Christian democracy

Christian democracy applies Catholic social teaching to modern politics, accepting democracy and the market while rejecting both liberal individualism and socialist collectivism in favour of an organic account of society built on the family, the association, and vocation.

Its organizing principle is subsidiarity: matters should be handled by the smallest competent authority, with larger bodies assisting rather than absorbing smaller ones. Paired with solidarity — a binding obligation to the poor and to the dignity of labour — it yields support for both a welfare state and a strong civil society independent of it, occupying a distinctive centre that is neither laissez-faire nor statist.

It is not merely a philosophy but one of the great governing forces of modern Europe. Founded on papal encyclicals from Rerum Novarum (1891) onward, it supplied the parties — Germany's CDU, Italy's Christian Democrats, and their neighbours — that rebuilt Western Europe after 1945, anchored the social market economy, and drove European integration under figures like Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman.

Its internal range runs from a more conservative, clerical wing to a progressive, social-reform wing, and in Latin America and elsewhere it has taken markedly different forms. What unites them is grounding politics in a theological account of the human person rather than in tradition, nation, or class.

Its critics on the left see a smoothing-over of real class conflict in the language of harmony and organic unity; secular critics question a politics resting on religious premises in plural societies; and as church attendance has fallen, the tradition has had to decide how Christian a 'Christian' democracy can still claim to be.

It is easily mistaken for ordinary secular conservatism, but its foundation is different: the dignity of the human person prior to both the market and the state, from which its whole distinctive shape — welfare plus subsidiarity, solidarity plus private property — is derived.