the progressive-left critic is right that CST refuses to treat poverty as a purely private matter — and wrong only in thinking the Church discovered this in the twentieth century as a concession to the left. It is there in James, there in Leo XIII in 1891, and it culminates, not begins, in the “structures of sin” language of the 1980s.

No fair treatment of this topic can skip the early Church’s common ownership in Acts, because it is the left’s best text and deserves to be quoted at full strength rather than waved away. “The multitude of believers had but one heart and one soul: neither did any one say that aught of the things which he possessed, was his own; but all things were common unto them… For as many as were owners of lands or houses, sold them, and brought the price of the things they sold, and laid it down before the feet of the apostles. And distribution was made to every one, according as he had need” (Acts 4:32, 34–35). If this is not a mandate for state-administered common ownership, what is it?

The honest answer requires a distinction the text itself supplies, and it is decisive: this common ownership was voluntary, not imposed by civil authority, and administered by the Church, not the state. The very next chapter makes the voluntary character unmistakable — Peter tells Ananias, whose sin was lying about the proceeds of a sale rather than withholding them, “Whilst it remained, did it not remain to thee? and after it was sold, was it not in thy power?” (Acts 5:4). Peter’s rebuke assumes Ananias had every right to keep the property or the price — it was genuinely his to dispose of. That is the opposite of socialism properly defined, which abolishes the right of private disposal by compulsion. Acts 4 describes Christians giving up what was truly theirs, out of charity, under no legal compulsion — not the state seizing the means of production and redistributing it by law.

This distinction is the exact line CST itself draws, and it is why Leo XIII could defend private property in the same century the Church still pointed to Acts 4 as an ideal of charity. The voluntary common life of the earliest Jerusalem community is a model of solidarity and detachment from wealth — a supererogatory practice of the fervent, not a universal precept, and never treated as license for the state to do by force what those first Christians did by love. Whoever cites Acts 4 to justify state confiscation has to explain why the text pointedly shows Peter affirming Ananias’s ownership rights in the same breath he condemns his lie.

That said, “voluntary, not compulsory” settles the narrow question of whether Acts 4 licenses state confiscation, but it is not the last word on obligation as such: the universal destination of goods discussed below (Section VI) still binds the propertied to the needs of others independent of any Acts-4-style act of communal generosity, so the absence of compulsion in Acts 4 does not mean CST leaves the comfortable free of any structural claim at all.

That last passage is the Magisterium’s most direct answer to both objections at once. Writing after the fall of Communism in 1989, John Paul II poses the question the world was asking: does the collapse of the socialist bloc mean capitalism should now be the model every recovering economy adopts? His answer is a distinction, not a yes or no. If “capitalism” names a system recognizing the positive role of business, the market, private property, and free human creativity, the answer is affirmative. But if it names a system in which economic freedom is not bounded by a strong juridical and ethical framework, the answer is negative, and John Paul warns against “a radical capitalistic ideology” that treats every social problem as self-solving through market forces alone. This is the same move Leo XIII made a century earlier — refuse the binary, give the textured answer instead.

The right’s proof-text deserves the same honest handling as the left’s. Genesis 1:28 records God’s command to the first humans: “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” Read in isolation, “subdue” and “rule over” can sound like unconditional license over creation and, by extension, the fruits of one’s labor — a warrant, some argue, against any structural claim the common good might make on private property.

But dominion in Genesis is never sovereign ownership in the absolute sense; it is stewardship under God, who remains the ultimate owner of what He has made. The man who receives dominion in Genesis 1 is the same man placed in Genesis 2 “to dress it, and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15) — cultivation and care, not extraction. CST reads dominion as delegated stewardship, which is why Centesimus Annus speaks of the “universal destination of goods” — the earth’s resources are intended for the benefit of all, even though private property remains the ordinary means of administering that destination. Ownership is real and not revoked by this teaching, but it is held in trust, answerable to the needs of others and to the God who remains the first owner of all that is subdued.