Crisis In Christendom, No. 14 of 17 No. 14 of 17

O my life, my day, my heart is on the cross of the East. The National Broadcasting Company and Cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. Today's program will consist of music by a unit of the Paulus choristers and an address by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen. A group of Paulus choristers open the Catholic hour with a motet from the Holy Week music. We hear the Jerusalem surge by C. Jasper's. Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America will now deliver the 14th in his series of addresses on the crisis in Christendom. His discourse today is entitled Freedom in Danger. I present Monsignor Sheen. Friends, today we shall speak about a grave danger facing the world. Not America alone. That danger can be expressed in the world which is on the tongue of everyone, namely freedom. A proof that we are in danger of losing it is because everyone is talking about it. If you suddenly came into a country where everyone was talking about the health of lungs, you would immediately conclude that a disastrous microbe was rampant. In the last world war, everyone spoke about making the world safe for democracy. And yet the world became so unsafe for democracy that within twenty-one years democracy had to stumble into another war in order to preserve itself. Now we ought to be worried about freedom simply because everyone is talking about it. Slaves talk most about freedom. We oppressed talk about justice and the hungry most about food. We all agreed that the external threat to our freedom and the freedom of the world comes from the totalitarian states. There is no need to develop this idea. They are Satan's vise-gillance of tyranny, the anti-Christ advanced agents of adversity. And our point is that the gravest threat to freedom comes from within. I do not mean from America alone. I mean within the hearts and souls of men throughout the world. While the world is attempting to preserve freedom in the political order, it is surrendering it in those deeper realms upon which the political reposes. After the group of men on a rooftop proclaiming and song and story the glories of architecture. While below, stoppers have already knocked out half the foundations of the house, and you already have the picture of modern freedom. Politicians in the upper stories are glorifying freedom while philosophy in education and the so-called liberal Christianity has knocked away all the supports of freedom. First of all, freedom is denied in education today. This may sound rather bizarre to educate us. We have been shouting catch words about freedom for decades. But I submit that they are talking about license, not freedom. They are concerned with freedom from something, not freedom for something. They are interested only in freedom without law, not in freedom within the law. And the proof, do not many educators today assume that evil and sin are due to ignorance, and that if we educate, we will remove evil. Do not others assume that evil is due to bad environment, bad teeth or bad glands, and that an increase of material wealth will obliterate evil? Can they not see the thieves' false assumptions destroy freedom? For if evil is the result of ignorance alone and not the result of a perverse use of freedom, then Hitler is only eniguramous. And he is not a villain. Can they not see that education without a proper philosophy of life can be made the servant of evil as well as a good? Have they not vision to see that if evil and sin are to be attributed to external circumstances, then man is not free to do wrong. Even wrong is in our environment, but not in our souls. Is it not inconsistent to praise men for choosing what is right? And at the same time, when he does wrong, deny that he is free, that kind of education, which denies guilt and sin is destroying freedom in our democracy. Freedom is destroyed while our soldiers are sighting for it on 21 battle fronts of the world. And freedom too is being denied in modern religion. So do not misunderstand me. I know it preaches freedom. But we are searching hearts, not lips. Modern religion denies freedom because it denies hell. In a recent survey of ministers, it was discovered that 73 percent did not believe in hell. If there is no hell, why should there be a heaven? If there is no wrong and hence no sin for which a man ought to be punished, why should there be a heaven where it should be rewarded for his virtues? If there are statues erected to our patriots, why should there not be prisons for our trade doors? Who do they think God is? A kind of grandmother who lasts off the wrongdoing of children? As if there were no scales of justice and he were not the God of righteousness. This sugary pale airsots of Christianity have set up not the very doctrine which Christ himself has preached. But on more than a dozen occasions, out of iron ore said there was a hell. Hell is the eternal guarantee of human freedom. If God were to destroy hell, He would at that very moment destroy freedom. All along as there is a hell, we know that God respects human freedom, that He will not by force nor by power. Destroy even that free will which rises up against Him with a never-lasting, I will not serve. Satan is thus destroying our freedom. At the very moment He has led us to believe that we are most free. And He has done so by the very same temptations which failed when He tempted Christ on the mountaintop at the beginning of His public life. You remember those temptations? Satan first of all, tempted our Lord from his gospel of love by offering substitutes. In the first temptation instead of winning souls through love, Satan suggested that Christ by them with bread be called men were hungry. And in the second temptation, instead of winning souls again through freedom and love, Satan suggested that Christ win them by some manifestation of power over nature, such as throwing Himself from a temple tower on earth. And in the third temptation, Satan suggested winning souls through politics. He unfurled before the mind's eye of the Savior, all the nations and kingdoms and empires of the world. And in a frightening boast, as if to imply that all were His, Satan says, all these, will I give thee, if falling down, thou wilt adore? Our Lord refused to surrender, freezing. Your souls would not love Him without the bribery of bread. And without the exhibitionism of power, and without telling Himself to Caesar, He would not force them. Freedom were in your, through any turnal heaven and any turnal hell. And Satan who failed in that temptation is back in the world again. And oh, how He is succeeding now. Those are selling themselves today for that bread which they call security. Selling faith for the power which is called science and progress. And while others, in over a fifth of the world, serfers have barred freedom for dictators and tyrants. So yes, that great Russian writer of the last century was right when in a great flash of genius, he warned the world that the denial of sin and hell, the ineducation and religion, would end in world socialism, where men would surrender freedom for a false security. But anti-Christ, returning to the world, and speaking to Christ, He says, just thou not know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages, that there is no crime. There is no sin. There is no guilt. There is only hunger. And men will come, crawling, and falling to our feet and say, give us bread, but drink our freedom. I wonder if those days are not already here. And finally in place of free men, the anti-Christ pictures, the new socialistic state that will be born, in which He and the followers will organize everything. After they convince people that there is no sin, there is only hunger. And then they will crucify Christ, who will redeem them from God. And anti-Christ speaks again and says to Christ, they will tremble in particular, they will be far out of wrath. And their minds will grow fearful. They will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready as a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy-mer and childy song. Yes, we, the anti-Christ, shall set them to work. But in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game with children's thorns and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin shall be expiated if it is done with our permission. That we will allow them to sin because we love them and the punishment for these sins, we, we of the anti-Christ, will take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves and they will adore us as their savior. We have taken on their sins before God and they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and their mistresses to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient. And they will submit to us, gladly and cheerfully, the most painful secrets of their conscience or all of them will bring to us. And we will have an answer for them all. And they will believe our answer. For it will save them from great anxiety and terrible agony that they endure at present and making free decisions for themselves. What I say to thee, O Christ, will come to pass. For dominion will be built up. I repeat, tomorrow thou shall see that obedient flock, what a sign for me the anti-Christ will hasten to heap up the hop-singers on the pires, on which I shall burn thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever disturbed our fires, he's in sorrow, O Christ, to know I shall burn thee. Sixth day I have spoken. That is the way the anti-Christ will speak in the new world. And this frightening spectacle is already taking place in a large part of the world today. By denying responsibility to God, men have surrendered their freedom to Satan. Because such is the inevitable outcome of the world, unless we pray. We ask the Jews and the Protestants and the Catholics to spend an hour a day in prayer and meditation. We will help you in this by sending you free, for they are asking a little booklet of prayers for wartime, entitled the shield of faith, but pray we must, unless we succumb to the temptation of the anti-Christ. For the same challenge is being hurled at us which was hurled at Christ on the cross, come down and we will believe. The Exitutioners, when they said that, were willing to admit that they would believe if he would only show his power by stepping down from his cross to poor fools, did they not see that they were asking him to force them to believe which would have been the end of freedom? They were free to believe that he was the son of God so long as he did not come down to his cross, might them. They had freedom so long as they left their faith in their own hands, and not in his. His refusal to come down from that cross was the guarantee of freedom, the nails which pierced him were the stars on the flag of freedom, the bruises of his body battered by free men, for the stripes of that flag, his blood was his reds, his flesh, his view, and his whites, and so long as he hangs there and we have that vision in the world, man is free. The moment he comes down in power, man is a slave, and he is man's dictator, but he will not come down, freedom will never be destroyed, not even in hell. For even there he leaves man the eternal choice of his free rebellious will. And so he did not come down. If he came down he would have made noxious and fascism and come in as long before that time, but coming down as the death of love. If he came down he never would have saved us. It is human to come down. It is divine to hang there, unspearable and wave to the poor winds of the world, all battle flag of freedom. There will always be freedom when men are not forced to love, and there will always be love when men are not forced to be free. God loves you. O Lord Jesus Christ, who in vibrancy hear us the prayers of sinners, for for we besiege all grace and blessing upon our country and its citizens. We pray in particular for the Presidents, for our Congress, for all our soldiers, for all who defend us in ships, 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 unto the haven of peace. Reunite us all together forever O dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. The address you have just heard was entitled Freedom in Danger and was delivered by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the 14th in a series of addresses on the crisis in Christendom. A copy of today's talk as well as the book referred to by Monsignor Sheen, The Shield of Faith, may be obtained by writing to the National Council of Catholic Men, Washington DC, or to the station to which you are now listening. We continue the Catholic hour with the traditional hymn Hail Holy Queen. The Holy Queen. The Holy Queen. The Holy Queen. The Holy Queen. Next Sunday of this time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver another address in the series entitled, Acceptance of Divine Judgment. Your announcer is Bob Stanton. This program has been presented by the National Broadcasting Company and the independent radio stations associated with the NBC Network in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men and came to you from New York. This is the National Broadcasting Company.