Few things offer clarity like a real crisis — today’s pandemic brings into focus what authentic social responsibility is.  

Consider where our corporate giants were just months ago.

When 2019 came to a close, Georgia passed its fetal heartbeat bill and the world’s biggest entertainment companies were apoplectic. Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger and Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos threatened that the law’s passage would require their companies to rethink all investments in the state. A letter signed by CEOs from 180 companies was direct: State restrictions on abortion threaten “economic stability” and impair companies’ ability to keep “business thriving.”

Not long before that, big companies offered the same response to North Carolina after it passed a bill requiring people to use the public bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex. PayPal, Deutche Bank and Adidas canceled jobs projects. The NCAA boycotted. CEO and founder of VoxPro Dan Kiely called the law bigoted and suggested it threatened the social fabric.

Companies didn’t like Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” either. That law, which sought to protect business providers from having to offer services that violated religious beliefs, was soundly rejected by Apple CEO Tim Cook. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman blasted the law, saying it “set a terrible precedent.” The NCAA, NBA, WNBA and NASCAR each railed against the bill.

When Texas considered passing a similar law in 2019 protecting religious professionals, the biggest companies again reassured Americans that they would protect the world from the coming apocalypse. Senior executives at Apple, Amazon, Google, Dell and Facebook would bravely hold the line. Being socially responsible required it.

 

How Times Have Changed

Fast forward to today. In the first four months of 2020, more than 60,000 Americans have lost their lives. Thousands more have been hospitalized. Businesses have closed. Unemployment has skyrocketed. Food supply chains threatened. School children sent home. Lives upended.

Was big business right? Was this the work of the long-awaited theocratic leviathan?

The answer is No.

A global pandemic has torn through our nation’s biggest cities and smallest towns. The world’s greatest market economy washed away in a sea of face masks.

Woke tolerance looks silly today. Coronavirus has distinguished the trivial from the truly terrible. For companies that are paying attention, it offers a lesson about what being socially responsible really means.

Take Bauer, for example. The leading hockey brand transitioned production away from goalie helmets in an effort to make face shields for front-line medical personnel. Under Armour and Fanatics answered the call for filling the personal protective equipment shortage. Hershey just committed $1 million to acquire, install and staff a new manufacturing line to make face masks, aiming to produce 45,000 per day. Fiat Chrysler says it can be counted on for one-million masks per month. Ford and GM are producing ventilators.

And those are just a few examples. Even some of the corporate giants mentioned earlier are stepping up.

This is American ingenuity imbued with a proper sense of solidarity.

 

Solid Catholic Principles

Yes — solidarity. From its roots in pontifical statements about social justice and the common good, most especially in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on capital labor Rerum Novarum, through the papacies of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis today, this important principle has long been heralded. We are all in this together and we should work together for the common good.

But the crisis does not just provide insight into authentic solidarity, it also offers crystal clarity on the importance of its co-equal partner: subsidiarity.

First introduced in Rerum Novarum, emphasized in Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and further developed in John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical  Centesimus Annus, the principle of subsidiarity consistently makes clear: It is gravely wrong for large, powerful entities to take from and do for the human person those things which the human person has been designed to do for himself. The individual does not exist for the state or for the corporation. These entities exist for the individual. And the individual exists for the family.

And during this crisis, when everything else in this world has been stripped away, it is important to remember with whom we are hunkering down.

We are not locked down with our corporate parent company.

We are not quarantined with the company’s public relations team or the suits in the legal department.

We’re not even with the kids’ soccer league or dance team.

Or with the Joneses at the country club.
We are weathering this storm with our families.
The human family is the domestic church. It remains the vital cell of human life.

Reflecting on this fact makes the following clear: It is never appropriate for the state or the corporation to swallow up citizens or employees in pursuit of causes which deviate from the family’s faith-informed conscience. When aggregating entities — whether they be governments or businesses — do so, they make the individual a passive player in his own moral life. This is incalculably destructive. It breeds — both in the individual and in the society where such harm is practiced — a detachment from the truth. And when truth becomes more distant, it becomes harder to know and seemingly impossible to pursue. Eventually, only chaos and nihilism remain.

 

Sic et Non

In short, companies that seek to corral Catholics into chasing after their own degenerate causes deserve an emphatic “No.” These false prophets come to us like wolves in sheep’s clothing. Claiming the banner of social responsibility, they use language as subterfuge. They seek not the common good but the power to dismantle society around their selfish ends.

In contrast, while Catholic teaching reminds us to always remain oriented on the eternal and not the temporal, those companies which get it right, warrant a prudently cautious “Yes.” By revering human dignity, showing respect for the family and honoring the role of faith in society, these companies reveal an authentic understanding of subsidiarity, social responsibility and the common good. And while buying from, investing in and working for corporations, large or small, should never devolve into a worshipping of such institutions, these companies deserve to know that we are with them.

“How will we know them?” you ask.
 Prudent discernment: You shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16).

Ronald Jelinek, Ph.D. is a professor of marketing at Providence College. His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Industrial Marketing Management and Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management.