Crisis In Christendom, No. 1 of 17 No. 1 of 17

The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. We open the Catholic Hour with Guno's setting of the prayer Dominez Sadum Fak, a prayer so particularly fitting for the beginning of the New Year. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. We are happy to bring back to the Catholic Hour audience today, the right Reverend Martinier Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America, who inaugurates a series of 17 addresses on the crisis in Christendom. His first talk is entitled, War and Revolution. I present Martinier Sheen. Friends, I wonder if you feel that it is getting a bit monotonous to start every New Year with my series. There are some who believe that anyone who is full of life hates monotony. I trust that you do not share this view. Is it not rather true that anyone who is full of life enjoys repetition and finds a romance in it? A child is full of life. You put a child on your knee and bounce him up and down until your legs ache and the child will say, do it again. Tell the child an amusing story and he will not say, oh, that's a no-one. I heard Uncle Larry tell that last week. He will say, tell me again. Now God is full of life and therefore he loves repetition. And every morning he says to the son, do it again. And every evening to the moon and stars, do it again. And every springtime to the days is, do it again. And every time a child is born into the world, he asks for a curtain call and gives a divine encour that the heart of a God may once more ring out in the heart of a babe. Now as we turn the cycle of another year and in your charity you not only tune in to my message but you breathe a prayer to God for me, may I say. Do it again. This year it is my privilege to address you on the subject of the crises in Christendom. Naturally it will concern itself with this awful capitalism which has brought the world to the edge of the abyss. There are two ways of looking at this war. One is a journalist, the other is a theologian. The journalist tells you what happens. The theologian tells you why it happens and what matters. If we look at this war as with the eyes of a journalist or a commentator, it will be only a succession of events without any remote cause in the past and no great purpose in the future. But if we look at it through the eyes of God, then this war will not be meaningless. It may very well be a purposeful purging of the world's evil that the world may have a reverse of freedom under his law for every human path leads on to God. He holds a myriad finer threads than gold and strong as holy wishes, and drawing us with delicate tension upwards to himself. And these broadcasts we approach the war from the divine point of view because it is the only explanation which fits the facts. The great mass of American people are very frankly dissatisfied with the ephemeral and superficial commentaries on what is happening. Being endowed with intelligence, they want to know why it is happening. A recent poll revealed that one third of the population of the United States did not know what this war was about. We all know what we are fighting against. We want to know what we are fighting for. We all know that we are in a war. We want to know what we must do to make a lasting peace. We know whom we hate. But we want to know what we ought to love. We know that we are fighting against a barbarism that is intrinsically wicked. We want to know what we must do to make the resurrection of that barbarism impossible. To clear the ground in this initial broadcast, we will first say what this war is not and then what it is. First this war is not merely a political and an economic struggle, but rather a theological one. It is not political and economic because politics and economics are concerned only with the means of living. And it is not just the means of living that have gone wrong. It is the ends of living. Never before in the history of the world have we had so many abundant means of living? Never before was there so much power. Never before have men been so prepared to use that power for the destruction of human life. Never before have we had so much education. Never before so little comings of the knowledge of the truth. The basic reason why our politics and our economics have failed is because both have forgotten the end and purpose of life. We have been living as its civilization, culture and peace were byproducts of economic activity instead of the other way around. Politics and economics are as incapable of curing our ears as an alcohol rob is incapable of curing cancer. And if we think that they will, this world war will end in socialism. Socialism is only the obligatory and enforced organization of the means of living to prevent our ruin. It is not our politics that is hard. Nor our economics that has rusted. It is our hearts. We live and we act. As if God had never made us. That is why I say this war is not political and economic in its fundamental aspects. It is theological. And secondly, this war has not been caused merely by evil dictators. It is commonly assumed that our milk of international peace is curdled because a few wicked dictators poured vinegar into it. And so we think that if we could rid the world of these evil men, we could return to comparative prosperity and to chickens in every pot. What a delusion. These dictators are not the creators of the world's evil. They are its creatures. They are the boils on the surface of the world's skin. They come to the surface because there is bad blood underneath. It will do no good for us to lance the boils. If we leave the sauce of the infection untouched, have we forgotten that from 1914 to 1918 our cry was, we will have peace. Well, we got rid of the Kaiser. But we had no peace. We had another world war in 21 years. Now we are shouting, with the world of Hitler and we will have peace, we will not. We must with the world of Hitler, but we will not have peace unless we supply. Those spirits will and moral forces, the luck of which produced a Hitler. If we only knew it, there are a thousand Hitler's in every arms, hidden under the barbarism of our day. Peace does not come from the extermination of dictators because dictators are only the effects of wrong philosophies of life. They are not the causes. They come into environments already prepared for them like certain forms of fungi come into wet woods. Nutsism is a disease of culture in this most virulent form and could not have come to power unless the rest of the world were already sick. Where we honest, we would admit that we are all citizens of an apostate world, a world that has abandoned God. And for this apostasy we are all responsible, but none more than we Christians, who are meant by God to be the source of the earth, to prevent it from corruption. Now it is not the bad dictators who made the world bad. It is bad thinking. It is therefore in the realm of ideas that we will have to remake the world. And thirdly, this war is not just another war. When hostilities cease, we will not go back again to our former way of life. This war is not an interruption of the normal. It is the disintegration of the abnormal. We are very definitely at the end of a near-of-history. The old werels have run dry. The staff of unlimited progress on which we leaned has pierced our hands. We are now faced to face with the fact that there are too many reactionaries still ignore. Namely, that society can become enhuman while preserving all the technical and material advantages of a so-called advanced civilization. We will not get back again to the same kind of world we had before this war began. And we do not want to. Anyone that would want to get back to the same kind of world would want to get back to our world that produce a Hitler. The world is pulling up its tents. Humanity is on the march. The old world is dead. And that brings us to what this war really is. There are two great events in the modern world. The war and the revolution. A war involves nations and alliances. A revolution involves ideas. The war moves on a horizontal plane of land and man. A revolution moves on the vertical plane of ideologies, doctrines, dogmas and creeds and philosophies of life. This distinction is very important. It explains how nations can be on one side of the war and on different sides of a revolution. Russia, for example, is on our side of the war, for which we are deeply grateful and whose courage and bravery we are. But Russia is not yet on our side of the revolution. And please, God, one day it may be. This war is only a nepotode in the revolution. Something incidental. It is the military phase by which the revolution is working itself out. The revolution is far more important than the war. For this world war is not a conflict of nations as was the last world war, but a conflict of ideologies. The far more important question than who will win the war is the question who will win the revolution. In other words, what kind of ideologies or philosophies of life will dominate the world when this war is over? Now a revolution we said involves ideologies, dogmas and creeds. How many philosophies of life are involved in this revolution? It is generally assumed that there are only two. We hear it said that this war is a conflict between democracy and totalitarian systems, or that it is a conflict between question and an anti-Christian civilization. Would to God it were that simple? It would be very easy to understand. But it happens that there are actually three philosophies of life or ideologies involved. First, the totalitarian worldview. Secondly, the secularist or materialist view of the world in which you and I live. And thirdly, the Christian worldview. We will devote a number of broadcasts to each of these later on. We are presently concerned only in denumerating the three orders involved. We repeat. There is first the totalitarian worldview, which is anti-Christian, anti-Democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-human. Secondly, there is the secularist or materialist worldview, which is humanistic and democratic. But which at chance to preserve these values on an unlaw and nonreligious foundation? And thirdly, there is the Christian view which grounds the human and democratic values of the Western world on a moral and religious basis. This Christian view includes not only the Christians, but also the Jews, who historically are the roots of the Christian tradition, and who religiously are one with the Christian and the adoration of God, the acceptance of the moral law as the reflection of eternal reason of God. Our choice then in this war is to be made among three dogmas. We have to decide whether man is a tool of the state as the totalitarian believes or whether man is an animal, as the spectatorist tradition of the Western world and too many Americans believe, or whether man is a creature made to the image and likeness of God as the Christian believes. This is the essence of the conflict. Now, what are we going to do about it? We simply cannot go on as we have. They from cannot live in wars or doesn't peace, nor can a church live in war as it does in peace. What are we Catholics doing as Catholics? Which is any different to what we did in the days of peace. Do we realize that we are members of Christ's mystical body on earth and as such that we must repent for the world? No occasional prayer of victory. No fulfillment of the minimum of Christian duties. No sporadic religious exhibitionism fulfills either our obligation to our church or our obligation to our America. We should know better than anyone else, as our Holy Father has told us, the whole world is seated in darkness because Christ has been reclusified. Something must be done now, what shall we do? Here is my request. It is renewal of an appeal of last year that you make a holy hour every single day, including in it a morning mass. Start tomorrow morning. May every pastor in the United States note the difference. You cannot go to Mass and Communion and spend a holy hour in meditation and prayer in your own home. Pray for victory, yes. We will win that. There is no doubt. But the peace, the restoration of the Mar-la, that will come only by return to the minds of the spirit of the church during the first few centuries of persecution. Our bodies need not be in catacombs, but our minds must think and our minds must pray as if our bodies were there. My friends among the Protestants and Jews, what are you doing now? That is any different to the day you did in false peace. Are you saying more prayers? Are you more patiently making sacrifices in wartime? Living as if God meant something in the dust of your common lives? May I ask you to send a holy hour every day in meditation and prayer that the Mar-la of God may win over indifference and hatred of a world gone mad. And to all, whomsoever you be, who writes to us, I will gladly send you free of charge, a prayer book for wartime entitled The Shield of Faith. Use it. These are darker days than we suspect. We have a double duty to do in this war. Double task, now the single one, we must defeat the active barbarism from without, and we must purge the passive barbarism from within. We must use our swords with an outward thrust against totalitarianism and its hard barbarism, and we must use a sword with an inward thrust to cut away our own soft barbarism. We have a war to win, and we have a revolution to win. War to win by overthrowing the power of the enemy and battle, and a peace to win by making ourselves worthy to dictate it. Victory on the field will conquer the hard barbarism, but repentance, cuff horses of spirit alone will conquer the soft. If we merely defeat the hard barbarism and lose to the soft, we will be at the beginning of cyclic wars, which will return until we are beaten, broken, crushed in a creative despair of coming back again to God. This is the true revolution. All the other revolutions of the twentieth century have been from without. This time we want a revolution from within. The revolutions which shook Europe during the last twenty-five years only shifted power from one class to another, and booty from one pocket to another, and authority from one political party to another. This time we want a revolution that will change hearts. We want a revolution like the one pictured in the magnificate of our blessed Virgin Mary, which was a thousand times more revolutionary than the communist manifesto of Carmach's. The trouble with all political and economic revolutions of our times is that they are not revolutionary enough. They leave hate in the heart of a man. Oh Lord Jesus Christ, who in thy mercy here is the prayers of sinners, pour forth we beseech thee all grace and blessing upon our country and its citizens, as we pray in particular for our president, for our Congress, for all our soldiers, for all who defend us in ships, whether on the seas or in the skies, or all who are suffering the hardships of war, we pray for all who are in peril or in danger. Rain is all after the troubles of this life, into the haven of peace, and reunite us all together forever, oh dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. This is the national broadcasting company.