Crisis In Christendom, No. 7 of 17 No. 7 of 17

I will have my day by O Lord, be the God of Me. The National Broadcasting Company, in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men, presents the Catholic Hour. Today's program will consist of music by a unit of the Polish choristers and an address by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen. First the choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The choristers will sing the Kierie and Anus Day from the Mass of St. Dominic by Richard Terry. The disintegration of the family in our national life is one of our major tragedies. The courtship takes place outside of the home. Often in a crowded room with a low ceiling, a mid-suffer-cating smoke, while listening to a tam-tam orchestra, glimmered by a girl who invariably cannot sing. The wife listens to radio cereals with their mouths, groans and commercials where triangles are more common than in a geometry book. She reads magazine articles written by women who never stay at home saying a woman's place is in the home. The family Bible, recording dates of birth and baptism, is no longer existent because you read the Bible, few give births and few are ever baptized. What are the most evident symptoms of the breakdown of the family as divorce? The universalizing of easy divorce by the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court means that the institution of marriage is slowly degenerating into state-licensed, free love. Polygamy and polyandre are recognized today. On condition that husbands and wives, as the case may be, do not harness other husbands or wives to gather to the court to their regutism, but that they hitches them up in tandem fashion or single-file. If our courts continue to disrupt this natural unity of a nation, they will incapacitate us for international fellowship. For if we destroy this inner circle of loyalty through this loyalty, how shall we build up those larger international circles of loyalty from which world peace is derived? I sometimes wonder if it really does any good for a Christian to argue against the modern pagan who believes that divorce is legitimate and that marriage is a terminable pact to selfish fancy. Like two women arguing over back fences, we are arguing from different premises. The majority of people who are opposed to the stability and continuity of family life do not believe in the model of God. They believe that man is only an animal or that morality is self-interest or that if there is a God, he never intended that we should not do as we please. Now once you start with these principles, then certainly divorce is right. Then certainly we should share sacrifices. If we are only beasts and lov is sex, then there is no reason in the world why anyone should assume responsibility. But why not go all the way? By the same principle anything is right, if I can get away with it, if bonds between husband and wife are revocable at will and for the advantage of self-love, why should not the treaties between nations be revocable at the will of either a party? If a husband may steal the wife of another man, why should not Germany steal Poland? If John Smith can break his treaty to take marriage loans until death, who shall say that Italy is wrong in breaking its treaties with Ethiopia or that Japan is wrong in seizing Manchuria? If divorce is from marital contracts, why not divorce is from international contracts? If in domestic society modern sneer at marital fidelity as bourgeois virtue, what right have they to ask that bourgeois virtue be recognized in world society? To those who spend life's treasures amidst the ruin of broken fidelity, there will one day come a haunting conscience. As John Davidson put it, your clueless pain is when you think of all the honey treasure of your body spent and no new life to show. Though then you feel how people lift their hands against themselves and taste the bitterest of the punishment of those whom pleasure isolates. Sometimes when darkness, silence and the sleeping world gives vision scope, you lie awake and see the pale sad faces of the little ones who should have been your children as they press their cheeks against your windows looking in with piti as wonder homeless. Famished, paves, denied your wounds and portions. Now set in contrast to this payton view of marriage, the seven principles of the Christian order in the family. First marriage is one and unbreakable until death, both naturally and supernaturally. Naturally because there are only two words in the vocabulary of love. You and always, you because love is unique, always because love is eternal. Supernaturally it is unbreakable because the union of husband and wife is modeled upon the union of Christ in his church which endures through the agelessness of eternity. Second, the foundation of marriage is love, not sex. Sex is physiological and of the body. Love is spiritual and therefore of the will. Since the marriage contract is rooted not in the emotions but in the will, it follows that when the emotion ceases, the contract is not desirable. For the love of the will is not subject to the vicissitudes of passion. In any case, a lifetime is not too long for two people to become acquainted with each other. Marriage should be a series of perpetual and successive revelations, the sounding of new deaths, the manifestation of new mysteries. At one time and at first there is the revelation of the mystery of the others in completeness which can be known but once because capable of being completed but once. At another time, the mystery of the others mind and later on the mystery of fatherhood and motherhood which before never existed. And finally, the revelation of the mystery of being's efforts for little sheep, uttering them into the Christ who was the door of the sheephold. Third, love by its nature is not exclusively mutual self-giving, but an exhausted, consumed in its own useless heart. Rather, it is mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery. As in heaven the natural bond of father for son recovers itself in the Holy Ghost who is the bond of unity. So too, the natural mutual love of spouse for spouse recovers itself in the child who is the incarnation of their mutual self-giving. All love ends in an incarnation, even gods. Fourth, every child is a potential noblemen of the kingdom of God and parents are to take that living stone from the quarry of humanity. Cut and chisel it by loving discipline and sacrifice. Know it on the pattern of the Christ who, until it becomes a fit stone for the temple of God whose architect is loved. To watch a garden grow from day to day, especially if one is planted the seed himself and cared for it, deepens the joy of living. But it is nothing compared to the joy of watching other eyes grow, conscious of another's image in their depths. Fifth, at any time when the first wild ecstasy is beginning to fade, when the husband might be tempted to believe that another woman is more beautiful than his wife. And the wife might be tempted to believe that another husband is more chivalrous. Then it is that God is a Providence Ends Children. In each boy, the wife sees the husband reborn in all of his chivalry and strength. And in each girl, the husband sees the wife reborn in all her sweetness and joy and denigacy. The natural impulse of pride that comes with be getting. The new love that overblumes the memory of a mother's pain, as she swings open the great portals of a flesh. The joy of each sleep creatures in the others fruit are as so many bees in a rosary binding them together in an ineffable and unbreakable union of love. And sixth, if the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is not because God's law is wrong. It is because our social system is wrong. Therefore, the state should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited, nor controlled to fit the economic. But the economic must be expanded to fit the human. In seventh, marital happiness is impossible without sacrifice. That is why on this Valentine's Day, we speak of arrows and darts of love, something that wounds, that wounds our selfishness. But only religion can conquer selfishness, that is why we have to pray. That is why I ask every Jew and Protestant and Catholic, the radio audience to make a daily holy hour prayer and meditation that American family life may be restored. And in addition to making this hour, including Holy Communion, Catholic should also revive the old family custom of the rosary every night. Begin it tonight and keep the family together. My little prayer books entitled The Shield of Faith to assist you in making these meditations are now ready. We'll send them to world who write for them free. Now such is the Christian position concerning marriage. And one that outside of the church is very largely misunderstood. It so often said, oh, they can marry again, they're not Catholics. Or we hear it said, the Catholic church says divorce is wrong. No. No. Divorce is not wrong because the church says it is wrong. Where does the church say it is wrong? Because, oh, my God says it is wrong. There's not one God for Catholics and another for hot and tops. You're all violent and that's where law will be punished by God. The modern pagan is no more free to break God's law than a Catholic. Why is it that everyone practically outside of the church associates the objection to divorce with a Catholic church? It's only because the Catholic church today is about alone in defending the natural law of God. And if a time ever comes, when the church alone defendeth the natural truth that two and two make for, the world would say, oh, that's the Catholic doctrine. Now, I tell you, that if the natural law continues to be defendeth almost alone by the church, a day will come when Catholics will have to be prepared to die for the truth that apples are green in the springtime and that it is wrong to poison mother-in-law. Men and women of America, awake, rage or orders to life and love while you have time. If you have not found the citadel of married happiness, it is because you have failed to lay seas to the outer walls of your own selfishness. The purpose of war is not the loot of the private soldier. Neither is the purpose of your marriage, the loot of life. Like apostles, you have been set out two by two, not that you may just eat and drink and buy and sell, but that you may enrich the kingdom of God with life and with love and not with death. The soil that takes the seed and the springtime is not unfaithful to its misciirship of harvest. So neither must you play a recreate or the responsibilities of love. The fires of heaven which have been handed down to you was to an altar have been given not for your own burning, but that you may pass on the torch. That other fires may climb back again to the heavens from which they came. If love were only a quest or romance, it would be incomplete. On the other hand, if it were only a capture and an attainment, it would cease to rise. Only in heaven can these two ever be perfectly combined, that is to say the joy of chase and the thrill of capture. For once having obtained God, we will have captured something so infinitely beautiful that it will take any eternity of chase to sound its steps. But here on earth, God is given to you who are faithful in the sacrament, a dynchering in those joys, wherein two hearts in their capture conspire against their mutual importance and recover the thrill of chase and following their young down all the rows that lead to the kingdom of God. It was a family in the beginning that drew a world of wise men and shepherds and Jews and Gentiles to the secret of eternal peace. It will be through the family again that America will be reborn when the day comes. When mothers will consider it their greatest glory to be sacriestans of love's fruit, and when fathers will regard it as their noblest achievement to be the steward of love's anointed ones, and when children realize that nature set no limit to the number of uncles a man might have. But that a man can have only one mother. When we realize this, then America will be great with the greatness of the founding fathers and the greatness of a nation blessed by God. O Lord Jesus Christ, who in thy mercy hear of the prayers of sinners, for forth we beseech the 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. Ring 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 address you have just heard was entitled, the Christian Order and the Family, and was delivered by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the seventh in Monsignor Sheen series of seventeen addresses on the crisis in Christendom. A copy of today's talk, as well as 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. And incidentally, we're glad to announce that these booklets are now being mailed out as rapidly as possible to the thousands who have requested them. The next Sunday at this time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver another address in this series entitled, The Christian Order and Education. Your announcer is joined in today's talk. Next Sunday at this time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver another address in this series entitled, The Christian Order and Education. Your announcer is John Patrick Costell. The Catholic hour 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.