Address delivered on January 3, 1943, by Msgr. Fulton Sheen

This year it is my privilege to address you on the subject of the Crisis in Christendom. Naturally, it will concern itself with this awful cataclysm which has brought the world to the edge of a great abyss. There are two ways of looking at this war: One as a journalist and the other as a theologian. The journalist tells us what happens; the theologian tells us not only why it happens, but also what matters. If we look at this war through the eyes of a journalist or a commentator, it will be only a succession of events without any remote cause in the past, or any great purpose in the future. But if we look at the war through the eyes of God, then the war will not be meaningless, though we may not presently see its meaning. It may very well be a purposeful purging of the world’s evil that the world may have a rebirth of freedom under His Holy Law, for "Every human path leads on to God, He holds a myriad finer threads than gold, And strong as holy wishes, drawing us With delicate tension upward to Himself." (E. C. Stedman, Protest of Faith).

These broadcasts approach the war from the divine point of view, because it is the only explanation which fits the facts. The great mass of the American people are 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 people did not know what the 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 we are fighting against a barbarism that is intrinsically wicked; we want to know what we have to do to make the resurrection of that wickedness impossible.

In this broadcast we will show what the war is not and then what the war is. Let us begin by clearing away three false conceptions of the war.

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, but the ends of living. Never before in the history of the world have there been so many abundant means of life. Never before was there so much power, and never before have men so earnestly prepared to use that power for the destruction of human life. The basic reason why our economics and politics have failed as a means to peace is because both have forgotten the end and purpose of life. We have been living as if civilization, culture, and peace, were by-products of economic activity instead of the other way round. Politics and economics alone are as incapable of curing our ills as an alcohol rub is incapable of curing cancer; and if we assume they will cure, or that they are primary, then this world war will end in socialism and socialism is only an obligatory and enforced organization of the means of living to prevent utter ruin. In a word, it is not our politics that has soured, nor our economics that has rusted; it is our hearts. We live and 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.

Second, this war has not been caused merely by evil dictators. It is too commonly assumed that our milk of international peace has curdled, because a few wicked dictators poured vinegar into it. Hence if we could rid the world of these evil men, we would return to a world of comparative prosperity. What a delusion! These dictators are not the creators of the world’s evil; they are it’s creatures. They are only boils on the surface of the world’s skin; they come to the surface because there is bad blood beneath. It will do no good to lance the boils, if we leave the source of the infection untouched. Have we forgotten that from 1914 to 1918 our cry was "Rid the world of the Kaiser and we will have peace"? Well, we got rid of the Kaiser, but we had no peace. On the contrary, we prepared for another war in the space of twenty-one years. Now we are shouting, "Rid the world of Hitler and we will have peace." We must rid the world of Hitler, but we will not have peace unless we supply those moral and spiritual forces the lack of which produced Hitler. There are a thousand Hitlers hidden under the barbarism of the present day. Peace does not follow the extermination of dictators, because dictators are only the effect 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 wood. Nazism is the disease of culture in its most virulent form, and could not have come to power in Germany unless the rest of the world were sick. Were we honest we would admit that we are all citizens of an apostate world, a world that has abandoned God. For this apostasy, we are all in part responsible, but none more than we Christians who were meant to be the salt of the earth to prevent its corruption. No! 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 restore the world!

Third, this war is not like any other 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 rather the disintegration of the abnormal. We are definitely at the end of an era of history. The old wells have run dry; the staff of unlimited progress on which we leaned, has pierced our hands; the quicksands of our belief in the unqualified goodness of human nature have swallowed the superstructure of our materialist world. We are now face to face with a fact which some reactionaries still ignore, namely, that society can become inhuman 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 a world we had before this war; in fact, he who would want to do so would want the kind of world that produced Hitler. The world is pulling up its tents; humanity is on the march. The old world is dead.

That brings us to what the war is. There are really two great events in the modern world: The war and the revolution. A war involves nations, alliances, men, armies, defense plants, guns, and tanks. A revolution involves ideas. A war moves on a horizontal plane of land, territory, and men; a revolution moves on the vertical plane of ideology, doctrine, dogmas and creeds and philosophies of life. This distinction is very important, for it explains how nations can be on the same side of a war and on different sides of a revolution. Russia, for example, is on our side of the war, but Russia is not yet on our side of the revolution; please God some day it may be.

The war is only an episode in the revolution—something incidental. It is the military phase by which the revolution is working itself out. The revolution is far more important and will long outlast the war, for this world war is not a conflict of nations, as was the last world war, but a conflict of ideologies. A 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 finished?

A revolution, we said, involved ideologies, dogmas, and creeds. How many philosophies of life are involved in this revolution? It is quite generally and falsely assumed that there are only two: The democratic and totalitarian, or the Christian and the anti-Christian. Would to God it were that simple! There are actually three great philosophies of life or ideologies involved: First, the totalitarian world view; second, the secularist or sensate view which has attached itself like a barnacle to the ship of the Western World; and, third, the Christian world view.

We will devote a broadcast to each of these later on. Suffice it presently to understand that there are three world orders struggling for the mastery of the world. We repeat. There is the Totalitarian world view which is anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and anti-human. There is the secularist world view which is humanistic and democratic, but which attempts to preserve these values on a non-religious and non-moral foundation, by identifying morality and self-interest instead of morality and the will of God. And there is the Christian world view which grounds the human and the democratic values of the Western World on a moral and religious basis. This Christian view includes not only Christians but also Jews, who historically are the roots of the Christian tradition, and who religiously are one with the Christian in the adoration of God and the acceptance of the moral law as the reflection of the Eternal Reason of God.

Our choice in this war is to be made among three dogmas: Whether man is a tool of the State, as the Totalitarian believes; or whether man is an animal, as the secularist tradition of the Western World—including too many Americans—believe; or whether man is a creature made to the image and likeness of God, as the Christian believes.

There is the essence of the conflict. We simply cannot go on as we were. A nation cannot live in war as it does in peace, nor can a Church live in war as it does in peace. What are we Catholics doing now, as Catholics, which is any different from what we did in the days of peace? Do we realize that as members of Christ’s Mystical Body on earth we must repent for the world? No occasional prayer for victory, no fulfillment of the minimum of Christian duties, no sporadic exhibitionism, fulfills either our obligation to the Church or to our country. We should know better than anyone else, as the Holy Father told us, that the whole world is in darkness because Christ has been re-crucified. May I therefore renew the appeal of last year that you make a Holy Hour every day, including in it the morning Mass. Start tomorrow morning. Let every pastor in the United States notice the difference in the morning. If you cannot go to Mass and Communion, spend a Holy Hour in meditation and prayer in your home. Pray for victory? Yes! We will win that, there is no doubt! But the peace, the restoration of the moral law, a new order based on God’s justice—that will come only by a return to the mind and spirit of the Church during the first few centuries. Our bodies need not be in catacombs, but our minds must think and pray as if our bodies were.

And my friends among the Protestant and Jews, what are you doing now that is different from what you did in the days of false peace? Are you saying more prayers, more patiently making sacrifices in war time, and living as if God meant something in the dust of common lives? Why should not you too spend a Holy Hour a day in medi- tation and prayer that the moral law of God may win over both the indifference and the hatred of a world gone mad? To all, whomsoever you be, who writes us, we will gladly send you, free of charge, a Prayer Book for War Time, entitled "The Shield of Faith."

We have a double duty in this war, not a single one. We must defeat the active barbarism from without, and we must defeat the passive barbarism from within. We must use our swords with an outward thrust against Totalitarianism and its hard barbarism; but we must also use the 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. A war to win by overthrowing the power of the enemy in battle; a peace to win by making ourselves worthy to dictate it. Victory on the field will conquer the hard barbarism. Repentance and catharsis of spirit alone will conquer the soft barbarism. Guns, ships, planes, dynamite, factories, ships and bombs will put down the first evil. Prayer, sorrow contrition, purging of our hearts and souls, meditation, reparation, sacrifice, and a return to God, will alone accomplish the second. If we merely defeat the hard barbarism and lose to the soft we will be at the beginning of cyclic wars, which will return and return until we are beaten and purged and broken in the creative despair of getting back 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 party to another. This time we want a revolution that will change hearts! A revolution like the one pictured in the "Magnificat of the Blessed Virgin" which was a thousand times more revolutionary than the Manifesto of Karl Marx. The trouble with all political and economic revolutions is they are not revolutionary enough! They still leave hate in the heart of men!

Prayer In Time Of War (adapted from Cardinal Newman): O Lord Jesus Christ, Who in Thy mercy hearest the prayers of sinners, pour forth, 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 forever, O dear Lord, in Thy glorious heavenly kingdom.