Problems Facing Catholic Rulers

Extract

When a ruler inherits authority he inherits a responsibility for ordering the relations of living people whom he has not created himself, and therefore has not formed with a view to the order that he conceives as most suitable. Moreover he inherits an existing order in which the relations of the members of that society operate. That order, the result of a long historical process, has itself conditioned the people who live within it to suit its requirements, and those people have themselves given to it a certain mode which they, wittingly or unconsciously, have evolved as best suited to give them the conditions that they desire.