See also The Drama of Atheist Humanism Ignatius Press

Fulton J. Sheen: “The Roots of Democracy and Peace. The word “crisis” in Greek means judgment. A crisis in history is therefore a “verdict of history” upon the way any given civilization has lived and thought, married and unmarried, bought and sold, prayed and cursed. That we are at such a crisis in history today is a commonplace. That this crisis is due to the progressive repudiation of Christian culture and the moral law is unfortunately not the thought of the “Common Man.”

It is still too universally believed that a shifting of political and economic forces, or a new banking system, will cure our ills. The heart of the crisis is not in these epiphenomena; it is rather in the abdication of conscience. We are at the end of an era of history, just as definitely as Rome was at the end of an era when Alaric knocked at its Salarian gates. The difference between that crisis and ours is that in the case of Rome a material civilization was collapsing and a spiritual about to emerge. In the present instance, it is the spiritual which is being submerged and the material which is in the ascendancy.

The story of Western civilization, like the dramas of the Periclean Age, can be divided into three stages. First there was a Christian civilization. Then there followed what might be called the Era of Substitution; in the last four hundred years of the latter era civilization has been trying to find a substitute for the regency of the Moral Law of God in the hearts of individuals and in the councils of nations; among these substitutions were the Divine Right of Kings, the Common Will, Human Reason, the Natural Law understood as Physical Law, and finally individual self-interest.

The third and final stage, which is now being ushered in, is probably an era of cyclic wars where the issue will not be between nations but between ideological absolutes. The wars of religion of the sixteenth century have now reached their logical conclusion in the wars of anti-religion.

Our so-called liberal civilization, which is dying, is only a transitional phase between a civilization that once was Christian and one that is anti-Christian. It has no stability of its own, being based for the most part in successive negations of the Christian philosophy of life. It will end either in a return to the Christian tradition or in revulsion against it. This alone constitutes the crisis of democracy; it will either return to its roots or die.

Communism / Nazism

The practical atheism and indifference of the Western World was a preparation for Communism, as Communism is the negative side of Nazism. Liberalism affirms that it makes no difference whether or not you believe in God. Communism answered; it makes a world of difference, because there is no God. Nazism retorted: Communism, you are wrong in saying there is no God. There is a God, but that God is not the God of Justice, he is the God of the German race. Nazism would probably have never come into being had not Communism cleared away the “débris of Christianity,” and Communism would never have come into the world if it had not already been “atheized” by millions of individuals. Marx merely socialized individual atheism, turning the atoms of atheism into the molecule of Communistic atheism.

The Western World of the Democracies is therefore partly the cause of this crisis in the sense that it was indifferent to the moral law, but it also provides the remedy in reacting against the terrible evils it has begotten. The spectacle of seeing its retail repudiation of the moral law worked out in a wholesale fashion has scandalized it, and caused it to react. Never before has the cause of democracy been so coincident with Christianity. We are fighting not to preserve democracy as a particular system or form of government but democracy as a principle, that is, one which recognizes the intrinsic value of man regardless of race, colour, nation or class. More exactly, we are fighting not to preserve democracy but to preserve the roots of democracy.

Marx-Engels-Hitler

We are not fighting to preserve the liberal concept of freedom, which understands freedom as the right to do whatever you please; we are not fighting to preserve the Marx-Engels-Hitler concept of freedom as the right to do whatever you must; but rather we are fighting to preserve the Christian concept of freedom, which is the right to do whatever you ought. Freedom from something is meaningless without freedom for something, and that ultimate something is God. We are not fighting to preserve or create a material equality, which considers men equal when their stomachs are filled with the same brand of caviar or their vaults with the same quantity of bonds.

Equality and Order

We are fighting to restore a spiritual equality which denies that any man shall ever be treated as a means or an instrument, and which affirms that all men are equal because there is a common denominator outside of men which makes men equal; that is, God.

The Liberal idea of equality was based on free trade, free money, and equal opportunity to run an economic race; the Christian concept of equality is based on free men and the equal opportunity of all men to live well, even though they are too weak, too crippled, or too old, to enter the economic race. We are fighting for Peace; but what is Peace? The best definition of Peace the world has ever had is that given by St. Augustine: “Peace is the tranquillity of order.” It is not tranquillity alone, for thieves dividing their loot, or the corrupt politician enjoying his spoils may be tranquil.

Peace adds to quietude the idea of “order,” which implies a hierarchy or a pyramid in which each thing is in its proper place and fulfils its proper function. There is order in the bodily organism. The head and the feet are not equal in dignity, but they are at peace when each acts according to its nature; their inequality is of function and therefore involves no injustice. The feet were made for walking, not for thinking. It would be a very perverted egalitarianism which would demand that we be fair to our head and walk on it as much as we do on our feet.

Confusion of Minds

Since Peace is inseparable from Justice and Charity, it follows that peace is conditioned upon a moral authority. This brings us back to the theme that a moral authority is needed today. This no one will deny. Minds are not universally perverse, but they are confused—they know not what is right. The criterion of right is agreement with a will or intention. For example, an engine works well when it conforms to the intention which the engineer had in designing it; a pencil is good when it writes, thus fulfilling the will of its maker. In like manner, right for man means acting in accordance with the Will of God or the intention God had in creating him. Holiness consists in fixation to that Divine Will.

It happens that, since God made man free, man may follow another will than God’s Will; for example, his own will, like the prodigal, or the popular will like Pilate. Unfortunately, too many in our day choose the second standard and identify right with the will of the majority, or the mood of the masses, or the spirit of the world.

No Standard

The millions of the world who keep their fingers on the pulse of public opinion and follow every theory, every vogue, have no standard of right and wrong. A thing cannot measure itself; a tape measure must be outside the cloth; a speedometer must not be a brick in the roadway; a judge must not be a shareholder in the corporation whose cause he judges. In like manner the judgment of the world must be from outside the world. Such a standard is the need of the hour remedy, an authority that does not, like some politician, find out what the people want and then give it to them, but which gives them what is true and good whether it is popular or not.

We need someone to be healthy when the world is sick; someone to be a stretcher-bearer when the house is burning; someone to be right when the world is wrong. A sword can put an end to the war, but it cannot create peace. Peace does not come from the womb of silenced batteries, but from a justice rooted in the Eternal Law of God. As Pius XI said: “To create the atmosphere of lasting peace neither peace treaties nor the most solemn pacts, nor international meetings or conferences, nor even the most disinterested efforts of any statesmen, will be enough, unless in the first place are recognized the sacred rights of natural and divine law.” This moral basis of peace has been to a great extent neglected in the past. Modern wars therefore came less as a surprise to the Church than to the world.

— from Philosophies at War

By
Fulton J. Sheen
PH.D., D.D., LL.D., LITT. D.
Agrégé en philosophie de L’Université
de Louvain and the Catholic
University of America

Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1943

~~~

Judas and the Priesthood

+ See also Archbishop Sheen on Pseudo-Social Justice vs. The Word made flesh.

+ America and Seductive False Liberty