Light Your Lamps, No. 5 of 11 No. 5 of 11

The National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent stations, in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Man, the President, the Catholic Order. Today on our program, we write Reverend Montsenier-Folten-Jay Sheen, who delivered a fifth in his series of addresses generally entitled, Light Your Lamps. The musical portion of the program will consist of selections presented by the Catholic diocesan coasters of Brooklyn. The Catholic Hour opens with the singing of the Adorama's Tey by Rosello. The Catholic Hour opens with the singing of the Adorama's Tey. We present now the right Reverend Montsenier-Folten-Jay Sheen, who delivers the fifth address in his series generally entitled, Light Your Lamps. The title of today's address is, How to Meet Communism. Friends, the burden of this broadcast is the practical problem, what a nation and a people can do to combat communism. Immediately there come to mind three ways in which it should not be done, first not by name calling and hate, for we cease to be children of the Heavenly Father by hating those who hate us. Secondly, communism should not be attacked on the grounds that it is opposed to liberalism or monopolistic capitalism, because from an economic point of view alone all these systems are unsatisfactory. Thirdly, we are not to meet communism on the false assumption that if economic conditions were bettered that we would have no communism. Communism is not an economic doctrine, it is a philosophy of life. Economic conditions were very good in the Garden of Eden, but Lucifer started his revolt there. This brings us to five positive ways of meeting communism, the economic, political, social, educational and spiritual. Communism can be met politically by choosing candidates in elections, not on the basis of political parties, not on the basis of the economic class they support, but on the basis of the moral worth of the candidates. Namely, whether a candidate is a husband of one wife, whether he says his prayers, whether he refuses to follow a party line dictated from abroad, whether he believes we ought to live up to the Atlantic Charter, and whether he agrees with George Washington that religion and morality are essential for national life. A nation always gets the kind of politicians it deserves. If a time ever comes when the religious Jews, Protestants and Catholics ever have to suffer under a totalitarian state, which would deny to them the right to worship God according to the life of their conscience, it will be because for years. They thought it made no difference what kind of people represented them in Congress and because they abandoned the spiritual in the realm of the temporal. The economic way to meet communism is to make capitalists out of the workers by a wider diffusion of private property. Before suggesting how this can be done, a word about the morality of private property is necessary. It used to be when property was real rather than financial as it is today, that the right to property was inseparable from responsibility. A man owned a horse. He could show a title to it. He could say, it is mine. But the responsibility for the horse was also his. If the horse plampled the neighbor's garden, he had to remunerate the neighbor. But because he owned, controlled and managed the horse, he was also entitled to 100% of the profits from the horse. With the development of finance, those two things which were meant to be joined, ownership and responsibility became separated and divorced. Those who own today do not labor or manage and those who labor or manage generally do not own. The stockholders are distinct from labor and management. Since the stockholders have surrendered responsibility, they have given up one of the essential notes of property and hence one of the titles to profits. But the owners or stockholders still claim all the profits. Though they have surrendered 50% of the title, namely labor and responsibility. The stockholders are only the passive creators of wealth. The active creators are the workers. For that reason, there should be a modification of the wage system. So as to give the workers a share in the profits, management and ownership of industry, well they work. A further development of this particular theme will be sent to you on request. There is no doubt as to which has the clearer title to profits. Certainly the man who clips coupons and stands in his postcard for a vote by proxy to the corporation. Is left entitled to the profits of industry, then those who wipe sweat from their brows at the end of the day. I'm very happy to say that during this past week in Washington, I spoke at a meeting of a corporation and its workers, where this suggested plan of mine of sharing profits with the workers was put into actual effects. Communism wants the dictator to own all the property. We want to share property with the workers. In terms of analogy, capitalism wants a few men to own all the hens. The workers receiving a few eggs for preparing the nest. The communist solution is putting all the hens and all the eggs in the hands of a dictator cook, who makes an omelette. It is bound to be unsatisfying because not all the people like omelettes and most people do not like the way the dictator cooks anyway. And the Christian solution is to distribute the hens so that every man can cook his eggs the way he likes them. And even eat them raw if that is his definition of freedom. By distributing a wide mass of property owners through the country with our scattered powers, privileges and responsibilities, one creates the greatest resistance in the world to tyranny, either political or economic. For just as a man is free on the inside, because he can call his soul his own, so he begins to be free on the outside because he can call property his own. Then property becomes what it was always intended to be the economic guarantee of human liberty. The social way to meet communism would be by the appointment of chaplains in industry from each of the three faiths. There is no escaping the past that once the individual enters into a new human relationship and one at which he spends most of his day, almost his entire week. There is a specific need of ministering to him in that relationship and not a part from it. In order that the chaplain might better operate within an industry, he should build a church immediately near the factory where labor, management and capital could assist with morning mass and learn that all wheat one bread or one body. If men would get down on their knees together, there would be much less need of using fists against one another. But the chaplains functions of course would go beyond the factory church, as the army assigns a chaplain an office within the army can. So the industry should assign quarters for a chaplain in which he may be freely consulted at all times by labor and management. For there is no reason why the iron gates of a factory should prevent the modern worker from enjoying what the village blacksmith used to enjoy, access ability to his rabbi, to his minister and to his priest. The chaplain should receive no salary, no expense account, no money of any kind, for me there are stockholders, management or labor unions in order that they may not be beholden to anyone. And the supreme value of industrial chaplains would be the organization of men on a non-competitive or spiritual basis. Then when the time came to a lack labor leader from the industry, the communists who thrive in vociferous minorities at late hours when the decent people want to go to bed would find themselves stale made it and checked by those who came out in great numbers to keep America, American and their skulls their own. Another way to meet communism would be to utilize our religious schools for adult education. These schools are an operation only about six hours a day, most of them closing at three o'clock in the afternoon. It would seem in a present crisis advisable to use the late afternoon and evening hours for adult education. Among many subjects taught there would be courses in religion, the training of labor leaders, courses on marriage, property and the philosophy of peace. Through such courses our people would learn that the alternative between rice and left is not the same as right and wrong. And the best way to make the world better is to make ourselves both better and wiser. Now finally there is the spiritual. Communism hasn't appealed to two classes, the simple and the frustrated. First the simple or the naive believe that communism is interested in the workers and the poor. Disappeal however does not last very long among the simple people once they come to know communism as it actually is. Then they reject it, that is why the communist party has such a rapid turnover reaching as high as 40% within a few years. Toward these simple deluded people there must be on our part a recognition of their good instincts and above all their passion for social justice. Deluded though they are, they are nevertheless unconscious and involuntary instruments of the Holy Spirit. Our task must be to educate them. For as their attachment to communism grows in ignorance so it will decline with knowledge. But by far the greater appeal however of communism is to the dissolution and the frustrated. This group becomes communist not because they are convinced that communism is right. But because they have a hidden hate against something or somebody. Individually they feel impotent to vent their hate upon a person or a class or an institution. But believe that if they join the party they could find a corporate expression for their pent up animatities and their damned uphate. Every frustrated, dissolution, discontented soul and everyone who has lost his faith is a potential member of the communist party. For example those who started out with a great lust for wealth and never achieved it. Or who became disappointed capitalists will join the communist party to get even with the capitalists whose wealth they envy and whose property they one day want to possess. Those who have felt the sting of uncharitable fellowmen who made fun of their race or color or nationality or refuse to give them the hand of fellowship are also likely material for communism. Not because communism can give them recognition which it does not in practice but only because these people get a chance to get even with those who are unkind. Those who have never been able to think clearly flock to communism or they have to do no thinking whatever. But where obedience to a dictator gives them the illusion of power. Those who became bored with life because of their anti moral life which produce chaos in their souls. Look for a communist dictatorship outside of themselves to organize their chaos. Those who lost the power of self-regulation from within to loss of virtue seek and impose regulation from without in the party. Those who lost the goal of existence, the purpose of life invite a communist tyranny to impose a goal to dictate a purpose. Those whose conscience has bothered them because of their sins or loss of faith become communist to persecute religion in a vain attempt to ease their loss of peace and art. And the supreme advantage of all of these hate is that they enable the frustrated and the dissolution to join the party to combine the strongest affirmations for social justice. With the most contemptuous disregard for individual justice and personal betterment. They could not become Christians which they want really in their own heart because Christianity would demand personal righteousness. But in communism they have a seeming sense of righteousness and justice by hating the wrongs of others without any obligation to better their own lives. Now what attitude should we take to these people? Well above all else, no hatred. Rather start with the assumption that these disillusioned individuals are perhaps not so very far from the kingdom of God. As a matter of fact they are much closer than the liberals and the indifferent who have neither hates nor loves. Once they come to see that what they hate is evil and not an economic system and what they are seeking is God and not their own miserable atheism in which each one makes himself a God and me an atheist. They are at the very door of that peace that only Christ can open to them. We therefore must always make a distinction between the ideology and the person, between communism and communists. Communism is to be hated as a doctor hates pneumonia in his sick child. But the communists are potential children of God and they must be loved as the sick child is loved. A Christian who starts with the assumption that all communists ought to be annihilated or sent to concentration camps which indeed they were due to us. Is not worthy of the name of Christ. We are to seek not their extinction but their transfiguration. Does God hate us because we are sinners? Then shall we hate them for being a particular brand of sinners? Was not Paul in the early church a greater persecutor of religion than Tito or Stalin or Hitler? There must have been thousands of Christians who had hoped that God would send a culinary thrombosis to Paul in order to take him out of this life. I'm sure the early Christians must have prayed that God would send someone to answer that fiery unselis enemy. Send an apostle they prayed to answer Paul, well God heard their prayers and God sent Paul to answer Paul. God's powers more manifest in conversion than in destruction. For he knows that the bitterest enemies make the best saints and not those weak-minded brothers and sisters who hate communism only when their newspapers hate them. Communists will be brought to the democratic and the Christian way of life not by argument because communism is anti-rational. But they will be brought by prayer, by charity, by kindness. Some years ago one of the editors of a Communist newspaper wrote a series of articles against religion and this is unworthy disciple. Now what would you do in such a case? Challenge the editor to a duel? Given my physique you would not. And then I was a Christian. So I invited the Communist editor to dinner. The first thing he did was to say, now what we have against you is that you refuse to admit that Russia is a democracy. I said how can Russia be a democracy in the life of Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution? He said what is Article 125? My good man I said I did not invite you here to talk about communism. I invited you here to talk about your soul and the Blessed Mother. And I talked about the Blessed Mother for one hour, nine years past, in which there was a prayer every day for that man. He now no longer has to worry about following the party line. He is a free man. His name is Lewis Budens. And this I think is the real way to fight communism by prayer. So may I ask you Jews and Protestants and Catholics in my radio audience to offer a holy hour of prayer a day for the peace of the world and for the spreading of the love of God. Now we invite you to join Monsignor Sheen as he offers this prayer. Sovereign Lord and Master, we fought so long we forgot what we were fighting for. When we left Thy light, like tiny gods we quarreled in the twilight of our petty rivalries. Give us in Thy tender mercy the peace we do not deserve. We pray for our president, our Congress and our courts that they may sustain and defend religion and morality without which no nation can long endure. Save us most of all from ourselves. Restore love to our broken homes, the joy of a good conscience to our frustrated lives, the poor freedoms to the enslaved peoples of the world and to our foolishness give the wisdom of Thy ways. Make us new men and light our lamps. In particular we pray for the people of Russia, whom we consecrate to the immaculate heart of Mary, that individually and as a nation they may realize their fondest hopes and know thee freely and openly O Christ, whom they are now forced to love and serve in secret. Not for our worthiness but for the mercy grant us these petitions of Christ Jesus, son of the living God. Today the Catholic Hour presented an address by the right forever in months senior Fulton Jay Sheen and titled, How to Meet Communism. All this news may obtain a complimentary copy of this address by writing to the National Council of Catholic Men, Washington 5VC, or to their favorite NBC station. We ask you to bear with us if you have not yet received copies of talks you have requested. We want you to know however that these requests are being filled as rapidly as possible. And now, Master Edward Keney sings a musical setting of the form, lovely lady dressed in blue. We are just your little boy and you. We cautiously invite you to join us next week at the same time when months senior Sheen will deliver another address in the series entitled, Light Your Lamps. Your announcer is Tom Fato, the Reverend Coney, you see to be directed to the music of today's program and the choir appeared on these broadcasts through the courtesy of his excellency, the most Reverend Thomas C. Molo, Bishop of Brooklyn. The National Council of Catholic Men, as present of the Catholic hour, through the facilities of the National Broadcasting Company and its independent affiliated station. This is NBC, the National Broadcasting Company.