By Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. |

” … dictators are not the creators of the world’s evil; they are its 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 puncture the boils, if we leave the source of the infection. Have we forgotten that from 1914–1918 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 will not! We must rid the world of Hitler, but we will not have peace unless we supply the moral and spiritual forces, the lack of which produced Hitler. There are a thousand Hitlers hidden under the barbarism of the present day. It is indeed significant that the era between 1918 and 1939 was called only an “Armistice” and such it was, an interlude between wars. Peace does not follow the extermination of dictators, because dictators are only the effects 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 already 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 no 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! 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 materialistic 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, and 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!

The War and the Revolution

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, 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 distinction also explains the war between Germany and Russia. Their conflict is not one of ideologies, for Communism and Nazism are both destructive of human freedom. As President Roosevelt said on February 10, 1940: “The Soviet Union, as a matter of practical fact known to you and to all the world, is a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.”

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. It is not so much a struggle between alliances of men, as it is between dogmas and creeds. The battles fought on land and sea and in the air are merely episodes of a greater struggle, which is being waged in the realm of ideas. 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?

Ideologies

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: Democracy and the Totalitarianism, 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 which is anti-Christian, anti- Semitic, and anti-human. Secondly, 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 with self-interest instead of morality with the will of God. Thirdly, the Christian world view which grounds the human and the democratic values of the Western World on a moral and religious basis.

The Jews

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. In the light of these three conflicting philosophies of life our task is three-fold. This anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and anti-human Totalitarian system must be defeated and crushed not just because it is a political or economic system contrary to ours, but because it is anti-human, and it is anti-human because it is anti-God. Hence our war against it is not in the name of democracy, but in the name of humanity.

We must fearlessly admit that we are not fighting the war to keep everything just as it is, for the materialism, selfishness and godlessness which would eat away the vitals of American traditions, justice and equality we can and should scrap. Then, having recovered our allegiance to God’s moral law, we may be worthy of our mission to lead the world to the peace born of the justice and charity of God, for “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keep the city, he watch-eth in vain that keepeth it.”

This war is incidental to the great decision the world must make: whether man is a tool of the state as Totalitarianism believes; or whether man is an animal as the secularist tradition of the Western World and 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 conflict.

~~~

— from Philosophies at War,  a collection of reflections by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen based on his radio addresses during World War II.