The transformed life of Israel, in contrast to the dominant values around them, focuses on justice and righteousness and steadfast love, that is, on compassion for the weak, on fidelity to human persons, and on the ordering of life which transcends self-aggrandizement and self-securing.

The common atheist-materialist-scientistic slogan that religion is static and never changes is, of course, not true.  An example of that can be seen in the subtle but unmistakable development of Catholic social teaching from the time of Leo XIII through Francis  Leo XIII, a deeply intellectual man of his time focused on a revival of Thomist concepts in making his arguments in favor of social justice in the modern period, something which subsequent Popes, most of whom were deep intellectuals in their own right, deemphasized or didn't use to make their arguments developing Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

There is one willfully distorted thing in Leo's arguments that has been used by Catholic reactionaries, distorting even what John Paul II, who they claim as a hero, into supporting the very neo-liberal and libertarian policies of such people as the Ayn Randian fanatic, Paul Ryan.   Subsidiarity is the principle that governmental and institutional power should be decentralized, higher levels of institutions and governments shouldn't do what lower levels of the same can do effectively.  Pay special attention to the last phrase "do effectively" because on ignoring that the Randian-libertarian, Republican-fascist use of Catholic social teaching is entirely dependent.

Paul Ryan has no intention of governments doing exactly those things which local and state governments, private institutions, including religious institutions have shown they are either unable or unwilling to do.  His policies are depraved and couldn't be more obviously anti-Christian, nevermind in opposition to the past hundred twenty-six years of explicit Catholic social policy.  That's so true that even a rather conservative group*, the "distributists" based on the improbable duo of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, has had to point out the grotesque abuse of the concept of subsidiarity doesn't mean what such people make of it.   The principle doesn't contenance inaction or neglect or worse, it wasn't a means of inhibiting or preventing the possibility of government or institutional action.

BUT ITS PROPOSED IMPLEMENTATION ALWAYS INTENDED THAT THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE,  INDIVIDUALS, FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT, AND EVEN SMALL BUSINESSES AND ESSENTIAL SERVICES BE PROVIDED BY WHATEVER APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS.   Paul Ryan, in his public life, isn't practicing Catholic social teaching or Christianity, he is practicing the teachings of the depraved atheist, materialist psychotic Ayn Rand.  And Catholics and others who pretend he is following the teachings of these encyclicals or even the Bible is simply lying about that.  There is a lot of that kind of lying in American politics and there has been from the first second a European invader violated the morality contained in the scriptures on this continent.  There is nothing new there.  But for someone to practice Randian politics while claiming the mantle of Catholic social teaching is fairly new, though Ryan didn't invent it.

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In this passage of chapter 6 of Walter Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense, you can see what I meant.

Conversion – Both Communal and Personal

It is especially the prophets of Israel, who lived five hundred years after Moses,  who most vigorously call Israel to conversion.  By that time the people of God had become thoroughly encultured.  They lived by the norms and values of their Canaanite environment.  The prophets call for a fresh embrace of their covenant with the Lord, insisting that this covenant is a workable form of life, even in the context of urban imperialism.  Thus Amos for example. 

Seek me and live . . . 
See, the LORD and live . . . 
Seek good and not evil . . . 
Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate (Amos 5:4-15).

And this is echoed by Isaiah, his contemporary:

Wash yourselves;
make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seen justice,
correct oppression;
defend the fatherless,
plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:16-17).

Hosea,  their near contemporary, is less precise ethically but makes essentially the same call:

Sow for yourselves righteousness,
reap the fruit of steadfast love;
break up your fallow ground,
for it is time to seek the LORD, 
that he may come and rain salvation upon you (Hosea 10:12).

So you, by the help of God, return, 
hold fast to love and justice,
and wait continually for your God (Hosea 12:6)

It is evident from these statements that conversion is not something confined to a spiritual or private agenda.  Rather a decision is called for that has urgent political and economic implications.  The prophets believe that all of life,  including public institutions,  can be reoriented so that they serve the purposes of the LORD to whom Israel has made covenant vows.  The transformed life of Israel, in contrast to the dominant values around them, focuses on justice and righteousness and steadfast love, that is, on compassion for the weak, on fidelity to human persons, and on the ordering of life which transcends self-aggrandizement and self-securing. 

*  I'm rather unenthusiastic about adopting any more -isms or declaring myself some -ist or other, I think that we need a moratorium on creating ists and isms and ideologies, I don't think the tendency of those to generate orthodox programs that become more important than the exigent needs expressed in the Prophets and their present day commentary by Popes, Old Testament scholars and even our greatest novelist present is a good thing. 

That said, when you're talking about these things, the categories of right-left break down.  The word "liberal" often becomes useless without modifiers because the way most of the world uses it is in complete variance with the original use of it in the United States which was explicitly a means of providing for the widows and orphans, the poor, the sick, the disabled, the alien among us.  In The Bible, that list, of course, extends to the working poor in such passages as those dealing with leaving grain, olives and grapes for them to glean, three of the most economically important entities.

So, I'm not encouraging anyone to become a "distributist" any more than I am that they become a socialist.  Creating ideologies is probably something that should have been left behind in the 20th century. Probably earlier would have been a good time to do that.  Too many, way, way too many.