The Working Catholic: Social Doctrine Part Twelve by Bill Droel Stay in your lane. That’s one paraphrase of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. The word itself is not found in most English dictionaries. It is derived from the Latin word subsidium, meaning help or aid. The idea behind this principle is that higher or bigger entities should assist lower or smaller entities, not usurp them. It can apply to family life, to dealings within business, in schools and other social... Read more

The Working Catholic: Experience Counts by Bill DroelCatholic philosophers of the mid-20th century (the Personalists) improved upon an older top-down notion of truth. Yes, truth comes from God. However, revelation does not come entirely from above. God’s truth (the Incarnation) is for all time embedded in human experience. The newer approach appreciates that God’s truth arises from and corresponds to real, important questions within our daily lives. For many years Catholicism assumed that God’s truth came down from on high.... Read more

The Working Catholic: Flee the World? by Bill Droel The monastic idea is to devote one’s entire attention to God. Doing so during the Middle Ages meant turning against the frivolous distractions of the world and concentrating fully on God, writes Jamie Kreiner in The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Liveright, 2023). Various monasteries and individual monks (women and men) used multiple techniques for achieving singular attention. Some practices were extreme. Plenty of monastic types, like... Read more

The Working Catholic: Charity by Bill Droel “To give away money is an easy matter… But to decide to whom to give and how much and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every [person’s] power nor an easy matter.” –Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) The hard part of giving away wealth “is figuring out how to do it in a leveraged way. It is not easy. Building Amazon was not easy… And I am finding that philanthropy... Read more

The Working Catholic: Democracy by Bill Droel Democracy requires a thick, independent civil society. Democracy is a fraud when restrictions are placed on churches, when unions are really fronts for the government or the company, when self-supporting newspapers and other media succumb to mega-forces and when there is only one viable political party. It is likewise difficult to impose genuine democracy in a place that does not traditionally have networks of autonomous groups. The benefits of civil society are multiple.... Read more