The Catholic Hour (05-23-1943)

O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Alt. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. Today's program will consist of music by a unit of the Paulus Carresters and an address by the Reverend Dr. Wilfred Parsons. As a composer of modern Catholic Church music, Bruno Oscar Klein ranks, certainly, as one of our foremost. A group of the Paulus Carresters open the Catholic hour singing his well-known composition, Adoroté. The National Broadcasting Company is the best of me. The National Broadcasting Company is the best of me. The National Broadcasting Company is the best of me. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. O Lord, as I find Him, all of us is the best of me. Last Sunday I reminded you that it was Pope Pius XII who called these times through which we are passing the hour of reparations. Our sons and brothers are risking their lives on land, on sea, and in the air in reparations for our errors of the past. But I also recalled that the Pope promised us that behind a murky cloud of reparations lies the shining hour of liberation. At our I said, we'll come after the defeat of our enemies with victory and peace. In a true sense, of course, reparations is liberation. In this argument of penance, when we have acknowledged our sins, when we have confessed them and been truly sorry for them, when we have humbly asked for absolution and promised it to do penance for them, then at the word of God's minister, we have really been set free for our sins had really made us slaves. It is that happy moment of being set free, the hour of liberation that I would like to imagine with you in this address. But it is not only freedom for individual souls that will come after we have made reparations. I am talking of nothing less than freedom for the whole world, the freedom of our nation, of the friendly nations, and of the enemy nations. It is true that many great and small peoples in Europe and in Asia are this very day weeping the bitter tears of slavery. After inhuman warm scenes have ruthlessly rolled over them. But is it not also true that even before that Italy and Germany and Japan themselves went into captivity when their captors first held up before their eyes the tempting vision of making captives of all the others? And what about ourselves, the nations that still are free? It is true that we have political liberty, that we still have the means of governing ourselves. But we too are held in the iron necessity of doing reparation for our errors of the past. Those errors which also held us captive will not dissolve until in the hour of liberation we shall have left them behind us and turned our eyes towards a resplendent new world in which those errors shall have no place. We may not forget that it was those very same errors which our enemies took and fashioned into chains for the enslavement of the world. The slavery of wealth, the slavery of labor, the slavery of the schools, the slavery of the state, the slavery of the church, the slavery of all the nations, all these slavery we of the free nations in our innocent ignorance preached and are sometimes practiced. But we preach them and our enemies practice them by putting them into execution in a form that filled even us with horror that they should be so ghastly. If we have seen ourselves as iftee formed in the mirror which our enemies have held up to us, and if through our sons and brothers lying dead and wounded on the field of battle, we shall have made reparation for the errors of the past. Is it possible that after the lights come on again all over the world, we shall return again to the old ways that brought disaster to us, God forbid. It will be no hour of liberation that will await us but the old hour of slavery to be followed in its turn only by another hour of reparation. Our leaders of the free nations have set before us the four freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want, and they have also given us an Atlantic charter in which these freedoms are more fully expressed. But may I be bold enough to say that noble and precious as these freedoms are greatly worth dying for as they are, they still are only the first chapter in the story of a free world to come. Freedom of speech will give us the power to have our governments rule us in our own interests if our governments are organized in the spirit of freedom. Freedom of religion will guarantee our worship of our Creator if the governments of the world acknowledge a Creator. Freedom from want will make money our servant if the governments of the world are not themselves the servants of money. Freedom from fear will make tranquil our days and our nights if the world itself is organized in a spirit of divine charity and not in a spirit of force. Let us try them to imagine together the happy moments of the coming of the hour of liberation. First of all, it will be the hour at which the unholy den of crashing guns and whistling bombs will cease to torture the sick years of our boys on the battle line and the souls of women and children crouching in a noisem shelter in the ground. It will be the hour at which the defeated enemy will straddle back sheepish and afraid to his homeland which he will wish he had never left. It will be an hour of starvation in which both the captive countries and the vanquished chapter will hold out their trembling hands to the victor in supplication for milk and bread. It will be an hour of magnanimous victory in which the victor will try to lead both the vanquished and his erstwhile captive back to a way of living that will be something like the kind of life. Their creator wanted them to have. But what about the victor besides bread and milk will we have something more to offer both the vanquished and the liberated captive? Will we be able to assure both the deuded followers of the dictators and the abused victims of their tyranny something better than the old worn out social order that led them in us to such a holocaust of bloodshed. And destruction if we will not God help us the hour of liberation will be a will of the whisk. It will be a cruel deception and the boys and girls of this war will see their children led into another even as their fathers and mothers did. It is something more than bread and milk that we must offer both the vanquished and his erstwhile captive. And what we will have to offer them will be the vision of ourselves changed into new men and a new society. They practiced what we preached let us in God's name not preach it anymore. There are those even now who tell us that we have no alternative. Either we must go back into the old selfishness which they called by the name of individualism or sometimes free enterprise say we must yield ourselves up to a new collectivism which may be a new kind of fascism or the older and discredited communism. If that is the only choice that lies before us then I repeat God help us because before God either we will have to fight another war to liberate us from tyranny once again or we will have yielded it to the tyranny without the necessity of fighting another war. The old selfishness will certainly bring us to another conflict but if we accept collectivism in advance there will be no need to fight another war or we will have lost it before the guns begin to fire. The hour of liberation men must mean two things or it will mean nothing. It must mean that we will be set free from the old error of selfishness at home within the nations and it must mean that the people themselves must be set free from national selfishness as well. Never forget that our enemies led their own people captive by peaking selfishness in the fair and lying colors of liberty and security for themselves. We of the free nations cannot disappoint the angry strokes of the world by enacting such another tragic comedy as that. Before all then we must have peace at home before we will be able to promise peace to the world. We cannot go back to the old idea that free enterprise means nothing more than war, a desperate war for survival, war between industry and industry, war between company and company, war between employer and worker. Neither on the other hand and we adopt a new idea, fascist or communist as you will, that war within society can be conjured away by subjecting everybody worker as well as employer to the omnipotent state. That would be peace indeed but it would be like the peace of death. The human spirit would be enslaved by it just as surely as it was by the old individual selfishness. No, let them not tell us that we have only to choose between them, between individualism and collectivism as if there were no other choice. That would be like saying that we can have tyranny or anarchy, an anarchy that leads to tyranny or a tyranny that is ordered anarchy. Social peace is neither of these things, social peace is liberation, liberation from selfishness, liberation from greed and unbridled power, liberation from exploitation, whether it be exploitation by the public authority or by private individuals. Most of all, social peace, as price the twelfth told us last December, must prevent the worker who is or will be the father of a family, from being condemned to an economic dependence and slavery which are irreconcilable with his rights as a person. No social peace is the fruit of justice and justice means a decent regard for the rights of all. Social peace will not be attained by confiscating private property but neither will it be attained by continuing to restrict private property to the few. We have the United States, we'll be able to come before a post-war world with a clear conscience and with three hands only when we have organized our own social order on the basis of justice and of peace. And what about that post-war world? When its women and children creep out once again from the sellers of their ruined homes and when its tired soldiers trudge we're really back to find employment once again in their shattered factories and their ravaged fields, will we solemnly instruct them with tragic irony that the nations also have now to choose only between the old international anarchy that all of us have been able to find. We've always led to wars and a new international tyranny that will be like the peace of death. No, we cannot return to the old national selfishness that called its self-soverancy but really meant that a nation could do what it pleased in the world without regard to the rights of other nations. But neither can we allow to be forged upon the nations, the change of an international totalitarian slavery that will destroy their existence. International peace must be like social peace. It too is liberation. Liberation from selfishness, liberation from fear, liberation from the crushing burden of military service. International peace, like social peace, means liberation by cooperating for the common good instead of being rivals in a common suicide. So we are the United Nations, after victory and peace, we'll have within our hands the terrible responsibility of handing the world the choice of peace or war. If we learn to cooperate with each other, and if we have the magnanimity to raid even the bank place nations up to a place of cooperation with us, then we shall be offering the nation's peace. This was the lesson taught us by Pope Pius XII in 1941 when he said that the devastation of this war is too great for us to add to it the havoc which would result from a frustrated peace which would be illusory. To avoid such a tragedy, there will be needed this sincere, willing, resolute and generous cooperation, not only of this or that party, of this or that people, but of all peoples and the whole of humanity. This is a universal enterprise that Pope Pianan for the common good of all, and it requires the collaboration of Christendom for the religious and moral aspects of the new order which it is intended to reconstruct. Now is the hour of reparation, but God will not be always angry with His people. When the hour of reparation comes upon us, is it not a sign that the hour of liberation cannot be far behind? If we but approach our Creator with faith and hope and love, like children that have sinned for ignorance and weakness, then the hand of God will reach into human hearts and into human society and bring us liberation. Thank you for all the parcels. The program continues from New York City. The adress you have just heard was entitled The Hour of Liberation and was delivered by the Reverend Dr. Wilfred Parsons of the Society of Jesus, Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University of America. This was the last in Father Parsons series of two addresses on social regeneration. A copy of today's talk 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 National Council of Catholic Men invites all those listening to join in offering up this prayer in time of war. O Lord Jesus Christ, who in thy mercy hear us the prayers of sinners, pour forth we be seeks 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, 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 into the haven of peace and reunite us all together forever, O dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. The Catholic Hour continues with the singing of the beautiful Mayday Carol. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I've almost gained thee under the fire of the Lord. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I've almost gained thee under the fire of the Lord. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. I sing of the Lady of all most fair. As a closing selection, we hear AM cannabels setting of the hymn, O Asuka Vietorum. O Asuka Vietorum, O Asuka Vietorum, O Asuka Vietorum. In this pure silence... all of thisを be thousand earth.... Whatever it is that is earth.... O we Within喔 surplus 那 It gives us great pleasure to welcome back to the Catholic hour next Sunday at this time Captain William A. McGuire, Chaplin, United States Navy. Your announcer is John Patrick Costum. This program has been presented as a public service 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 Washington and New York. Here's the National Broadcasting Company.