ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

Good morning. In just over half an hour there will be a ceremony in Manchester Town Hall when the people of Manchester will be given 6 billion pounds to spend on health services. From now on it is they, through their elected local representatives, not the national government, who will have to decide difficult health and social care priorities. This follows the 2 billion pounds that have already been handed over to them from the centre for housing, transport, planning and skills training. It’s a very dramatic example of what Catholic Social Teaching calls the principle of subsidiarity. This states that decisions should be made at the lowest appropriate level, and only at a higher level when it is in the common good to do so. Some decisions, like defence spending, obviously have to be made at the national level, and others, say, on how the village green is to be maintained, clearly belong at the local. But there are scores and scores of intermediate decisions for which there is no blueprint on where they should be made. Nevertheless, the principles which should guide us as to the appropriate level are quite clear-responsibility, accountability and the common good. If a community is capable of taking responsibility for its life, and if its elected representatives are truly accountable for the decisions they make, then Catholic social teaching says it is wrong for a higher level of decision makers to take over. But that teaching also says this has to be shown to be for the good of the whole country. The principle of subsidiarity is rooted in the teaching on responsibility and accountability shared by most of the great religious traditions of the world. We have been given responsibility- first of all for shaping our own lives, and our families and then the communities of which we are a part, not forgetting the earth itself of which we are stewards. It need not have been like this. We could have been made puppets, but instead the shaping of life been put in our hands. From a Christian perspective there is a further dimension to this. For Jesus gathered around him a group of intimate friends and handed over to them the continuing task of disclosing the divine in and through the human. The Divine life in him was to become embodied in their life together. And if we have been given responsibility we are also accountable for how we exercise it. So the shift in decision making power to Manchester today, an example which might be followed by more of our great cities, expresses the principle of subsidiarity. Time will show whether it meets the test of the other key principle of Catholic social teaching, that of solidarity, of serving the common good, the good of the country as a whole. First broadcast 27 February 2015