Peace, No. 11 of 17 No. 11 of 17

The national broadcasting company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. The Catholic Hour opens with Cherubinus, lovely communion hymn, Vene Jesus. Vene Jesus, love me, be me, be me, be me, be me, be me, be me, be me. Love me, be me, be me, be me. Love me, be me, be me, be me, be me. Love me, be me, be me, be me. Love me, be me. Love me, be me. Love me, be me. Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America will now deliver the eleventh in his series of seventeen addresses on the General Subject Peace. His discourse today is entitled Spectators and Actors in the Drama of the Cross. I present Monsignor Sheen. Friends. Why does God permit this war? This question is generally asked by the Spectators, not by the Actors in the Drama of Suffering. It is the sufferers who manifest the greatest faith. It is the Spectators who are the skeptics. No one knows this better than a priest. As we go about administering the consolation of the sacraments, which our divine Lord provided for the suffering and the dying, we are but rarely asked for the faithful, why does God do this to me? On the contrary, we find most often a positively joyful submission to the divine will, the sufferers saying, whatever the good Lord sends me, I accept. Or, well, this suffering gives me an opportunity to do penance for my sins. Or, this was short in my purgatory. Or, what I suffer is nothing compared to what Jesus suffered on the cross for me. But as we priest leave the beds of the faithful, who bear the marks of the cross and their bodies, and go out among those whose lives are comfortable and who never pray, where cross because the morning paper is not a rire for breakfast, and who think that an A.B. degree gives them a greater mind than the Almighty. Among these we are asked, why does God allow this war and suffering and evil? It is generally those who have never had a struggle in life, who never disciplined themselves, who bombard heaven with petulant accusations, and shout to God, very sinful, worry, why? Why? On the stage of Calvary a great actor enacted a role in that world's greatest tragedy, and after bearing the brunt of the world's evil, pronounced with strong voice and clear mind the great last line, father, into thy hands, I command my spirit. But beneath that stage the spectator's queried, why does God not deliver him? Why is it that the actors in the drama of the tragedy are less puzzled by its cross than the spectator's? One reason is because suffering initiates us into the great mysteries of life. The spectators see only half the game. They need announcers to explain the plays. The players know the secrets, where they are going, and why. Consider St. Peter, for example, he slept in the garden. This may have been excusable. For up to that point he was only a spectator. He was not yet introduced to the full mystery of the cross. But he understood the mystery when he himself became an actor in the drama. There is an old legend to the effect that Peter followed the advice of some friends and fled from the persecutions in Rome. A short distance outside of the city on the Appian Way, he meets the risen and glorified Savior, still bearing the scars of his passion. And Peter asks, Quo Vodis, Dominé, where art thou going, O Lord, and the Savior answered. I am going back a game to Rome to be recrucified. That was enough for Peter. He saw that his own refusal to love the Savior as the Savior loved him was nailing the Lord of the cross. And back a game to Rome he went. And when his hour came to witness to his faith, he deemed it unworthy to die as the Savior died, and asked his executioners to crucify him upside down. Suffering revealed to Peter the deep mysteries of life as the dozen millions of others. Like fire it burns away the drops that the fine gold might be ours. The log in the forest is only a spectator of the sun's fire, but brought from the forest into the hearth it becomes now an actor and returns fire with fire and sings as it is consumed. It is interesting to note that the only recorded time our divine Lord ever sang was the night he went out to his death. So with us our nature is larger than we know. Our destiny higher than we know. That is why our destinies are best achieved when our lower ends are set at naught. The silver in the bow of the earth has a higher destiny than it knows, but only the miners drill which blasts it from its dark dwelling can assign that silver to its higher purpose with the earth. The planets have a higher destiny than they know. They must therefore be tug up from their roots and ground beneath the jaws of death before they can live in the animal. Animals have a higher destiny than they know. And only a sacrificial knife can usher them into that higher goal of ministering to the life of man. And man too has a higher destiny than he knows. But unlike all things below him he attains it nept by self-extinction but by a surrender the baser part of him that he may perfect that higher faculty which really makes him a man, a child of God and the heir of the kingdom of heaven. As our divine Lord said, if you wish to save your life you must lose it. And from another point of view suffering also removes a false sense of values. It makes this problem rather acute. Are we going farward according to the will of God and every law written in our nature? Or are we going to stand alone, saving our miserable selfish lives and in the end lose them? In great moments of tragedies sorrow and pain we are very often given sudden intuitive visions of the utter hollowness and emptiness of life apart from God. Suffering always begets in us a longing for security. That is why this war which manifests the utter stupidity of the modern philosophies of life in which will empty the barons of those who thought only a feeling them will force souls to seek another security. Another hope. Perhaps men will act now as they did when they were children. Many a child when reprimanded or punished or denied a wish would turn away from his present discontent back to something which gave him pleasure even though it was only a broken toy. And so too, now that the barbels of a godless world have broken, growing children will seek happiness by turning back to something which gave them happiness in their youth in a moment of sorrow. Maybe a prayer they learned that their mothers need. Coventry Patmore tells us in a poem how a little boy and sorrow found consolation in clasping blue bells and pennies. My little son who looked from thoughtful eyes and moved and spoke in quite grown-up wise. Having my law the seventh time disobeyed, I struck him and dismissed with harsh words and unkissed his mother who was patient being dead. Then, fearing less his grief should hinder sleep, I visited his bed. But found him slumbering deep with darkened eyelids and their lashes yet from his late sobbing wet. And I, with mone kissing away his tears, left others of my own. For on a table drawn beside his head he had put within his reach a box of counters and a red vein stone, a piece of glass abraded with a beach and six or seven shells and two French coins rames there with careful art to comfort his sad heart. And perhaps in this present sorrow of the war we as a nation will go back to the God we have forgotten and disobeyed and he in his goodness will console us as a father. The fundamental difference between the spectator and the actor is that for the spectator man is ultimate but for the actor God is ultimate. This accounts for the totally different approaches to the problem of pain and war and suffering. The humanitarian spectator wants to alleviate human suffering. He really wants to. He will contribute to hospitals. He will endow universities. Of course he will never inquire whether or not they are teaching truth. He believes that a day will come when science will do away with man's ears and that when education is truly universal there will be no more wars. He feels that his responsibility ends by doing something, whether it be giving an ambulance to secure a job or to find a place for an indigestion. He is a agent revolutionary. If he fails to alleviate suffering he never worries. He feels that he has done all that he could. He generally says that. His responsibilities end with his gift. Where he cannot heal, he ignores. Who he cannot relieve, he passes by. But the actor in the drama of Calvary on the contrary begins precisely where that humanitarian leaves off. He does all the things the humanitarian does. But is very careful when he gives money that it will not be used to destroy life into hospital even scientifically. Nor ever used to spread error or immorality in schools, however disguised under the cloak of academic freedom. But the actor goes beyond these things. He seeks to take the sorrow of his neighbor's own and to fulfill the injunction of Paul. There one another's burdens. The spectator seen Christ carrying His cross to Calvary would organize a civil liberties league, sinned a protest of pilot, signed by 400 professional signers who will sign anything that throws a burden on someone else and then publicize it in the newspapers. But the actor, meeting Christ on the road, would help him carry His cross as Simon did. The spectator might ask our Lord to lay down His cross. The actor will take it up. The difference between the two is the difference between alleviating and redeeming, between doing all you can and sharing all you are for another. The spectator regards trials and sufferings as a problem. The actor regards them as a challenge. Our government is complaining that the people of the United States are too complacent about this war. What is the root of this complacency? It is assuming that we are spectators of the war and not actors in its trauma. If there be national complacency, it is due to a backwash of spiritual complacency. Peter James and John slept in the garden of Gethsemane because they were unmindful of the awfulness of the Savior's hour. Worry keeps us awake. These men slept. Therefore they did not worry. They were blind to the reality of evil that was at their gates. They were complacent. And if we be indifferent to danger, may it not be due to the fact that our secular schools for over two generations have been teaching, there's no distinction between good and evil. It all depends upon your point of view. Well, if there be no evil, how shall we be aroused to its existence in enemies? If there be no goodness, how shall we become the defenders of goodness? If there be no sin or guilt, when shall come our moral indignation which alone can win a war? Now that war is upon us, we must begin to realize that we are not spectators of it, but we are actors. And as we plunge into the sacrifice and the bloods and the toil and the sweat of it all, we must be stirred to a sense of our corporate responsibility to our fellowmen and to the world. That is why we have been pleading, in every broadcast, with Jews and with Protestants, to set aside an hour a day for meditation and prayer. And that is why we beg our fellow Catholics, who are physically able to attend Mass daily receive Holy Communion and prolong their meditation half an hour thereafter, long the lines suggested in the Holy R booklet which we will send free to any Jew, Protestant or Catholic who asks for it. This Holy R devotion has an object. It is to awaken our national conscience, to make us realize that the whole world is in a mess. And for one reason, because is sin. The sin of all of us, in varying degrees, the sin of forgetting God and His divine Son, and since sin is a common debt, let none of us ask to be exempt from that burden. Each Holy R must be made not for our particular intention, but to pay off some debt of the world's sin. We thus become actors in the drama of restoring the world's sanity for presently the world is gone mad. The whole world is in the state of mortal sin. It needs redemption. We have no economic or political plans. We are not even interested in trying to create a good society. We are trying to create the creators of a good society. America is not yet conscious of sacrifice and of the cross. We submit to it only in the proportion that we have to. But voluntarily, we must begin to do more. We are flying from sacrifice as Peter did. And our Lord, He is meeting America on the roadway of life. And the Azas King, the same question that Peter asked, called goddess, America. Where are you going? America? That's it. Where are we going? Where are we going? Are we going to the cross as spectators or as actors? What is your answer? As the majority in America answers, so shall be the future of America. God love you. O Lord Jesus Christ, win thy mercy, hear us the prayers of sinners. For, for, 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 reunite us all together for ever old dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. The adress you have just heard was entitled Spectators and Actors in the Drama of the Cross, and was delivered by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the eleventh in Monsignor Sheen's series of seventeen addresses on peace. A copy of today's talk, or of the Holy Hour booklet described by Monsignor Sheen, may be obtained by writing to the National Council of Catholic Men, Washington DC, or to the station to which you are now listening. A group of the Paulus choristers continue with an old Breton hymn arranged by Deem Steever, before the Shrine. The Household of the Savior and Grace of the Household of the Savior and Grace of the Household. And mercy, and blissful. Concluding the Catholic Hour, we hear the hymn, I met the Good Shepherd by Tosa. Next on day of this time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver another address in this series entitled The Divine Cost of Stopping the War.