Crisis In Christendom, No. 4 of 17 No. 4 of 17

Since the Catholic hour. A group of Polish choristers open the Catholic hour, singing imite spiritum to them. Today the church is going to come, make a fool of clock. In the name of God, He is the Lord of all. He is the Lord of all, He is the Lord of all, He is the Lord of all. O Lord, He is the Lord of all. O Lord, He is the Lord of all. The right reverend, mon senior Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America, will now deliver the forth in his series of 17 addresses on the crises in Christendom. His discourse today is entitled, More Barnacles on the Ship of Democracy. I present mon senior Sheen. Friends, next Sunday we will begin treating the third philosophy of life involved in this war, the Christian. Today we conclude the second, the materialist culture of the Western world. The great ship of America we said last Sunday has developed a few barnacles which endanger our democracy and the stability of our national life. We mentioned now three more of these barnacles. First license, secondly the Trojan horse, and thirdly relativism. First the barnacle or the superstition of license. We hear it assert it in some such way as this. Freedom means the right to do whatever you please and is to be understood as the absence of law, we strait and discipline. A man is said to be free when his desires are satisfied. He is said not to be free when they are unsatisfied. The goal of freedom is self-expression. Such is the superstition of license or a perverted freedom. Now this superstition is grounded on a very false definition of freedom. Freedom does not mean the right to do whatever you please. If it did, it would be a physical power and not a moral power. Certainly we can do whatever we please, but ought we. Freedom means the right to do whatever we ought. And therefore is inseparable from law. Nor is it true as our modern say that freedom consists in the shaking off of convention, tradition and authority. What is called self-expression is in reality, often nothing else than self-destruction. About the only curve the modern sense-safe man allows himself are those curves which contribute to his health. He dies, but he never fasts. He feels justified in throwing off all restraints for no other reason than because they are old. When we reach a point where we judge our freedom by the height of the pile of discarded inhibitions, such as the commandments of thought, then anyone who would die for that disempowered ghost of freedom is a fool. Furthermore, the superstition of license assumes that men will always do the right thing if they are educated, hence the contempt for discipline. Now here we touch on the basic weakness of modern education. It assumes that sin is ignorance and is not due to the abuse of freedom. Evil is attributed to want-event licenment. When confronted with a problem of evil, educators immediately rush to a conference to discuss means of diffusing greater knowledge when what is really needed is a little more discipline. The intellect makes mistakes, but the will sins. And education must be turned to the forgotten truth that character is in the will, not in the reason. And man may know all we have to teach him and still be a bad man. The ignorant are not necessarily devils. Nor are the intelligentsia necessarily saints. The fact is that when education becomes a servant of a perverse will, it can increase man's capacity for wickedness. Unless the education restores discipline, restraint, and trains the conscience of the young, our license will end in anarchy. Why should it take a war to bring out the aroreginess? Why does no one think of the necessity of discipline and restraint until we set out on the business of killing? And if the bravest die and butter, when shall come courage in peace? There is only one solution. We must begin in America to think less of the things we want to be free from and begin to think more of the things we want to be free for. And that is why I appeal to the Jews and the Protestants and the Catholics in this radio audience to make a holy hour of meditation and prayer every day, in order that they may come to an understanding of why God made them. And we will send with our compliments a copy of a prayer book entitled The Shield of Faith to Whomsoever writes for it. And we want Catholics to make this holy hour by including mass and communion every morning. Is it asking too much to make a daily holy hour? I just received words from a sailor who ship was sunk in the Solomon Islands. Everything he had went down with a ship. Everything except a water-soaked, scattered, and well-tumb little book entitled The Holy Hour, which we gave away last year on the Catholic Hour. For twenty-two days and nights, with their awful agony of hunger and thirst, this boy and his companions floating about the watery, waste of the Pacific on a rubber out, made many holy hours from that little red book. And God heard their prayer and brought them to safety and he said to me this news. I wonder which of my listeners would dare tell anyone of these brave boys that they found that daily holy hour a little too hard. And that brings us now to our second barnacle or superstition, the barnacle of the Trojan horse. There is one great menace to our country and to the world which we may not ignore. And that is Marxian socialism or communism. It is rather soft-pedaled in these days because of our alliance with Russia, but for no good reason. Because Russia is on our side, Russia never feels impales of going to ecstasy about the glories of democracy. Neither do I see any reason why because we are on the side of Russia we should go into ecstasy about Marxian socialism. What is Michael Reimeking Russia great in this conflict is not its atheistic communism. It is its love of the Fatherland. It's fun as for its Earth. Its natural asceticism and self-sacrifice, its deep and righteous hatred of the invader. These great qualities of the Russian soul make us hope that Russia will once more reate over the comity of nations of the Western world, the roots of which are Christian. And that Russia one day will accept the four freedoms, one of which is freedom of religion. We are speaking here of Marxian socialism and now with particular reference to our own country. What we have to fear in this country is the new Trojan horse. The old Trojan horse you remember looked like democracy on the outside, but on the inside it was the suppression of private property, religion and personal rights. The new Trojan horse on the outside looks like a united war effort. But on the inside it is the same old anti-Americanism. In other words, under the guise of our military kinship with Russia, Marxian socialism is undermining our American government in way of life. And so skillfully is it done that it is made to appear that anyone who says a word against communism is sabotaging our war efforts. This is nonsense! The two things are quite distinct and let no one doubt it. Stalin himself said that he was fighting against Naziism but not against Germany. And that gives us the right to say that we are against communism but not against Russia. Now let us get the record straight. We want Russia to drive the Nazis out of their land. We want their people to live in peace with themselves and with the world. We do not want communism in America or Germany or Poland anymore than we want not to see a more fascism. If anyone doubts the sincerity of our love for Russia, let me say that every Catholic priest in the world daily says prayers who are divine lord of blessed mother in the apostles for the intention of Russia. And that is more than the communist do. In other words, we American Catholics are for the Russian bear but we are not for the Trojan horse. We want the Russian bear to eat the Nazi swastika but we do not want the Trojan horse to eat the American eagle. And that brings us to our third barnacle or superstition. This one is very common. What is this? You heard it in some such way as this. There is no distinction between truth and error right and wrong. Everything depends upon your point of view. All values are relative. When expedience moral conventions can be accepted, when a hindrance they can be rejected. There are no moral objective standards and hence no absolute distinction between good and evil. Everyone is his own lord giver. Everyone is his own judge. Such is the superstition of relativism. Now this idea that there is no absolute distinction between right and wrong, truth and error, stands in this country from the philosophy of pragmatism. This philosophy denies that God is an absolute. It judges truth not by its consistency or by its correspondence with reality but by its utility. As one of the very best known of all American philosophers has written and I am quoting him verbatim, the true is only the expedient in our way of thinking. The right is only the expedient in our way of behaving, expedient in almost any fashion. Such is his idea. In other words, whatever succeeds is right. And this philosophy is taught in every secular college and university in the entire United States without exception. Now what are its consequences? Well for the last two or three decades, thousands of japs have been studying in the United States in our great universities. They heard these pragmatic ideas. They used to write these ideas down on their textbooks. And when a professor said there's no such thing as right and wrong, the true is the expedient in your way of thinking and the right and the good, the expedient in your way of behaving, the japs wrote it faithfully. They closed their copybooks and they took them back to Japan. When they got back to Japan, they opened their notebooks and they read again about the right being the expedient. They studied their lesson well and their little weasened eyes became more weasened as they read. And finally when they were sure they had learned their lesson, they closed their notebooks and they flew across waters. And on December the 7th, they bombed Pearl Harbor. Where are they right? Did not have harshest intelligence, you tell them they were right? Did not they say that anything that is expedient of right? Well it was expedient, was it not? Dusted our superstition, come home to roost on a bombed and exploded American soil. So how blind we are. Can we not see that in abandoning the moral faces of life, we abandon the right to call anyone wrong? What moral standards are the japs violating if the criterion of truth and righteousness is expedient say? Why do we say that the japs have violated the conscience of the world? If the conscience of the world has no other standard than useful? And incidentally where was this moral conscience of the world before the war began? How shall the righteousness of our cause be distinguished from the righteousness of our enemies cause if there is no objective standard outside of oath? If there is no objective distinction between right and wrong, how in the name of heaven can hit there be wrong? And how can we be right? Maybe. Maybe as a nation we had better get back again to God. Our greatest enemy in the United States is the intelligentsia who teach these ideas. Now what do I mean by the intelligentsia? By the intelligentsia I mean those who have been educated beyond their intelligence. And who destroy morals and wreck moral. Thank heavens our boys and the battlefronts of the world do not share the views of these educators, journalists and writers who have been sniping away for years with the moral law. Calling it reactionary, behind the times labeling purity and truthfulness as bourgeois virtues as Karl Marx does. Our boys and the battlefronts do not believe these things, they believe in an absolute distinction between right and wrong. When Colin Kelly for example as a selfless pilot sent the first Jap ship of this war and in doing so lost his life. When Edwin O'Hare chopped down the first Jap plane when Dick Flemming made himself the first human torpedo. When Daniel Callahan became the first Admiral to go down fighting. When Mike Moran became the first naval officer to sink six Jap ships in a single combat. When Commander John Chae became the first fighting man whose last letter to his son became a famous American testament on patriotism. When the five Sullivan became the first American family of boys to be snuffed out in this war. These men had no opinion about America's cars. They did not believe that the righteousness of the stars and stripes depended upon our subjective outlook. They believed in an absolute distinction between right and wrong. Between our cars and the cars of our enemies in fact so much so did they believe it. The favor willing to make our own lives second rate of our cause. While these and millions of other boys and armed forces believe in that distinction, an absolute distinction between right and wrong. We have these intelligentsia at home in our classroom saying to our young there's no distinction between right and wrong. It all depends upon your point of view. Everything is relative. Friends, this is nonsense. It does not depend upon our point of view. Our cause is right. It is right before God. It is right under God and in God's name we will defend it. God bless. O Lord Jesus Christ, who in thy mercy hear us the players of sinners. Pour forth we besiege 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 we unite us all together forever. O dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. The address you have just heard was entitled More Barnacles on the Ship of Democracy, and was delivered by the right reverend Monsignor Footen J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the fourth in Monsignor Sheen series of 17 addresses on the crisis in Christendom. A copy of today's talk, as well as of the booklet referred to by Monsignor Sheen, the shield of faith, 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 are closes with the traditional hymn Dear Guardian of Mary. Dear Guardian of Mary. Dear Nose of Hatchel. Life's ways are for weary. The others of his wild. Big stands of all roundness, the whole crowd we see. Big stands of all roundness, the whole crowd we see. Big stands of all living. Dear Guardian. Holy Spirit, come and guide us. Holy Spirit, come and guide us. Holy Spirit, come and guide us. Holy Spirit, come and guide us. Next Sunday at this time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver another address in this series, entitled, The Christian Order. Your announcer is John Patrick Costello. The Catholic are has been presented by NBC in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men, and came to you from New York. This is the National Broadcasting Company.