Light Your Lamps, No. 1 of 11 No. 1 of 11

National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent stations in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Man, present, the Catholic Hour. Today, the life-revering, moncing, you both and Jane Chan returns to the Catholic Hour to deliver the first of a series of addresses generally entitled, Light Your Apps. During this series, which will extend through Easter Sunday, moncing if she will discuss the question of communism and the life of the papal encyclicals. The music on our program will be provided by the Catholic diocesan-choristers of Brooklyn under the direction of the reverend Cornelius C. Tumey, and will originate in the same James Procurety Vol. Brooklyn. The choristers sing now a hymn that reminds us of Christ, who suffered and died that we might live eternally. Cruelting he have born our griefs and have carried our sorrows, the very langeries by the composer Victoria. The choristers sing now a hymn that reminds us of Christ, who suffered and died that we might live eternally. The choristers sing now a hymn that reminds us of Christ, who suffered and died that we might live eternally. Cruelting he have born our griefs and have carried our sorrows, the very langeries by the composer Victoria. The choristers sing now a hymn that reminds us of Christ, who suffered and died that we might live eternally. Cruelting he have born our griefs and have carried our sorrows, the very langeries by the composer Victoria. Cruelting he have born our griefs and have carried our sorrows, the very langeries by the composer Victoria. And now we are happy to bring you the right Reverend Monsignor Fulton J. Seen who will deliver the first series of addresses generally entitled Light Your Lamps. Monsignor Seen, as chosen as the title of today's address, signs of our times. Friends, God love you. I want these to be my first words of greeting to you, as they will be the concluding words on each broadcast. God love you means God is love, God loves you, and you ought to love God in return. It is very difficult to do justice to this subject of communism each Sunday, in the 16 minutes allotted to me in this 30-minute program. So this year I have written a much poorer treatment of each broadcast, which will be sent free to you if you write in your request. Why is it that so few realize this seriousness of our present crisis? Partly because men do not want to believe their own times or wick it. Partly because it involves too much self-accusation, and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves to measure their times. Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world. Well, they are saved, you are saved, you are saved. What he said to the side you see, then, Pharisees in his time, and I ask for a sign. When it is evening you say, it will be fair weather for the sky is red. And in the morning there will be a storm for the sky is red and lowering. You know then how to discern the face of the sky. Can you not know the signs of the times? Do we know the signs of our times? They pointed to an escapeable truth. The first of which is that we have come to the end of the post-Prenasance chapter of history, which made man the measure of all things. The three basic dogmas of the modern world are dissolving before our very eyes. First we are witnessing the liquidation of the economic man, or the assumption that man who is a highly developed animal, has no other function in life than to produce and acquire wealth, and then like to cattle in the pastures be filled with years and die. Secondly we are witnessing the liquidation of the idea of the natural goodness of man, was no need of a god to give him rights, or a redeemer to salvage him from guilt, because progress is automatic thanks to science, education and evolution, which will one day make man a kind of god. And we are witnessing also the liquidation of rationalism, or the idea that the purpose of human reason is not to discover the meaning and the goal of life, namely the salvation of a soul, but to devise new technical advances to make on this earth a city of man to replace the city of god. It may very well be that the historical liberalism of our modern generations is only a transitional era in history, between a civilization which once was Christian, and one which will be definitely anti-Christian. And the second great truth to which the signs of the times pretend is that we are definitely at the end of a non-religious era of civilization. By that I mean one which regarded religion as an addendum to life, a pious extra, a moral builder for the individual but of no social relevance, and God is a silent partner whose name was used with a firm to give respect to Biddi. But who had nothing to say about how the business should be run. And the new era into which we are entering is what might be called the religious phase of human history. Do not misunderstand me, by religious we do not mean that men will turn to God. But rather that the indifference to the absolute which characterise the liberal phase of civilization will be succeeded by a passion for the absolute. From now on the struggle will not be for colonies and national rights. But for the souls of men the battle lines are being clearly drawn. The basic issues are no longer in doubt. From now on men will divide themselves into two religions. Understood again as surrender to an absolute. The conflict of the future is between an absolute who is the God man and an absolute which is the man God. Between the God who became man and the man who makes himself God, between brothers in Christ and comrades in anti Christ. But the anti Christ will not be so cold. Otherwise he would have no followers. You will wear no red tights nor vomit, sulfur, nor caryous spear, nor wave and arrow tail as metastufflies in post. No air in sacred scripture do we find war and for the popular myth that the devil is a buffoon who was dressed like the first red. Rather as he described as a fallen angel as a prince of this world whose business it is to tell us that there is no other world. His logic is simple. If there is no heaven there is no hell. If there is no hell there is no sin. If there is no sin there is no judge. And if there is no judgment and evil is good and good is evil. But above all these descriptions our Lord tells us that he will be so much like himself but he will deceive even the elect. And certainly no devil that we have ever seen in picture books could deceive the elect. How will he come in this new way to win followers to his religion? He will come disguised as the great humanitarian. He will talk peace, prosperity and plenty. Not as means to lead us to God but as ends in themselves. He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live, induce faith and astrology so as to make not the will but the stars. He will explain guilt away psychologically as repressed sex. Make men shrink in shame if their fellow men say they are not broad-minded and liberal. He will identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong. He will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is vital. He will increase love for love and decrease love for persons. He will invoke religion to destroy religion. He will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived. His mission he will say will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and fascism which he will never define. But in the midst of all his seeming love for humanity, his lib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell no one. He will not believe in God. And because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counter-church which will be the ape of the church because he, the devil, is the ape of God. It will be the mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the church as the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man in his loneliness and frustration to hunger more and more for membership in his community that will give man enlargement of purpose without any need of personal amendment and without the admission of personal guilt. These are days in which the devil has been given a particularly long rope. Evil hour, when the shepherd may be struck and the sheep dispersed, as the church made preparations for just such a dark night, in the decree of the Holy Father outlining the conditions on which a papal election may now be held outside of the city of Rome. Men who know history have seen these dark days coming, as far back as 1842, 105 years ago, I need the German Toith wrote, Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great if temporary role in the modern tragedy, while gloomy times are roaring toward us. And a prophet wishing to write in your pocalypse would have to invest entire innu'beasts. Be so terrible that St. John's older animals would be like gentle dogs and cupids in comparison. The gods are veiling their faces in pity on the children of men, their long-time charges. The future smells of Russian leather, drugs, godlessness and many weapons. And I should advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their backs. At an 1842, well indeed may we be warned. For the first time in history our age has witnessed the persecution of the Old Testament by the Nazis and the persecution of the New Testament by the Communists. Anyone who has anything to do with God is hated today. Whether his vocation was to announce his divine son Jesus Christ as the Jew or to follow him as the Christian, because the signs of our times point to a struggle between absolutes, we may expect the future to be a time of trial for two reasons. Firstly to stop this integration. Godlessness would go on and on and on if there were no catastrophes. What death is to an individual that catastrophe is to an evil civilization. The interruption of life and for the civilization the interruption of a godlessness. Why did God station an angel with the flaming sword of the garden of paradise after the fall? If it was not to prevent our first parents from entering again and eating of the tree of life which if they ate, what have their morphal eyes their guilt? And God will not allow unrighteousness to become eternal. He permits revolution, disintegration and chaos to come as reminders that our thinking has been wrong. Our dreams have been unholy. Moral truth is indicated by the ruin that follows when it has been repudiated. The chaos of our times is the strongest negative argument that could ever be advanced for Christianity. Catastrophe reveals that evil is self-defeating and that we cannot turn from God as we have without hurting ourselves. And the second reason why a crisis must come is in order to prevent a false identification of the church in the world. Our Lord intended that those who were as followers would be different in spirit from those who were not. But this line of demarcation has been blotted out. Instead of black and white there's only a blur. Mediocrity and compromise characterise the lives of many Christians. They read the same novels as modern pagans educate their children in the same godless way. Listen to the same commentators who have no other standard than judging today by yesterday and tomorrow by today. Allow pagan practices to creep into family lives such as divorce and remarriage. There are not wanting so-called Catholic labor leaders recommending Communists for Congress. Or Catholic writers who accept presidencies in Communist front organizations to instill totalitarian ideas into movies. There's no longer the conflict and the opposition which ought to characterize us. We are influencing the world less than the world influences us. There is no partners. We who are sent out to establish a center of health have caught the disease. And therefore have lost the power to heal. And since the gold is mixed with an alloy the entirety must be thrust into the furnace. Now the drops may be burned away. The value of the trial will be to set us apart. Evil catastrophe must come to reject us, to defy us, to hate us, to persecute us. And then we shall define our loyalties, affirm our fragilities and say on whose side we stand. Our quantity indeed will decrease but our quality will increase. It is not for the church that we fear before the world. We tremble not that God may be dethroned but that barbarism may reign. And treat practical suggestions then for the times as Christians realize that a moment of crisis is not a time of despair but of opportunity. We were born in crises, in defeat, to crucifixion. And once we recognize that we are under divine wrath, we become eligible for divine mercy. The very disciplines of God create hope. The thief on the right came to God by a crucifixion. And secondly Catholics opt to stir up their faith, hang a crucifix in their home, remind them that they have a cross to carry. Gather your family together every night to recite the rosary, hold a daily mass, make the holy hour daily in the presence of our Eucharistic Lord, and particularly in parishes where pastors are conscious of the world's need and therefore conducts services of reparation. And finally Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Americans, all of us, must realize that the world is summoning us to heroic efforts at spiritualization. It is not a unity of religion we plead, but that is impossible when purchased at the cost of the unity of truth, but a unity of religious people, where in each march is separately according to the light of this conscience, what strikes together for the moral detrimental of the world. The forces of evil are united, the forces of goods are divided. We may not be able to measure the same cue, what to God that we did, but we can meet on our knees. You may be very sure that no started compromises nor carrying of waters on both shoulders will see you through. Those who have the faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better begin to find out what they mean. For in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray. Play the Michael. Michael, the prince of the morning who conquered Lucifer, would make himself a god. When the world once cracked because of a sneer and heaven, he rose up and dragged down from the seven heavens the pride that would look down on the most high. And play too. Play to our lady. And say to her it was to thee, who's given the power to crush the head of the serpent, who lied to men that they would be like unto gods. And may a vow, who disfine Christ when he was lost for three days, find him again, for our world that has lost him, give to the senile incontinence of our verbiage the words. And as thou disformed the world and I won't, form him in their own hearts. Lady of the blue of heaven, in these dark days light arms, give back to us the light of the world that a light may shine even in these days of darkness. God your field. The right reverend, mon senior Fulton J. Sheen, has just delivered an address entitled, The Signs of Our Times. Our listeners may obtain a complimentary copy of this address by writing to the National Council of Catholic Men, Washington 5 BC, or to the NBC station to which they are listening. The chorus is now in tone, Don Lorenzo Parosi's stepping of the hymn, Ave Verem Corpus, Hail True Body, born of the Virgin Mary. The soloist is Master Edward Kenney. Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Ave Vermor, Today the Catholic are presented in address by the right Reverend Moncini of Poulton J. Scheme, entitled, Signs of Our Times, and music by the Catholic diocesan co-asters of Brooklyn will appear on the program through the courtesy of his Excellency, the most reverend Thomas E. Maloy, Bishop of Brooklyn. The reverend calling you see to me direct to the music, and Mr. Harold Spencer is at the organ. We cordially invite you to join us again next week, but once in your scene, we'll deliver the second address in this series, generally entitled, Light Your Lamps. Your announcer is Dom Pardo. The National Council of Catholic Men has presented the Catholic Hour through the facilities of the National Broadcasting Company, and its affiliated independent stations.