ABSTRACT
For the Reformed churches the corresponding principle is that of ‘sov ereignty in one’s own circle’, or ‘the special task and vocation of each social group’. There is obviously a difference of accent. The Protestant conception underlines the separate and exclusive responsibility of the individual and the small group, though only within defined limits and subject to a vocation of service to others. The Catholic phrasing stresses rather the inclusion of these small units of society-in greater wholes, within which however they have a sphere of autonomy on which they have a right to insist. But in practice the two conceptions come to much the same thing. There is work to be done at every level of social organisation from the individual to the international community, and the responsibility for what can be done at lower levels must not be allowed to gravitate to the top. Every social unit or group has a sphere of work which it can do efficiently in the interests not only of its members but of society as a whole, and this sphere must be defined and reserved for it. A higher authority may of course insist that some subordinate group live up to its responsibilities. It may call on the subordinate group to justify its indepen dence by proving that there is indeed some sphere in which it can work efficiently on its own. It may check excesses or suggest new lines of development. It may ‘direct, watch, stimulate, and restrain’, as the passage of Quadragesimo Anno just quoted goes on to say. But only in the last, extreme resort may it take over its subordinates’ responsibilities and dis charge them itself. A phrase sometimes used to cover this whole conception, from both the Protestant and the Catholic side, is ‘autonomisation’; the
‘autonomisation’, that is, of individuals and social groups. It can also be described as ‘horizontal pluralism' ; a policy which insists on the indepen dence, rights, and responsibilities of each individual or group which can show that it has a legitimate sphere of its own: independence firstly as against others on the same level of social organisation, and secondly as against those at other and particularly higher levels.
