One Lord, One World, No. 4 of 16 No. 4 of 16

During the next half hour, the National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent stations have made their facilities available to the National Council of Catholic Men as a public service for the presentation of the Catholic Hour. Today, the right Reverend Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen will deliver the fourth in his series of sixteen addresses under the general title One Lord, One World, and Warren Folley will direct the choir of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament New York City in a musical program. The choir under Mr. Folley's direction opens today's program with a call arrangement of the prayer by the American composer David Geyan. Mary THOSE The evening the Catholic hour again presents to the radio audience the right-reverned Mon senior Fulton J. Sheen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. The title of Mon senior Sheen's talk is the economic condition of world peace, Mon senior Sheen. Friends, I have always greeted you as friends, but this year in order to concretize these greetings, we are preparing a booklet bearing that very title whose aim is to combat anti-Semitism, bigotry, and anti-Christianity. It is yours for the asking. Notice that we never speak of anti-Christianity without also condemning anti-Semitism, for since God is the Father of all, there must be love for all. May I ask therefore that every Jew and Protestant and Catholic in the radio audience aid this good will by spending an hour at day and prayer. Catholics are asked to make it before our Lord in the blessed sacrament. Please try. Last Sunday we spoke of the moral law and today we begin applying it to the economic order. Next Sunday we will apply it to the political order. The basic moral principle of the economic order is the right to property is personal. The use or responsibility of property is common. Of the two right and use, use is more fundamental than right. We have become so used to emphasizing property rights that we completely ignore the fact that God made this world for all men. We neglect the fact that around each person there are various circles or zones, some very close to personality and others very distant. In the first zone closest to self are my right to things which are absolutely necessary. For example, food, clothing, habitation, the normal necessities of life, sufficient for self and family. In the next zone are those things which are relatively necessary because of the peculiar position or state of life or because one uses one's abundance for the good of others. But in the outermost zone, because those things which are not necessary at all, luxuries like yoss and racehorses, the repudiation of moral principles today is confused all of these zones or blurred them into one zone. So that one uses the term my to cover them all without any distinction. For example, the modern man will speak of my food, my house, my car, my servants, my art gallery, my stamp collection, my private golf course, my Paris residence, and even my God, with exactly the same emphasis on my. As if the right in those over zones of possession was equal to the right in the inner zones, and as if the possessive pronoun had exactly the same shade of meaning when I said my bread, as when I said my socks and bombs. The moral law in the contrary affirms that the right to property varies in direct ratio to how close or how far away these zones are to personality. The nearer things are to self, the stronger the right to ownership, the nearer the eye, the stronger the have. As the nearer we get to fire, the greater the heat. That is why in sedentary, the right of a head of a corporation to a second million does not equal the right of a worker to share in the wealth which he has helped to create. The right to property therefore is not absolute and invariable. Now in every well-ordered society, right and use are inseparable. For wherever there is a right, there is a responsibility for the way we use that right. For example, I may have a right to a cow, but if I allow my cow to graze in your victory garden and trample on your spinach, I must remunerate you. When the cow dies, I must bury it. My right to the cow is bound up with my responsibility or my use of the cow. Now this principle is very clear when we speak of a cow. When you enter into modern industry, the applications of the principles of right and responsibility are not quite so easy. Now the reason is modern capitalism has divorced, right and use or right and responsibility. Great industries generally are not owned by one man, but by tens of thousands. No one individual, for example, owns over 4% of the beltelephone company. The right is diffused through stocks, but notice the difference between the ownership of a cow and the ownership of a stock, because I have a right to my cow. I am responsible for the way I use it, but how many who own stocks feel any responsibility for the operation of the corporation? They are only worried as to clip a few coupons, male in a postcard authorizing a vote by proxy. How many who are stockholders in corporations are concerned as to whether the workers are receiving the living wage, whether their rights of collecting bargaining are recognized, or whether their hours are too long? The fact is that stock owners are concerned only with their right to property, not with their responsibility or their use of it. Under finance capitalism, therefore, there's been a divorce of right and responsibility or use. Those who own stocks do not manage nor assume responsibility, and those who manage or assume responsibility or work have no stock. As family life has broken down because of the divorce of husband and wife, so economic life has broken down because of the divorce of capital from responsibility and the divorce of labor from its tools. The result is that we have capitalists who never labor, and labor leaders who are capitalists in the sense that they do not labor either. Thus, the two elements of private property which are clearly united in the ownership of a cow are divorced in the ownership of capitalistic enterprises. The owner of a cow could rightly claim all the profits from the cow because he owned it and he was responsible for it, but the owner of the stocks claims all the profits simply because he owns the stock, though he disowns the responsibility. He has surrendered half of his title to profits, namely responsibility, but he nevertheless lays claim to all the profits. Now this does not mean that the moral principle concerning private property is wrong, it only means that our system is wrong. I'll make it right. By granting to those who manage and work in and are responsible for the production of profits, some share in the wealth they have helped to create. If a farmer keeps his rights of the cow which surrenders his responsibility and care to a hired man, he at least ought to give that hired man a glass of milk every now and then. Now, if I ask the eleventh, elaborating on the moral law, suggest a partnership contract between capital and labor and to such an extent that the workers share in some way in the ownership, management and profits of industry. Now this partnership involves three things. First, give the employee E's a right to participate in the management of industry. For example, by having one or more of their members represent them on the board of directors. Secondly, give the employee E's the right to share in the ownership of industry. Through for example, special labor shares which should not be subject to market fluctuation like capital shares and which should give them the right to vote on the distribution of dividends. And thirdly, give the right to employees to share in the profits of industry over and above a just wage since they do more to create those profits than the money lender with his stock certificate. The advantages of this kind of partnership are many. If capital once labor to become interested in it work, it ought to give labor some capital to defend. Man is willing to sit down on someone else's tools, but he's not willing to sit down on his own. That's regards labor. A co-partnership will restore the vocation of work. It will transform a factory from a place where men find fault to a place where they will have responsibility because they share ownership. The choice then is clear. Either we will diffuse the ownership of private property or we will destroy freedom. But the abolition of private property is the beginning of slavery. Wherever property is, there is power. Put it in the hands of monopolistic capitalism and capitalist will dictate how to vote. Put it into the hands of the state and the state will tell you how to vote. For is a great political figure once said no one ever wants to kill Santa Claus. In a recent article in one of the most popular American weeklies not long ago, it was suggested that the American people must choose between individualism and collectivism. That is, between a system in which the individual manages everything without government interference and collectivism in which the state manages everything without individual interference. Now this is not the true choice. There's a gold and mean. Namely, one in which property rights are diffused through co-partnership. The state must guarantee the total security of its citizens, but it must not supply that security. Freedom from want must not be purchased at the cost of freedom in which a bureaucratic state becomes the world's caterer. There's a third thing besides the reign of money in society which is capitalism and the reign of state which is socialism. There's a gold and mean between a system in which capitalist get all the eggs and the workers the shelves and he's system in which the socialistic state gets all the eggs and makes anomalous for us and that system is one in which the hands are shared and that is what we are advocating. Now once you get down to rock bottom, what objection is there? The capitan and labor should become shares in industry. Basically, there's only one. Selfishness. So long as there is no spiritual force to harness the wild, the quisitive instincts of men, at what point do you think that the capitalist will say, please, please, no more profits I've had enough. I already made 78% on my investment. Can you imagine the capitalist saying that? As a matter of fact, I once heard a capitalist say, if this war goes on for two more years, I could make a million. Take labor. At what point do you think labor is going to say? Stop now. Our wages are high enough. Our hours are short enough. Do you think that will ever happen? One of the largest labor journals in the United States a week before Christmas had this editorial. Let us prove to the boys at the front that we can work harder and we can produce more for them. And then three days later, 125,000 of them went on strike. Given the unrestrained lust for money on the part of capitalism and labor, there will be no stopping until both die of their own too much. Socialism is no answer to the problem simply because socialism is not social. Any state which concentrates property in its own hands is the enemy of the people. In any theory which attempts to correct the irresponsibility of either capitalism or labor by myth making them both irresponsible has killed the free personality of man. And to cure this unbounded selfishness the state has had to interfere with capitalism. In order to preserve some semblance of common good, it may soon have to interfere with labor for exactly the same reason. So long as capitalism and labor regard each other as so much carrion, upon which as vouchers they may devour their field, the common good of a free and decent America will be only a cemetery wherein ghouls may feed on buried treasure. This is basic. The selfish, aquisite spirit of capitalism and labor must be crushed if we are ever to have peace and security. But how crush it? One way is for the state to do it. That destroys freedom. That's the way the Nazis did it and the fascists and the communists. The Germany was at the top of exporting nations. For a while fascism had the trains running on time. Communism had no more unemployment than things they and for the same reason. But in killing selfishness these systems kill free enterprise and free man There's another way open to us and that is the law of religion and the law of spirit. Namely, we must in some way see that the solution of the economic problem is not in the economic order. It is really in the moral and that takes me back to the beginning. I'm now very impractical suggesting that the solution of our economic problem has something to do with a return to the moral law and to God. There are many who will not like it but many good will will because it will create an America where no man will claim a right without acknowledging a duty where capital will do some labor and labor will have some capital. Where the right to property will be personal and where the use will be common. Where no one will recognize he is free until all are free and where no one can be free until he submits to that truth of God which makes all men free and in making all men free makes them Americans. God luck. Monsignor Sheen has just delivered an address entitled the economic condition of world peace. Our listeners may obtain a copy of Monsignor Sheen's talk by writing to the National Council of Catholic Men Washington D.C. or to the station to which they are now listening. Another Native American composer James H. Rogers has made the lyric setting of the Osalu Tarrés Pustilla, a saving victim in which Mr. Paulineau directs his choir. The boy soprano soloist is Master Richard Beck. We now invite all those listening to join Monsignor Sheen in offering this prayer in time of war. O Lord Jesus Christ, we have been blessed. Wind Imercy here is the prayers of sinners. For forth we beseech thee all 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 ships, weather 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 for ever O dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. O dear Lord, in thy glorious kingdom, Next week Monsignor Sheen will deliver another talk in the Catholic hour. The subject of his address will be the political condition of world peace. The music will be performed by the choir of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, New York City. The music will be performed by the choir of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, New York City. The music will be performed by the choir of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, for all who are suffering the hardships of war, we pray for all who are suffering the hardships of war. The music on today's program was directed by Warren Fouley. Your answer is John Patrick Costello. The National Council of Catholic Men has presented the Catholic Hour through the facilities of the National Broadcasting Company and its independent affiliated stations, which have been made available as a public service and as a contribution to the religious life of America. This is the National Broadcasting Company.