By Robert Royal.

An ancient Greek legend tells of Alexander the Great confronting the Gordian Knot, which no one could untie. An oracle prophesied that whoever untied it would rule the East. Alexander drew his sword and cut it in half. In another version, the knot was tied around a chariot pole; Alexander slipped the pole out, and that did the trick. Either way, the lesson is: some things don't yield to the usual approaches. They require a leap to unprecedented measures.

In Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth," the archbishop of Canterbury, marveling at Prince Hal's metamorphosis from youthful carouser to sage ruler says: "Turn him to any cause of policy, / The Gordian knot of it he will unloose." Words that come spontaneously to mind, though further moves remain to be seen, about the second Trump administration.

Some of our knots required the swift Alexandrian sword: Boys and men in girls' bathrooms (and sports), surgically disfiguring children, criminal illegals roaming American streets, open borders, DEI racism masquerading as anti-racism, support for gay comic books in Ecuador or LGBT plays in Ireland, and how many other absurdities? There's no point in administrative or congressional "investigations" into such things. That would be a further waste of time and resources much needed elsewhere. You just stop them and those who did them.

So, Kudos to Trump and DOGE. But now begins the harder part, which calls for a certain finesse.

There's been a bit of talk in these heady days about Catholic social principles, though the main concepts haven't been much in play. There was implicit recognition, for instance, of the Catholic idea of the family as the primary cell of society in the confused discussion of Vice President Vance's assertion about the ordo amoris.

But the central Catholic social principles are human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity. We need serious attention to these because they've been subtly undermined and would help greatly, properly applied.

Human Dignity, for instance, is widely taken for granted, but it's often presented as if all people and ways of life are equally acceptable. (Several American bishops have even used it as an argument against deportations.) Last year's Vatican document Dignitas infinita rightly says that we remain made in the image of God, whatever our sins. But it doesn't nearly warn enough about what once was obvious: that our sins disfigure that image and are a rejection of portions of our own dignity.

The Common Good is a complicated notion that cannot be much discussed here. (The worst lecture I've ever given was trying to explain the concept to a foreign audience; I've taken pains so that won't happen again.) But it can't simply mean some sort of collectivism. Indeed, quite the opposite. The U.S. Constitution similarly speaks of "promoting the general welfare," but the Founding Fathers feared runaway government and restricted the Federal republic to carefully enumerated powers.

Education, for instance, contributes to the general welfare, but there's a reason why there was no department of education until 1979 (almost 200 years after the Constitution was ratified); education inevitably involves community values and moral questions better handled at the local and state level - i.e., not the federal government's business.

Catholic social principles of solidarity and subsidiarity help to understand why. For present purposes, solidarity is clear enough - it's a virtue, a dedication to care for others, but with limits of its own to guard it from totalitarian temptations, which is why we also have subsidiarity.

Here's the classic passage about subsidiarity from Quadragesimo anno (1931):

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshake...