Peace, No. 16 of 17 No. 16 of 17

The National Broadcasting Company, cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men, presents the Catholic Hour. A group of the Paulus Corristers opened the Catholic Hour singing excerpts from the lamentations of Jeremiah's The Prophet, which are used in the Office of Tenorbre, on the last three nights of the Holy Week. In these lamentations, Jeremiah's weeps over the miseries, which is people suffered at the hands of the Babylonians. The Holy Week was the first to be performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was the first to be performed in the Holy Week. In the Holy Week was the first to be performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. The Holy Week was performed in the Holy Week. And that was the end of my writings. I will now deliver the 16th, in his series of 17 addresses on the General Subject, Peace. His discourse tonight is entitled, The Crucifixion. I present mon-senior Sheen. Friends, looking out on the four horsemen spreading death, disease, war, and famine over the earth, over the earth, we are tempted to ask, why does God let this happen? That is an incomplete sentence from the theological point of view. Finish it and it reads this way. Why does God let this happen to Himself? Is a different life that casts on the tragedy of war to realize that in some mysterious way Christ is living, suffering, thirsty, being imprisoned and dying in us, and that this war is His passion? This does not mean that the historical Christ who was born of Mary suffered under a punches pilot and has now glorified at the right hand of the Father suffers again in the same human nature for having died once he can never die again. But it does mean that the Christ who is the head of the body which is the church does suffer again. But not our Lord Himself say that anyone who would do anything to one incorporated to Him would be doing it unto Him. And to so ever receive, He said, one such little child for my sake, receives me. Did He not picture Himself as going through the world hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, and sick? And telling us that those who served the little ones in His name would serve Him, as He put it, for I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you covered me, sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me. Apply this now to the world war. Christ's life in His individual human nature is glorified, but Christ's life in His church and all those incorporated to Him by baptism is not yet glorified. He is growing to His full stature in us as He grew to His full stature in the nature He took from Mary. The crucifixion of good Friday is not only something that happened 1900 years ago, it is something that is happening now as the cross is erected in our midst today. From a spiritual point of view there are no national causes. There is only a conflict of those who crucify Christ and those who are crucified with Him. Consider first to our Lord His major suffer today by those who crucify Him by Judas and pilots and the executioners. Judas still roams the world. The person of all those were baptized to Christ and called to be one with Him, but have fallen away from their high destiny by selling out. In the catalog of freshism, of Nazism and Communism you will find those who in their use were signed with the sign of the cross and sealed with the seal of salvation. Even like Judas and parched in their way their Christian heritage for thirty pieces of silver from the coffers of a transitory political power. Come over the list of other nations and you will discover that those leaders who either welcomed international Congress of Middit and atheists to their midst or turned their backs on the rights of religion were those who like Judas were once called to be defenders of faith. Those who do most harm to the cause of Christ are not those souls who were left barren in their naturalness, but those call like Judas to live and move with the Son of God. The Christ in the garden of yet semini still has his lips blistered with the kiss and in his last gracious love to win them back he still whispers. Judas, dust thou betray the Son of man with the kiss. Pilate lives too. He lives in all those teachers and jurors who deny an absolute, who feels that right and wrong are only points of view, who flatter themselves on their broad-mindedness as they allow the mob to choose between Bravison Christ, who ever feeling that possibly Christ is the Son of God but who would not assert it, lest they lose favor with Caesar, who when they are brought face to face unequivocally with divine truth ask the same question asked by Pilate what is truth and then turned their back on it. Put the creed therefore in the present tense Christ is suffering under punches by it. The executioner still walks the earth too. Grute-who blind forces which ignore the divine take orders from higher ups, persecute the Christ in his church, profane eucristic presence, nail his mystical body to its free and then with the calmness of their ancestors beneath Calvary, shaken dice, scissor watch. While being enacted before them they might even throw down dice. There is the great drama of the world's redemption and they only sit and watch. But if there are those who crucify, there are those also who are crucified with Christ. Those who are hunted because they believe in Him and the whom our Lord foretold, if the world hates you, know that it has hated me before you. Yes, He said, the hour is coming for everyone. When He who kills you will think that He has done His service to God. Because our Lord suffered on that cross, He looked forward to all times and to all peoples. And offered not only Himself but all the members of His church to His Heavenly Father. That obligation we complete in ourselves in the language of Saint Paul, we say, what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ, I feel up in my flesh for His body which is the church. How can we fill up the suffering of Christ? Was His passion incomplete? Most certainly not. It means that all our sufferings, pains were in His thoughts on the cross and were offered to God the Father for us. As they were wanting in the sense that they had not yet been endured in our flesh, that the passion be completed in any soul is necessary that the part assigned to Him be realized and actualized in His own body. Each of us therefore must finish in His life and in His soul the vision of the dying Christ. The Son of God has given us the sublime vocation of sharing in the fellowship of the cross. He has called each one of us to be a redeemer with a small r as He is redeemer with the capital r. To each and every one of us He says, here is a splinter from the cross that I have been carrying from the foundation of the world. We are not to think there for us God God is standing outside the sufferings of the world, apart and aloof in the unsurvelled serenity of heaven. God is not as spectacular to the drama of suffering. He has come down as His greatest fagidian and as seems greatest victim. If He points to a forest and bids us enter it is because His feet have already made the pathway through the thickets and thorns. If He bids us to take up across daily and follow Him it is because He has already borne it on His own shoulders. God is not outside the tears and the tragedy of life in every pang that reigns a heart of a man, woman or child. God has His share. We cannot meet across in our respective ways of life but that He already took it, that the foot of the steps of Pilice temple made at the badge of His glory in the symbol of a Christian. We cannot have feet tired and worn from the service of others but that His own were calissed and going about doing good, nailed to a cross too for having been too good. We cannot have the sorrow of losing friends or a mother but that He Himself already felt the rent in His own heart as He left a friend to a mother on the gibbet of the cross. If our lot in war was there for a lot of tragedy and suffering and sacrifice it would be done gladly because He with us is once more redeeming a world. It was this vision that sustained the soldier as a carried us pack. The true Christian soldier like Joyce Kilmer will think of his task in the light of the Passion of Christ. My shoulders ache beneath my tack lie easier across upon his back. I march with feet that burn and smot thread holy feet upon my heart. And shout at me who may not speak. They scourge thy back and smote thy cheek. I may not lift a hand to clear my eyes of salty tears that fear. Then tell my fickle soul forget thy agony of bloody sweat. My rightful hand is stiff and numb from thy fierce palm red rivers come. Now did suffer more for me than all the hopes of land and sea. So let me render back again the millions of thy gift. Amen. Because we are in Christ we will try to reproduce therefore the sentiments of Christ in His cross. To those who make us suffer who nail us to a cross we will say, Father forgive them. They know not what they do. They thought to heavenly Father they were crucifying a man. They think now they're crucifying a human institution. In reality they are like called before his conversion for secuting you. They do not know that every nail is aimed at thee, O Christ. Father forgive them. They know not what they do. Two thieves did blasphemy on the cross. Yet one of them was saved. Many two were suffering in the world today without solving its mystery and the cursing, blaspheming the from their beds and their battle feels. Give us salvation, O Jesus, that we may never despair of converting even those who blasphemy. Grant that some of them, like the thief on the right, may hear thy words. Amen. I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise. From thy cross, O Christ, thou discommend thy dear mother to thy beloved disciple. And thy beloved disciple to thy dear mother. May we nail on our cross like thee. See that when duties passons us there that we stay to do thy will, and if need be, make the surrender of loved ones and family. Then behold thy son. When darkness is so enveloped, I cross, and the sun he disliked at high noon, when suspended between heaven and earth, thou didst feel that both heaven and earth had rejected thee. Thou dost never once lose in thy human nature. Thy hold on God, crying, my heart, my God. Why, why hast thou forsaken me? Give us strength, O Jesus, when we seem abandoned in darkness and pain, when all seems lost, and the wise, a birth that never answered, to cry out in undying confidence. My God, my God, when thou dost turn to me and say, I thirst, thou meant not a thirst for water, but a thirst for love from the hearts thou madeest. May the chalice of thy getsemeny feel with the wine of suffering beyond from my lips to the soul. Make it make me thirsty to spread thy name and love before men so that in the end I may measure my life not for the wine that I drank, but by the wine I poured forth. Under thy crossmen challenge, if he is the king of Israel, let him come down and we will believe that thou didst pay until the task was done and didn't triumphed at cry out that the work was perfected. For O Jesus, Crem, that whatever may be my lot in life, whether it be in life or darkness, to hold my faith, to fight the good fight, to run the course, to stay on the cross and the evening comes. Thou dost give thy body and blood to earth. Thou dost give thy mother to John, John to thy mother, but thy spirit, Thou dost keep for thy heavenly father. Crem that I may keep my spirit too, amidst the wars and sorrows of this world, so that at the end I can give it back to thee from whence it came, let the last word of my life be. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. God love you. O Lord Jesus Christ, wind Imercy hear of the prayers of sinners, for forth we besiege the oil, grace and blessing upon our country and its citizens. We pray in particular for the president, for our Congress, for all our soldiers, for all who defend us in chips, whether on the seas or in the skies, for all who are suffering the hardships of war, we pray for all who are in parallel in danger. Bring us all after the troubles of this life into the haven of peace and reunite us together for ever O dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly King. The address you have just heard was entitled The Crucifixion and was delivered by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the 16th in Monsignor Sheen series of 17 addresses on peace. A copy of tonight's talk, or of the Holy Hour Booker described by Monsignor Sheen, 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. The Catholic Hour concludes with the singing of the vertical Christus Factor's Aest. This was made obedient, even under death. This vertical is used at the conclusion of the Tenor Brace Services in Holy Week. Next Sunday at 6 o'clock, Eastern War time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver the last in the series of addresses entitled The Resurrection. Your announcer is John Patrick Costell. The Catholic Hour has been presented by NBC in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men as a public service and came to you from New York. 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