I can't speak for defconw, but if I were to say something like, "Leave us alone," I'd add, "Unless you're prepared to sit down and do some heavy digging and careful parsing."
"Parsing" wasn't always something people like Clinton did to obscure meanings and weasel around.
These days, for the past almost 150 years, Catholic social teaching has been appropriated by people on every hand, most of whom did NOT do the lifting and parsing.
Take unions. I think it's evident, and Rerum Novarum agrees (I think) that people have a right to form associations, and therefore employees, laborers, people in skilled trades, etc. have that right. And why, on the face of it, shouldn't these associations approach employers to negotiate matters of employment?
But that does not give carte blanche to unions to have closed shops, to compel membership, or to be unjust.
For me the best example of this sort of balancing of tensions is how we treat the needy. And perhaps the first idea to convey is that the metaphor of a social family is more suited to Catholic thought than that of an array of political relationships.
Solidarity: In a family, if baby cries, everybody who can pitches in (or HAS pitched in by going to work or whatever.) And in a family, we care for baby so that one day baby will grow to be able to care for others.
Subsidiarity: In a family when everything is ticking over smoothly, mother, father, and maybe older sibs take care of baby. But if one parent gets the galloping whoopses and the other has to plow the fields, then maybe an in-law or an uncle or aunt might kick in, nurse the sick parent and/or help with the plowing.
But as soon as the whoopses leave and the field is harrowed, these more "remote" family members withdraw to their previous roles and mother and father return to their normal duties.
Similarly, we all have a duty to one another and especially to the needy. But the duty falls on what I think of as concentric circles: immediate family, extended family, neighborhood, community, county, state, nation, everybody. If extended family can't do it, then we try neighborhood, and so on. But each layer up helps to get the circle beneath it back to a satisfactory position and then withdraws.
Our experience, though, is that when we go to the state, they NEVER leave, and if we go to the feds, the next thing you know they're teaching baby about anal sex! AND they're telling the taxpayers that we have to pay more and more to service the dependent class that the "helpers" have created and enabled.
So the welfare system as we have it is NOT really what Catholic Social teaching is about. But it's what SOME Catholics and most non-Catholics think of when they hear "Catholic Social Justice" and all the rest. If you want an accurate picture, you have to know a little about the documents that articulate the context.