There is a deeply misguided belief that the road to justice lies in the consolidation of authority into ever-larger international institutions, particularly in the post-Christian landscape of global governance and political power. This myth has gripped not only secular technocrats; it has found a sympathetic ear in some ecclesial circles, proposing that larger bureaucracies, global legal bodies, and centralized supranational governance are the only viable answers to poverty, war, and injustice. Pope Francis, in documents such as Fratelli Tutti and his frequent endorsements of the United Nations and international courts, seems to have lent credibility to this vision. With utmost charity and firm respect for the late pope’s office, it must be said that this is not only a political misjudgment; it is a theological and biblical error.
Let us begin with the root philosophical fault. Modern global institutionalism rests upon a faulty anthropology: that man is fundamentally a subject to be managed by a governing body, rather than a person to be honored in inherent dignity. Supranational governance, from the European Union to the UN and the International Criminal Court, tends to treat nations as fragments of a single global machine rather than distinct states with subcommunities possessing unique identities, cultures, and fiscal and political priorities. The result is an ideological flattening, a bureaucratic reduction of the human condition to that which can be administered, regulated, and redistributed en masse.
One area where this is painfully clear is in the experience of the Christian minorities suffering genocide, persecution, and discrimination around the globe. The UN was largely silent when Coptic Christians were beheaded by ISIS in Libya; the International Criminal Court remained elusive as Boko Haram systematically enslaved Nigerian girls; and there is still a noteworthy global lack of binding international outrage against the imprisonment and torture of underground Chinese Catholics loyal to the Holy See. These questions do not receive answers because the very institutions entrusted with justice are structurally incapable of prioritizing transcendent moral goods. The ICC has spent more than two decades and over $2 billion prosecuting mostly low-level African warlords while failing to address modern, widespread crimes against humanity perpetrated by large regimes with veto power or considerable economic clout, leaving the astute to conclude that the court’s operations are more theatrical than truly judicial.
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis wrote, “We need a juridical, political and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity” (§138). Laudable as the intention may be on the surface, this kind of sentiment collapses under its own weight when history, economics, and theology are considered. The push for larger, centralized internationalism in the name of peace and justice has consistently resulted not in peace but in paralysis of communities. The results have been policies that are over-bureaucratized, politically compromised, and often blind to the real needs of the suffering.
Consider the case of the European Union, originally conceived as a cooperative economic coalition to preserve peace in postwar Europe. Today the EU has become an unelected bureaucracy imposing moral relativism, open-border mandates, and social engineering programs across its member states. Nations like Hungary and Poland are actively seeking to preserve Christian moral principles and sovereign policy, and because of that they are routinely condemned and sanctioned by EU courts. Ironically, those same courts remain impotent before the secularist push for the deconstruction of the family, neo-Marxist and socialist economic policies, and the rise of anti-Semitic violence in western Europe.
Globalized governance also often exacerbates the suffering of poorer nations, contrary to their touted intent. The international climate agenda, for instance, frequently results in environmental policies that place the energy industries of developing nations in policy chokeholds, forcing them to import expensive and sometimes inaccessible “green” technologies while still lacking basic supplies of electricity for their citizens. As Helen Raleigh documented in Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Backfired, the UN and the World Bank frequently condition financial aid on ideological conformity, including gender ideology, abortion access, and compliance with progressivist agendas fundamentally at odds with natural law anthropology, Judeo-Christian worldviews, and even the moral and religious frameworks of recipient nations. In effect, supranational institutions have demonstrably become coercive tools of Western secularism, exporting spiritual confusion under the guise of humanitarian aid.
What then is the answer? I propose that it lies not in a utopian universalism but in the perennial principle of subsidiarity. The Catholic Church has long taught, most notably in Quadragesimo Anno and Centesimus Annus, that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level, closest to the people affected. As Pius XI pointed out, “It is an injustice, and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order, to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do” (Quadragesimo Anno, §79).
Subsidiarity reflects not only sound political philosophy but also deep theological truth: that the fundamental reality of human dignity is best safeguarded by institutions and groups closely rooted to the real experience of the human person, families, and communities they aim to serve, hence institutions like parishes, towns, and nations—not faceless superpowered councils in Geneva or Brussels. Philosopher Wilhelm Röpke argued in A Humane Economy that “the attempt to substitute centralized machinery for personal moral responsibility is not only ineffective, but inherently dehumanizing.” These supranational bodies may simulate justice, but they cannot instantiate virtue, nor can they ensure the true common good as a result.
The historical record supports this. After World War II, the United States did not seek to impose a global government upon the vanquished. Instead, it undertook the arduous, expensive, criticized, yet noble task of rebuilding Japan and Germany by supporting their national institutions and aiding them in the construction of new constitutions, legislative systems, markets, and civic frameworks while respecting their unique cultural heritages. The result has been evident: two of the world’s most stable, prosperous, and democratic nations, both of whom have remained sovereign and possess reasonable levels of free markets, and have extended that stability to their own spheres of influence.
Imagine if, instead of massive bureaucracies in New York or The Hague, we saw a coordinated network of localist empowerment, where developed nations helped less-developed ones build their own judicial independence, protect ownership of private property, enforce contracts, establish free markets, institute civil virtue, and educate the populace in public discourse and market participation. Such a world would not be homogenized but would maintain heterogeny in national identity and cultural flourishing while remaining harmonized with the global populace. Nations would thereby be individually strong, not diluted, and true legislative and enforced justice would be instituted on the soil of each society, not abstracted in sterile, global forums and international courtrooms.
The Catholic Church herself provides a reasonable institutional model to emulate in that sense. She is not a globalist power imposing a singular culture but rather a communion of churches, united in faith but diverse in expression. She respects the sui iuris identity of Eastern Catholic Churches, the customs of local bishops’ conferences, and the legitimate autonomy of national and cultural traditions, provided they remain in communion with the deposit of faith and the Holy See. This is, in one institutional understanding, subsidiarity incarnate, wherein universal truths find unique expression in particular cultures.
Even Pope Benedict XVI, writing in Caritas in Veritate, though himself supportive of some kind of world authority, nevertheless cautioned: “This authority, however, must be regulated by law, respect consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity… and must be ordered to the realization of the common good” (§67). In other words, any such body must not be structured such that it replaces local governance but rather assists it in justice. Unfortunately, many of the structures we now see do the opposite.
The attempt to craft a universal moral order apart from the gospel is doomed to failure. Pope Leo XIII warned, “Every civil government must acknowledge God as its Founder and must obey and reverence Him.” When global institutions claim religious neutrality or moral secularism while legislating moral issues, they inevitably replace Christian anthropology with another, typically utilitarian, calculus, which favors those with lobbying power over those with inherent dignity.
The Christian vision of the world is not one of imperial unification but of covenantal communion. Christianity has never called for a national superstate. The Church, while universal in essence, always lives in the soil of real human cultures. Christ sent His apostles to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), not to dissolve the nations.
Therefore, we ought to imagine a future built upon the enduring foundation of truth, subsidiarity, human dignity, liberty, and virtue, not massive structures of internationalist and institutionalist hope. Let us recall the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that “the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” The role of government, even with the consideration of foreign assistance, is to empower the citizenry to take virtuous responsibility for their lives, their families, and their communities. And where that is not happening, tyranny creeps in disguised as mercy.
The Christian gospel compels us to act and to urge service, not to wait for global consensus and the legislation of more charity. The Church is not a supranational assembly of ethics. Biblical subsidiarity teaches us what the Church has always known: Justice begins in the home, in the parish, and in the polis; among neighbors who are united in a common cause, not nameless administrators. Human dignity is best preserved not by expanding bureaucratic reach but by empowering local virtue.
