it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them." As with many social encyclicals in the modern period, this one occurs in the historical context of the intensifying struggle between communist and capitalist ideologies, exactly forty years – hence the title – after the Vatican's first public stance on the issue in Rerum novarum. Promulgated in 1931, Quadragesimo anno is a response to German Nazism and Soviet communism, on the one hand, and to Western European and American capitalist individualism on the other. It broke the surface of Catholic social teaching in this context, and it is helpful to keep this in mind. The main author of the 1931 encyclical's "subsidiarity" part was the German Jesuit and economist Oswald von Nell-Breuning. Gregory Beabout suggests that subsidiarity draws upon a far older concept as well: the Roman military term subsidium. He writes that "the role of the subsidium (literally, to sit behind) is to lend help and support in case of need." Employing Beabout's etymology, subsidiarity indicates that the higher social unit ought to "sit behind" the lower ones to lend help and support in case of need. Another etymological interpretation states that subsidiarity literally means "to 'seat' ('sid') a service down ('sub') as close to the need for that service as is feasible". Either interpretation indicates a hermeneutic of subsidiarity in which the higher social body's rights and responsibilities for action are predicated upon their assistance to and empowerment of the lower. Francis McHugh states that in addition to the "vertical" dimension of subsidiarity, there is also a "horizontal" dimension which "calls for a diversity of semi-autonomous social, economic, and cultural spheres". Quadragesimo anno presents these "spheres" as occupying the space between the poles of individual and State: "...things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed "individualism" that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance