In his acute analysis of the character and institutions of the United States, “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville, a 19th-century French liberal, stressed the importance of what we call “civil society.” American democracy, Tocqueville understood, wasn’t just a matter of the state, here, and the individual, there. “Between” the state (or government) and the people there were the many free, voluntary associations that formed the sinews and musculature of America. Those free associations also performed many essential social functions: they educated the young, served the poor and cared for the sick. 

Writing a century and a half after Tocqueville, Pope John Paul II ...