part of the Catholic tradition, memorably restated in the modern period in Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum but reaching back to Thomas Aquinas and his predecessors (McCann, Porter), has closely associated society with the state and placed responsibility for the common good in the hands of the rulers. Nevertheless, that same tradition has also proposed the principle of subsidiarity as a way of identifying the relationship between the good of the larger society, the commonweal, and the good of the various