---
title: "What is solidarity?"
url: "https://seekabove.com/answers/what-is-solidarity"
description: "Solidarity is the conviction that we are genuinely responsible for one another — not as strangers who occasionally help, but as members of one human family whose lives are bound together. It is more…"
published: "2026-06-05"
updated: "2026-06-10"
category: "Catholic Social Teaching"
scripture: ["1 Corinthians 12:26", "Galatians 6:2", "Acts 4:32", "Luke 10:33-34"]
catechism: "CCC 1939–1942"
---

# What is solidarity?

## Short answer

Solidarity is the conviction that we are genuinely responsible for one another —
not as strangers who occasionally help, but as members of one human family whose
lives are bound together. It is more than a warm feeling of pity; it is a firm
commitment to seek the good of others, especially those who are suffering, as if
their burden were our own.

## Full explanation

Imagine two ways of responding to someone in trouble. The first is sympathy from a
distance: you feel sorry, maybe you send something, and then you go on with your
separate life. The second is different — you treat their problem as actually
yours, the way you would for a brother or a close friend. Catholic teaching calls
that second response solidarity, and it insists it is not optional kindness but a
basic truth about who we are.

The reason is simple. We did not assemble ourselves into a society out of pure
self-interest, like strangers sharing a bus. We are one family under one Father,
and the bonds between us are real whether we acknowledge them or not. The worker
who made your clothes, the farmer who grew your food, the person displaced by a
war you will never see — these are not abstractions. Solidarity is the habit of
seeing them as kin and acting accordingly. The Church sometimes describes it as a
kind of friendship that reaches beyond the people we happen to like or know.

This has teeth. Solidarity asks the comfortable to notice the costs their comfort
imposes on others, and to change. It asks nations not to treat the poor parts of
the world as someone else's problem. It asks us to share not only money but
knowledge, opportunity, and a place at the table. The Church even speaks of
sharing spiritual goods — that the faith and prayer of the Church belong to the
whole body, not a private few. Solidarity is the opposite of the modern instinct
to build a comfortable life and pull up the ladder behind us.

It is worth being honest that solidarity can be costly and inconvenient. It may
mean paying more so that the person who made a thing is paid fairly, speaking up
when it would be easier to stay silent, or simply refusing to look away. But this
is also where the Church locates real human greatness. A life turned entirely
inward shrinks; a life that takes up the weight of others grows. Solidarity is not
a tax on happiness — it is one of the roads into it.

## Why this matters

Without solidarity, society fractures into rival camps, each guarding its own and
suspicious of the rest. With it, the strong feel the claim of the weak and the
fortunate feel responsible for the forgotten. For the individual, solidarity is
freedom from the small, anxious world of pure self-interest. For the Church, it is
how love of neighbor becomes more than a slogan — a daily practice of carrying one
another, paying fairly, and refusing to treat anyone as expendable.

## Common misunderstanding

Solidarity is often confused with a vague feeling of compassion — being moved by
sad news. But a feeling that changes nothing is not yet solidarity. St. John
Paul II defined it as "a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself
to the common good" (*Sollicitudo Rei Socialis* 38), because we really are
responsible for each other. It is measured not by how
much we feel, but by what we are willing to do and give.

## Scripture connections

- **1 Corinthians 12:26** — when one part of the body suffers, all suffer; we are
  members of one another.
- **Galatians 6:2** — bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
- **Acts 4:32** — the early believers shared what they had so that no one was in
  need, an image of solidarity in practice.
- **Luke 10:33-34** — the Good Samaritan makes a stranger's trouble his own,
  modeling solidarity that crosses every boundary.

## Church teaching references

- CCC 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942
- *Sollicitudo Rei Socialis* (1987) named solidarity as a moral virtue and a duty
  among peoples.
- *Centesimus Annus* (1991) tied solidarity to the right ordering of society.
- *Fratelli Tutti* (2020) reframed solidarity as universal friendship across
  borders.

## Reflection question

Whose burden have you noticed lately but treated as "not your problem," and what
would change if you let yourself see that person as family rather than as a
stranger?