Think Local
January 17, 2019
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, Sugaring Off, 1943
“TODAY’S governments, more than just big, have taken on the overbearing configuration of Behemoth Government, over-bloated, top-heavy, inefficient, unapproachable, unaccountable, inhumane and cruelly unjust. Unaccountable, that is, to the people it governs but not to the hidden powers that secretly control it.
This trend is the product of the prevailing attitude, itself based on the slippery footing of modern principles, which have men automatically turning to the highest and most distant reaches of authority to do for them what they are able and morally obliged to either do for themselves or to commission the smallest and most localized institutions to do for them. The Church looks upon this attitude — and the criminal system it has spawned — with profound disfavor. ‘Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and industry can accomplish, so too it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance or right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.'” [Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno]
