The state needs putting back in its place because of our understanding of the term subsidiarity. The state exists to help individuals, families, the community and civil associations achieve their legitimate objectives. Subsidiarity means to help or to provide support. From a proper understanding of subsidiarity many direct policy implications follow. We come to understand, for example, the recent problems with the Catholic adoption agencies. These problems came to exist because, instead of the state helping the voluntary associations in their act of solidarity of finding stable families for children, the tables were turned. The voluntary associations - that is, the Catholic adoption agencies - became agents of the state. The state is in charge of adoption and the agencies dance to the tune of the state. The right relationships have been precisely reversed.

We need to be aware that the right relationships have been reversed in education, too. Schools, even Catholic schools, have become agents of the government and not of parents. They provide a service of educating children on behalf of the government. Indeed, it is interesting that Pope Paul VI said that the state should provide the same support to parents to have their children educated in a private school as was provided in state schools. Such a system would set Catholic parents and schools free. It would also, I suspect, lead to the creation of many more Catholic (and non-Catholic) schools that would provide more alternatives for parents that better suited the varied needs, character and aptitude of their children.

There certainly is not unqualified support for a free economy in Catholic thinking. As the Catechism makes clear, quoting from Centesimus annus, the market economy must be circumscribed in a framework of law so that the market is the servant of human freedom. Where that framework should begin and end is not something determined directly by Catholic social teaching. There is a relatively wide field of argument that Catholics of different political perspectives can occupy. We would not expect all Christians to take the same side in a debate about whether we should respond to the current financial crisis by deregulating or further regulating the City.