Crisis In Christendom, No. 3 of 17 No. 3 of 17

O Lord, I am the Lord, I am the Lord. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Army. The Catholic Hour opens with Perence Dickinson's musical setting of a prayer for our men in the Armed Forces. For all who watch tonight, my land or sea or air, O Father, may they know that thou art with them even there. O Father, may they know that thou art with them even there. For all who watch tonight, my land or sea or air, O Father, may they know that thou art with them even there. Which gave for us thy rest. O Lord, may they know that thou art with them even there. O Lord, may they know that thou art with them even there. For all who watch tonight, my land or sea or air, O Father, may they know that thou art with them even there. O Lord, may they know that thou art with them even there. O Lord, may they know that thou art with them even there. O Lord, may they know that thou art with them even there. O Lord, may they know that thou art with them even there. The right reverend, Monsignor, Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America will now deliver the third in his series of seventeen addresses on the crises in Christendom. His discourse today is entitled Some Barnacles on the Ship of Democracy. I present Monsignor Sheen. Friends, last Sunday we spoke of the first of the three philosophies of life involved in this war. The totalitarian. Today and next Sunday we speak of the second, the secularist and the materialist culture of the Western world. By the secularist ideology we mean the attempt to preserve human and democratic values on a non-moral and non-religious foundation. The condemnation of secularism of the Western world is not a condemnation of the Western world. There is the same distinction to be made between the two as between a ship and its barnacles. The ship in its passage through the seas picks up barnacles which impedes its free progress through the waters. Every now and then that ship must be brought into dry dock to have the barnacles scraped away. The ship is good. The barnacles are bad. Now Western civilization or what we call democracy may be likened to a ship. The Malaka in particular is a good ship. It carries a precious cargo of believed in an innable rights and liberties. This ship of America is good. It carries the burden of the four freedoms of which our presidents spoke. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. This ship of America is good and it is phrased it down with a cargo of the right of sanctuary. For America has been a sanctuary in the past and is a sanctuary now to the oppressed peoples of the world. There is no other land on the face of God's earth has been a sanctuary. This ship of America is good and it is phrased it down with a precious cargo of all those time and noble things which make you and me proud to call ourselves Americans. But in the course of sailing this ship has acquired some barnacles. These barnacles are superstitions which I shall speak to constitute what we call the passive or soft barbarism from within. They are a danger to Western civilization not quite as open as totalitarianism but just as insidious. Today we shall describe three of these barnacles. The superstition of fauvres, of scientism and materialism. After we have described them we hope that we will be able to scrape them off. First the barnacle or the superstition of fauvres, it runs down such a way as this. Man is naturally good and indefinitely perfectable. But the mere fact that he lives and thanks to great cosmic floods of evolution he will be swept onward and onward until he becomes a kind of a god and this earth becomes a paradise. Goodness increases with time where evil and error decline. Progress is automatic. Such is the superstition of fauvres. Now why is it wrong? It is wrong because it confuses mechanical advancement with moral determined. Progress in things is not necessarily progress in persons. Plains may go faster but man does not necessarily become happier. Mastery over disease is not necessarily mastery over sin. Conquest of nature does not mean conquest of selfishness. Time does not always operate in favor of betterment because a man is sick. Time does not make him better unless the evil is corrected. Time may operate in favor of disease, decay and death. True progress is morally and not mechanically conditioned. It depends not on vitamins, more playgrounds and better milk and duckless glands, but on the will, the will to goodness. There is therefore only one real true progress in the world. That consists in the diminution of the traces of original Satan. History does not prove that we are making progress. Notice the intervals between wars in modern times. The interval between the Napoleonic Wars and the Franco-Pression War was 55 years. The interval between the Franco-Pression War and the First World War was 43. The interval between the First World War and this one, 21, 55, 24, 21, from each war more destructive than the other, and at a time when man at all the material conditions are central for happiness. Is this real progress? The sad and tragic factors that modern man under sufficient stress and even among comforts will do deeds of evil as terrible, as any that have ever been recorded in human history. Barbarism is not behind us. Barbarism is beneath us. And at any moment it can emerge unless our wills, aided by God's grace, repress it. Our own mechanical ability to move quickly can go hand in hand with the power to do more evil. Let no one deny it. Our scientific progress has outstripped our moral progress. The myth of necessary progress has exploded. But because evil in the world is not evil right, does not mean as they say that there is no right. What it does mean is that we must put it right and in order to do this we may have to learn the lesson of the cross and the agony of Get Saminy. Maybe. Maybe. We had far better get back again to God. Then there is the second bondical or superstition, the superstition of scientism. I do not say science. I say scientism. And by scientism I mean that particular abuse of science which affirms that the scientific method is the only way of knowing anything. It is this particular superstition which makes people say, science tells us. But they never say, scriptures tell us. Or the church tells us. Or the commandments tell us. Science is supposed to be the very last word on any subject. And there is no place for values, tradition, metaphysics, revelation, faith, authority, or theology. The only true knowledge is that which comes from counting. Such is the superstition of scientism which has gripped America. Now science is of course a very valid way of knowing. But only of knowing those things which are subject to experimentation and the methods of the laboratory. The great values of life, such as justice, truth and charity, are beyond experimentation. No one has yet ever been able to put a mother's love into a test. But who will deny that it exists? We cannot put a man into a cauldron and pour in him and stew him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of envy. The great values of life are beyond the laboratory. From scientism of this kind he is ruining higher education in the United States. And is doing it by assuming that anyone who has counted something that has never been counted before is a learned man. It makes no difference what you count in higher education. But in the name of heaven, count a certain Western University, a wardet, a doctor, a philosophy degree to where students who rose on the thesis, the microbec contents of cotton undershirts. A midwestern university has counted the ways of watching dishes. Eastern universities have counted the intelligents in the Gospels, the natives and the ablities in orbit, the four ways of cooking ham, and another to quote their own words, the psychological reactions of the post-rotational eye movement of squads. Go into any Catholic school in the United States tomorrow and check out any child in the first or second grade and say to that child, why are you here? Where are you going? What is the purpose of life? And the child will be able to answer your questions. But ask this PhD student who can count at the microbes and cotton undershirts, why is he here? Where is going? What is his destiny? He would not be able to tell you. He would not have a five cent gadget in his house five minutes without knowing his skull or its purpose. And then he will live 10, 20, 60 years without knowing why he is here or where he is going. It is not true that modern youth is revolutionary because he lacks sufficient economic advantages. Never before this modern youth had so many. The modern youth is revolutionary because he has no purpose in life. And unless, have the nation, we list our purposes and values in education. We will end only by educating for chaos. Oh, we are paying a terrible penalty for divorcing our science from God. Nature with studies science belongs to God. When man turns against God, nature or science turns against man. His Francis Thompson rather beautifully put it. I tempt it all his servitors, but to find my own betrayal in their constancy, in faith to him, in pickliness to me, their traitorous truness and their loyal deceit. That is the true story. Nature will be false to anyone who is untrue to its maker. For years, science has been discovering the wonders of nature. But instead of glorifying God is for God's sake, and science has stopped themselves to be authors of the book of nature instead of only its proof readers. And tearing nature away from God, nature now turns against them. The result? The science which was supposed to be our servant is now our master. Why is it that millions today shriek and terror from a machine in the air? Why does man use this technique to destroy man? Why do children crouch in bed? And mothers dig holes in the powers of the earth as bombs fall from the skies and all hell is let loose. If it is not because science has gotten beyond our control, maybe, maybe we had far better yet back again to God. The third barnacle or superstition is materialism. This superstition affirms that man has no soul, there is no future life, man is only an animal. As our modern psychologists tell us, he is a psychoanalytical bag filled with physiological libido, or he is a stimulus-refunged mechanism. The end of his life is the acquisition of money, the enjoyment of pleasure. There are no standards outside of the material. Now it simply is not true. The piece follows material prosperity. There is more frustration among the rich than among the poor. Sin and evil do not disappear with the advent of prosperity. Society can become a human while preserving all the advantages of a material prosperity. And if there are, no standards outside of the material. How shall we judge the new acquisitive society which is arising? Based on the acquisitiveness of power, as against the old acquisitiveness of money, as fortunes dwindle, as taxes meet up in heritances, hunders bureaucracies begin to administer vast sums of money, formally administered by capitalists and bankers, envious greedy and lustful men will seek to become dispensers of that social beauty. And who shall say that these new financiers of power are wrong? Given no under-soulless standards, banged out of materialism, wherein power is disloyal from conscience, and we lose the right to protest in the name of justice. Our world is sick of materialism. It is pathetic to hear people ask, what can I as an individual do in this crisis? These people who have been told that they are only animals? Many of them feel like cogs and machines. They want to get away from it all. Some of them would like to climb back into catechomes, like Jews and exile, they hang their hearts on the trees, and ask how they can sing a song in a foreign land without a soul. There will be a change. The millions of boys on the battlefront of the world who are fighting for their lives and for great moral issues will recover their souls. Midswoon's and death and fire and shell, they will get close to the meaning of life until that something within them which really makes them human. And then they will look back, and they will be angry at those who educated them. They will come to hate not only the enemy and battle, but they will hate still more. The inteligenciate home who told them that they were only animals. They will begin to realize that these so-called educated horse robbed them of their greatest possession faith. And for a while they will wander around the battlefields like Mary Magdalene in the garden saying, they have taken away my lord! And I know not where they laid him, but when they do stumble on him, as Magdalene did when she saw the red-litered marks of nails, they will ever once again into the possession of the soul. And when they come marching home, there will be a judgment on those inteligencia who told them that they had no soul. They will begin to live like new men, and there will be a rebirth of freedom under God, for maybe I don't hear their rights! But maybe we had all better be right and get back again to God. Why do I speak about these barnacles on the ship of democracy? Because they are in danger in the American way of life, because they are outmoded ways of thinking, because we are called upon in this world war to be the moral leaders of the world. Never before was a greater task thrust into any nation's hands than into our own. We have a great vocation, and we must be worthy of it. We do not want the ship of America to be held up in its mission by barnacles and fall superstitions. May I therefore ask you, Jews, Protestants and Catholics, to spend an hour a day in prayer that America may be worthy of its calling? Catholics should include daily mouse and communion in this hour, and to anyone who wishes a prayer book for wartime, entitled the shield of faith, we will send it with our compliments. For how else except by prayer? Realize the pledge of our President when he said, The United Nations seek to work for the restoration of the international order in which Christ guides the hearts of individuals and nations. That is a tremendous responsibility. America, Oric, you have a higher summons. Work worthy of your vocation. Pair yourself, repose your greatness if in your return to God. God love you. O Lord Jesus Christ, who in thy mercy errs the prayers of sinners, for, for, we beseech 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, O dear Lord, in thy glorious heavenly kingdom. The address you have just heard was entitled, Some Barnacles on the Ship of Democracy, and was delivered by the right-revern, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America. This was the third in Monsignor Sheen series of 17 addresses on the crises in Christendom. A copy of today's talk, as well as that 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. Copies of last Sunday's talk are also still available. I am the King of all. Next Sunday at this time, Monsignor Sheen will deliver another adress in this series entitled, More Barnacles on the Ship of Democracy. Your announcer is John Patrick Costello. The Catholic hour has been presented by the National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men, and came to you from New York. This is the National Broadcasting Company.