Communism And The Church

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. Now there actually is such a thing in the world as authoritarianism. It is communism. What is the essence of authoritarianism? Well I would say it was threefold. First, it subjects the mind to dogmas. Two, it makes fear the basis of obedience. Three, it destroys freedom of thought. Now the Church has none of these qualities. It could not have them. Because remember that our blessed Lord lived in the midst of authoritarianism. The people among whom he moved were under the power of the Romans. Furthermore all of the Pharisees were authoritarian. So when therefore our blessed Lord founded his Church, naturally he made it a bulwark against all forms of authoritarianism. Notice how he even contrasted his Church and what would be likened to communism. He said, you know that among the Gentiles, those who bear rule, Lord is over them. And great men want their power over them. But with you, it must be otherwise. And whoever has a mind to be first among you must be your slave. Now how did our Lord save us in his Church from authoritarianism? We're going to contrast here the three characteristics of communism with three characteristics of the Church. First, our blessed Lord established a Church in which, one, we do not obey a system but a person. Two, in the Church the basis of our obedience is not fear but love. And thirdly, in the Church freedom of thought is saved by reverence for the truth. Now let's take these up one by one. First of all, dogmas. In communism and in any other form of authoritarianism, one has to submit to a system. That is to say, a very complicated network of assumptions, codes and directives and orders which are very often abstract, such as, for example, the dialectical materialism of communism, the theory of class conflict, and the labor theory of value. But as Catholics, we do not subscribe to a system of dogmas. We begin with a person. The person of our Lord continued in his mystical body the Church. What is faith? Faith is the meeting of two personalities, you and our Lord. There is no adhesion to an abstract dogma, but rather a communion with a person who can neither deceive nor be deceived. The authoritarian starts with a party line. We start with our Lord, the Son of the Living God, who said, I am the truth. I am the truth. In other words, truth was identified with his personality. Remember when you were a child? What did you consider your home? Just a sum of commands given by either your mother or your father? It was more than that, was it not? It was the love of their personalities. Our faith, then, is first and foremost in Christ, who lives in his mystical body the Church. It is only secondarily in the explicit beliefs. If our blessed Lord did not reveal them, we would not believe them. If we lost him, we would lose our beliefs. He comes first. Everything else is secondary. There is no doctrine, no moral, no dogma, no liturgy, no belief apart from him. He is the object of faith, not a dogma. For example, there is a kind of a dogma, we might call it that, that when a young man loves a young woman, he should give her a ring when he becomes engaged to her. But what is primary to that custom and that dogma that he should give a ring? Is it not a love of her personality? So with us. To a Catholic, there is nothing credible in the Church apart from Christ who lives in it. Why if we did not believe that our Lord was God, if we said that he was only a good man, we would never believe in the Eucharist or the Trinity. If we believed that our Lord was just simply a human being who perished in the dust, we would not believe in the forgiveness of sins. We know that our blessed Lord once taught, governed and sanctified through a physical body which he took from his mother, and now we know that he continues to teach and to govern and to sanctify in the mystical body which he took from the womb of humanity. His first body was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, his mystical body was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Therefore we accept every single word of his, not just what his secretaries wrote, but we receive his living word, living through the centuries. You have heard it said, I want no church standing between me and Christ. There is no church standing between us and Christ. The Church is Christ. The Church no more stands between him and us, for example, and my body stands between me and my invisible mind. The Church is what St. Augustine called the totus Christus, the whole Christ, and therefore is truth living through the ages. O thank God for your faith, your faith in the person of Christ who is the eternal contemporary. Now that brings us to the other charge that is made, namely that if you belong to the Church, you are subject to fear. It is true that in every single system of authoritarianism, fear is the basis of obedience. But because we start with the person of Christ, the basis of our obedience is not fear, it is love. You cannot love dialectical materialism, but you can love a person. And between our Lord and us there is a bond of love, and these two are inseparable. That is why our Lord did not communicate to Peter the power of ruling and governing his Church until St. Peter told our Lord three times that he loved him. The power to command in the Church comes only from obedience to Christ. Therefore the submission that we as Catholics make to the Church is something like the submission that we make, well, to one of our most devoted friends. It's like the obedience of a son to a loving father. We do not feel any distance between our Lord and us. As a pupil becomes more and more attached to his teacher, the more he absorbs the truths of the teacher, so too we become more and more united to Christ. The more we love him, and also the more of his truth that we absorb, the more we know our Lord, the more we obey the truth manifested through his Church, the less we fear. That is why scripture says, perfect love casteth out fear. The more his truth is ours, the more we love him. And when we fall away from the faith, God forbid, it is not like falling away from the love of a book or a song or a trinket. It's falling from a friendship. It's falling from love. I really cannot imagine anything more cold and more enslaving, more paralyzing to human reason, more destructive of freedom than that thing to which millions of people are prostrating themselves every day, namely the terrible anonymous authority of they. They say they are wearing green this year. They say that Catholics adore Mary. They say that the hair will be worn shorter this year. They say that Freud is the thing. Who are they? Countless slaves and poppets are bowing down daily before that invisible, tyrannical myth of they. No wonder dictatorships arose to personalize that terrible slavery. These millions will not accept the authority of Christ who rose from the dead, who continues to live in the Church. They know whom we obey. They do not know whom they are obeying. They cannot point to the persons or to the object behind that terrible, anonymous they. But thank God we know. We obey our Lord in the Church. The very negative proof of the fact that it is love that binds us is in the thousands and thousands of letters that I have received in the course of years from persons who have fallen away from the Church or who are outside of it because they entered into a second or a third invalid marriage. All of these letters express invariably a great unhappiness on the inside, a boredom, a non-we, a disgust, and an anxiety. Not because they have broken a law, but because they have broken a bond of friendship with the Sacred Heart. Their loneliness also bears witness to the truth that when there is no person to love, there is no servitude, there is only subjection. When there is a love of Christ, then love begins to believe everything. And since no one can ever surpass the love that Christ showed for us in redeeming us and founding his mystical body, the Church, there can be no greater servitude in the world. And that is the only kind of love that can save us from authoritarianism with its fear and make us really loving creatures bound together in the tendrils of affection to him who loved us even to a point of death. Now that brings us to the third point. It is sometimes said that the Church destroys freedom of thought and almost annihilates reason. Only it is the contrary that is true. Authoritarianism destroys real freedom of thought. You see, you must always make a distinction between freedom from thought and freedom of thought. The devil has pretty much convinced the world that if you accept God's truth, you are not free. In fact, if you accept any truth, you are destroying your reason. He has very much convinced many souls in the world that any limitation that is put upon their reason is the destruction of that reason. For example, in the Garden, he suggested to our first parents that if they did not know evil, that God in some way was destroying their freedom. So he asked, why did God command you? To him, you really are not free until you know evil. In so many words, the devil was telling our first parents, the purpose of God is to prevent free inquiry. He wants to keep the human race in ignorance. Do not be fooled. God is an old, fuddy-duddy. He is a reactionary. He does not want you to know evil. Be liberal. Those are the words of Satan. So God is made to appear as the enemy of truth, in just the same way that a father who refuses to let his five-year-old son have a shotgun is said by the son to be denying freedom. So to the devil, to continue to be loyal to one wife, or to a country, or to truth, is a mark of slavery and a want of freedom. Let us analyze that assumption. Is it true that the more you subscribe to divine truth, the less will you become? Well before I went to school, I was free to believe, for example, that Shakespeare was born in 1224. But finally I was told that Shakespeare was not born in 1224, that he was born in 1564. I'm saying that only from memory. I hope that I am right. But at any rate, I was given an exact date. I found out that education in truth was really restricting my freedom to fall into error. Before I went to school, I also thought that H20 were really the initials of a spy. Then I fell into the hands of a reactionary teacher. He stopped all of my liberalism. Do you know what he told me H20 meant? He said it was the symbol for water. And thus the more I studied, the less free I became to know error. What the world forgets really is that freedom is a world that is very much abused. We want to be free from something only for the sake of something. For example, I want to be free from communism in order to perfect my soul. I want to be free from hunger in order to develop the body that God gave me. I want also to be free from fear in order to be free from love. You notice that freedom from something is always a freedom for something. What's the use of being free from anything unless we know the purpose of freedom? I heard once of a rich man who went up to a taxi driver and he said to the taxi driver, are you free? The taxi driver said, yes, I'm free, and the rich man left shouting hurrah for freedom. It was nonsense, simply because the only reason of being free from something is to be free for something. Freedom therefore is not liberation from the truth. It is rather the acceptance of the truth. When are you really most free? When you know the truth about anything. For example, you are free to draw a triangle on the condition that you give it three sides, and not thirty-three. You are free to draw a giraffe if you draw it with a long neck. If you do not obey the truth and the nature of a giraffe and you give it a short neck, well you'll find that you're not free to draw a giraffe. You are free to drive your automobile in traffic on condition that you obey the traffic laws. You are free in the law. You are free in truth. You are free to pilot a plane on condition that you respect the law of gravitation. And you acknowledge the truth of aviation. Now that's what our blessed Lord meant when he said, the truth will make you free. Now our truth therefore in the church is a truth that has come down to us from Christ. And it is a truth that really is so very, very noble that when we begin to wander away from it, we lose our way. There's a tremendous satisfaction in having a map. And that is what the truth of Christ is like in the church. We may get off the road, we may get offered by sin, we may get offered by error, but as long as we got that map, we can get back on the road. There are indeed some people, once they get off the road, they tear up the map. That's a still greater tragedy. The church too really is very wise because it always teaches us both sides of a question. I taught philosophy in a university for 25 years, and I noticed that anyone and everyone who taught in the university always knew both sides of a question. For example, everyone in the Catholic university where I taught, everyone knew the opinions of the modern world in any given subject. In philosophy, for example, we knew Marx and Sartre and Heidegger, Jaspers and Freud and the like. But do you think that the teachers in secular universities knew anything about Christian thought? They know only one side of the question, not both. Look at the papal encyclical on communism. Communists once told me that the clearest and finest explanation of communism that he ever read was in the Holy Father's encyclical on communism. He gave both sides of the question. Look at that great work of philosophy and theology called the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas. Every single question that great mind teaches begins with a doubt and a difficulty. Then he answers it. We know both sides of the question. Those outside the church all know only one side, and frequently it's the wrong side. Our freedom, therefore, is not an independence of truth, but rather dependence in love. That's the joy of being a Catholic. Perhaps I can make it clear with this analogy. On an island in the sea there were children. Around the island were great high walls. Inside of those walls on the island, children sang and danced and played. One day some men came in a rowboat to that island. They were reformers, and they said to the children, Who put up those walls? Someone is restraining our freedom. Tear them down. And the children tore them down. Now if you go back, you will find all of the children huddled together in the center of the island, afraid to play, afraid to sing, afraid to dance, afraid of falling into the sea. That is the church. The wall is truth, and as Christ in the church said, If the Son of Man makes you free, you are free indeed. God love you all. God bless you.