Solidarity means we are all in this together, and none of us can say, “Your end of the Titanic is sinking.” As St. John Paul II put it, solidarity “is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”
As with all Catholic social teaching, solidarity has deep biblical roots in both the Old and New Testaments. The author of the Acts of the Apostles summarizes those roots nicely when he says that God “made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:26–27).
—from St. Anthony Messenger’s “The Church’s Best-Kept Secret“
by Mark P. Shea
