Crisis In Christendom, No. 2 of 17 No. 2 of 17

The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Army. The Catholic Hour opens with the Benedictine Motett O'Sallotharis Hostia in a mail-corder setting by Charles Guno. The Catholic Hour opens with the Benedictine Motett O'Sallotharis Hostia in a mail-corder setting by Charles Guno. The Catholic Hour opens with the Benedictine Motett O'Sallotharis Hostia in a mail-corder setting by Charles Guno. The Catholic Hour opens with the Benedictine Motett O'Sallotharis Hostia in a mail-corder setting by Charles Guno. The Catholic Hour opens with the Benedictine Motett O'Sallotharis Hostia in a mail-corder setting by Charles Guno. The right reverend, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America, will now deliver the second in his series of 17 addresses on the Christ of the World. His discourse today is entitled, The Thing We Are Fighting Against, I present Monsignor Sheen. Last Sunday in our opening broadcast, we said three dogmas or philosophies of life are struggling for mastery in this war. The anti-Christian totalitarian worldview, the non-Christian secularist worldview of Western civilization, and the Christian worldview. Today we discuss the first, the anti-Christian totalitarian view. This anti-Christian, anti-human, anti-democratic totalitarian view exists in four forms, widely scattered throughout the world, first in an historical form, as the revival of the imperial traditions of ancient Rome, which is fascism. Second, in an anthropological form, as the glorification of the Nordic race, which is noxious. Third, in a theological form, as the identification of divinity with a dynastic house, which is Japanese imperialism. And fourth, in an economic form, as the proclamation of class struggle on the anti-religious basis of dictatorship of the pro-rateriates, which is Marxian socialism. In the recent Christian, Christmas Allicution, the Holy Father condemned these four forms, in these words. As a conception which claims for particular nations or races or classes, the norm from which there is no appeal. A short time ago, a graduate of one of the oldest and best-known secular universities in the East, came to see me. He tried to argue me into his position, which was this, that there's no difference between the cause of America and the cause of the Nazis. He further contended that right and wrong were not involved in this war. Or he said he had been taught in his particular university, that there was no distinction between right and wrong. It was merely a question of a point of view. Now this error, I shall discuss in the next two broadcasts. Today I am concerned with giving you the arguments which I gave him. My position be, the totalitarianism in all of its forms, is intrinsically witted. And for these three reasons. First of all, because it denies the value of a person, by placing the value and the nation, the race, the class and the dynasty. Second, because it denies the quality of all men. And thirdly, because it affirms that evil is the method and the goal of the revolution. First it denies the value of a person. The basic principle of democracy is the sacredness of the individual as a creature endowed by God with inanable rights. The basic principle of Nazism and the other totalitarian systems is that the individual has no rights, except those given to him by the party or the state. In America freedom resides in man. In Nazism freedom resides in the race. In America man indulges the state with rights which he received from God. In Nazism in the other forms the state and the man with rights which it got from the dictator. The very best expressions of this totalitarian idea that the individual has no value is to be found in the writings of that very influential German Karl Marx, the founder of Marxian socialism. In 1843 rejected the democratic conception of man on the grounds that it was Christian. These were his words. That each man has a value as a sovereign being is an illusion, a dream and a postulative Christianity which affirms that every man has a soul. Later on writing in the first edition of Dost Kapital, Marx further developed the same idea. He said, if I speak of individuals it is only in so far as they are for sonnetic occasions of economic categories and representatives of special class, relations and interests. What does this mean in plain language? This means that Marx had no use for the individual worker or the individual polotariat as such. The person in himself has no value. He has value only as a member of a revolutionary class. Once the person ceases to be a member of that class he ceases to have value. This disdain of the human person is the first dogma of all totalitarian systems. It explains for example why the Jew has no value and no rights under Naziism. Because he is not a member of the revolutionary race. It explains fascism which states society is the end, individuals only the means. It explains the once and disregard of individual life by the Japanese imperial government and the statement of Japanese educators. The individual is not an entity but depends upon the whole arising from and kept in being by the state. These low and on spiritual views of man are the beginning of slavery. And it is to conquer them that America is at war. Secondly, totalitarianism in all of its forms is wrong because it denies the equality of all men. The American democracy has found it on the principle of the essential spiritual equality of all men. When President Roosevelt was asked last October to whom his four freedoms were meant to apply he answered to everyone all over the world. Totalitarianism denies this basic equality. Under its system men are equal only on condition that they belong to a certain class or race or dynasty or nation. Hitler therefore proclaims the superiority of the German race over all the peoples of the earth. With the possible exception of the Japanese for Hitler has recently discovered that one of the Japanese sun gods is a first cousin of the Japanese nation. The German god Botan isn't that wonderful. The persecution of the Jews arises therefore not because as Hitler first claimed that they were wealthy but simply because they were not Nordic. According to the same basic principle the Protestant pastor Neumiller and the Catholic bishops such as Bishop Van Gallen are denied equality on the ground that they put loyalty to Christ above loyalty to the fear. This idea of the absolute supremacy of the German race is found in a long line of German philosophers. Tickety, haggle, trichky and later on this idea was set to music by Richard Wagner who in his operas accustomed three generations of Germans to the mis-of-the-Nordic and pagan past of Germany. Hitler says that Wagner is one of the inspirations of Naziism because of his glorification of Seekfried and the German myth. As a matter of fact Wagner wrote the Germany already had one reincarnation of Seekfried in Frederick Barbarossa who established the first Reich. This Marx being called the second Reich. Wagner said that a day would come when this Seekfried Barbarossa would have a third reincarnation. In one whom he called in his own words a hero who turns against the ruin of his race, the hero won't be able to be divided. And he said that when this new Seekfried comes he will make his home over the very spot where the bones of Seekfried and Frederick Barbarossa now lie supposedly buried in practice starting. It is to crush this idea, the theory of superior race or the superior peoples that America is at war. Thirdly, totalitarianism is wicked because it makes evil the method and the goal of the revolution. Naziism is not negative like Marxian socialism. Marxian socialism is anti-religious. Naziism is very religious but its religion is diaponic. There is only one way to describe how it grafted violence onto legality and that is in the phrase of Rausny, the revolution of nihilism. And such it is to following a blind irrational myth, the entronement of the will to power. It is pointless for us to argue against the Nazis on the ground that they are cruel and unjust. We are not talking about the same things. What justice is to us, that injustice is to them. What we call virtue, they call vice. What we call kindness, they call cowardice. The inspiration for this idea is due principally to Frederick Nietzsche, who sought to found another basis for morality than Christianity. Now these were some of his principles. I am quoting him verbatim. Become hard. Morality must be shot. Man must be trained for war. And woman for the relaxation of the warrior. Or else is fally. Purposely evil is the most interesting kind of evil. It is not evil, it is goodness which has to be justified. Dionysius is sensuality and cruelty. Dionysius versus Christ. This is the contrast. Such is Nietzsche. And Hitler is the political and the military executor of Nietzsche's will. Now add all these three together. The denial of the value of the person, which the German Karl Marx proclaimed. The denial of the equality of all men, which the German philosophers proclaimed and which Wagner set to music. And then add to it the primacy of irrational power lost in cruelty, which the German Nietzsche affirmed, and you have the thing that we are fighting against. It is not a nation, it is not a state. It is a spirit, the spirit of anti-Christ, the lust and awful perversion of a community that turned its back on God and to whom Satan showed his face. And let no one steltify himself by believing the totalitarianism as we have defined it. Can be Christianized or democratized or humanized. For here we are not dealing with wicked men who could be converted through God's grace, but with a wicked ideology that makes conversion impossible. Earing she can be brought back into the she-fold of Christ, with evil philosophies which are like wolves cannot. Well this war is doing us this service. It is explaining and better exploding the fallacy that it makes no difference what we believe. It does. It makes a tremendous amount of difference what we believe, or we act when our beliefs. If our beliefs are right, our deeds will be right. The evil of the Nazis is that they practice what they preach, because their philosophy is wrong, their deeds are wicked. But you ask, how could Naziism become so popular? Why should totalitarianism sweep over most of Europe within 20 years? The answer is not difficult to find. Then the answer is a lesson for us. These demonic forces replace the spiritual energy of a bourgeois civilization with a semblance of order. They found substitutes for the doubts and the skepticism and the sophistication of a responsible intelligence in the certitude of an absolute authority embodied in the social philosophy. They proved to us on any worldview is better than no view. That a regime that possesses some authority is better than a regime which has none. They supplied some kind of an answer, false though it was, to the hidden dominance of the Lord's affinance, to the indifference of democracies to absolute values, and to the claim of great merchants that private gain has precedence over the common good. They appealed to people because they arose in part as a reaction against the excesses and effects of the materialist culture of our Western world. Which we will begin to explain incidentally next Sunday. They corrected abuses after the fashion of a man who might burn down his barn to get rid of the rats. But they are the logical conclusion when let us not mistake it. The logical conclusion of the last 200 years with its progressive repudiation of Christian principles in social political and economic life. Which repudiation? Produced first a non-religious civilization, our own. Then an entire religious civilization, Marxian socialism, and finally the new false religion of Nazism against which we are fighting now. We are at war against a devil. There is a devil. Man is no match for him. And unless we quickly get on God's side and trust in God's strength, we will lack the faith to see the devil and then the moral indignation to oppose him. And that is why I am appealing in every broadcast to every American to return to God, to spend an hour a day in prayer and meditation. Jews and Protestants can make this hour in their homes, but Catholics should make it in church since our divine Lord is present in the tabernacle. And this hour should be possible to include morning Mass and Communion, which would entail both prayer and fasting. And anyone who would like prayer book, four-war time, entitled the Shield of Faith, who was this to making this hour, who would gladly send it free for the asking. But America must awake. There is too great a disparity between the effort on the battle for the people, the front and the effort on the home front. Our American boys that are cutting away the underbrush at Guadalcan ad, fighting sharks on rafts in the Pacific, rushing kept pill boxes in Ugini, and the tucking through mud once season and he's another in Africa, have a right to ask a commensurate sacrifice of those who are at home. If we were fighting a nation, we could leave the job to the armed forces, but we are fighting an evil, something intrinsically wicked. We are in combat with a demon. And the kind of a demon that our divine Lord said is driven out only by prayer and fasting. Eddie Rickenbacher made his holy out of prayer on a raft in the Pacific. And anyone of us who thinks it is too much to make it in his home or in church, is not worthy to salute the same flag. This is not a war. This is a revolution. A revolution against the anarchic spirit of evil. And ours to pre-business is to drive the demons back again to hell. But they will not obey that command, either while we stand or while we sit. They will obey it only when we are on our knees. Praise, and fasting, and watching, and our God-dovey. A prayer for peace. O Lord Jesus Christ, who in thy mercy hear us the prayers of sinners. For for we've received the all grace and blessing upon our country and these citizens. We pray in particular for the Presidents, for our Congress, for all our soldiers, for all who defend us in shifts, whether on the seas, or in the skies, for all who are suffering the hardships of war. We pray for all who are in peril, or in danger. Bring us all after the troubles of this life, into the haven of peace, and reunite us all together forever, O dear Lord, in thy glorious, heavenly, The address you have just heard was entitled, the thing we are fighting against, and was delivered by the right reverend, the monsenior Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the second in monsenior Sheen series of seventeen addresses on the crisis in Christendom. A copy of today's talk, as of the booklet referred to by monsenior Sheen, the shield of faith, may be obtained by writing to the National Council of Catholic Men, Washington D.C., or to the station to which you are now listening. It is still available. Next Sunday at this time, monsenior Sheen will deliver another address in this series, entitled, Some Barnacles on the Ship of Democracy. O be spirit, come and fight us, O my life, I lay thee by, O my life, I lay thee by, O my life, I lay thee by, O my life, I lay thee by, O my life, I lay thee by, O my life, I lay thee by, O my life, I lay thee. Your announcer is John Patrick Costello. The Catholic Order has been presented by the National Broadcasting Company, This is the national broadcasting company.