What kind of a world do you want? WPiathlnbcfa Worth boy Want? WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? By Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S. J., Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Political Science, Georgetown University, Washington, D. C. Four addresses delivered in the nationwide Catholic Hour (produced by the National Council of Catholic Men, in cooperation with the National Broadcasting Company), on Sundays from April 7 through April 28, 1940 Page What’s Wrong with the World? 3 The Evil of Racism 11 The Evil of Statism . 19 The Catholic Answer 27 National Council of Catholic Men 1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D. C. Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor Huntington, Indiana Imprimatur JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D. Bishop of Fort Wayne Deadtiifted WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? Address delivered on April 7, 1940. In the midst of the uncertainty and bewilder- ment that accompany the puzzling moves of the present war in Europe, there is one recurring thought that remains constant and clear. That thought takes the form of a question, and it is, per- haps, present to the minds of Americans more than it is to the minds of those who are closer to the con- flict. It is a question that will not down, persistent and nagging, and it demands an answer. The ques- tion is this : What kind of a peace will follow when all the killing is over and the world is at last sated again with bloodshed and horror? What kind of a peace will follow? Is it prema- ture to ask such a question? Should we wait until proud cities are laid low, and thousands of beau- tiful ships find a grave in the cold and unpitying ocean, and the bones of millions of men lie rotting in hastily dug graves in the West and in the East, and widows and orphans cry every night for the husbands, and fathers, and brothers who will never come back home ? Before we attempt to answer such a question, should the world calculate the chances of winning for this side or for that and hold its col- lective mind in suspense until there is scarcely left anything in the world that is worth caring for ? I think not. Oh, of course, if this struggle is merely a battle between opposing money markets over wider and more profitable outlets for buying and selling; if it is merely a war of clashing imperialisms, each one striving to occupy lands coveted by the other; or if 4 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? it is even only a blind and stupid urge of one nation to destroy an enemy lest that enemy destroy it—in all those cases, perhaps, it is not worth while asking a question that can have no possible sensible reply. But as the days go by, and as one dazzling and sensational move succeeds another on the diplomatic checker board of the world, the conviction is harden- ing in the minds of most men here and abroad that the new world war, whatever it was at its beginning, has become something deeper and more full of mean- ing than a mere struggle for power. The spokesmen for all sides, in Great Britain and France, in Ger- many and Russia, are beginning to talk as if this war were charged with the enigma that will settle for all time the destiny of all men that inhabit this earth. On one side there is a tacit alliance of two new world forces which, if they are successful, will make for us a world that will be different from any- thing that we have hitherto known. On the other side there is the will to resist this revolutionary change, to the last limit of force, if need be ; but at the same time there is not discernible on that side any clear insight into the mainsprings of its own resistance, or any certain conviction that would nerve its followers to risk everything in the hope that something better will come about after it is all over. Nevertheless, in the minds of all the humble people in the world, in the minds of those whose thoughts do not find their way to the front pages of the newspapers or even make their weight felt in the halls of diplomacy and on the fields of battle, the question will not down. It is the persistent question with which I began this address: What kind of a peace will follow all the slaughter? WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? 5 I have said that I hear no voice that seems to offer us an answer to this all-important question. That is not quite exact. There is one voice which has been heard by all the world, which spoke last October, after the conflict had barely got under way, and which perhaps is only now beginning to be understood, though everybody heard it. It is the voice of the present Holy Father, Pope Pius XII. May not that be the reason why the President of the United States, intrigued, perhaps, by the sound of that voice, and wishing to know more of what it meant, sent a personal representative to keep in touch with him at the Vatican? May it not be the reason why the Foreign Minister of Germany made a special trip to Rome, not to see and talk with the great Mussolini, but indeed to have a long private talk with the Holy Father ? May it not be the reason why the eyes of all the newspapers in the world were turned inquiringly in his direction, and why the diplomatic corps of every nation was on the alert to catch every intonation and hidden meaning of the cautious statements which came from the Throne of the Fisherman? Now what was that reason, really? Be very sure that it was not because the Pope had found the secret of how to break the fortress lines of the besieging nations, or that he knew the way to divide the lands and markets of the world so that there will be no more war, or even that he could devise a formula by which the warring nations could sign a peace without too much loss of face. If the world made a pathway to the Vatican, it was because of another reason altogether. It was because, to the question of what kind of peace the world desires, he replied by asking another question. And that ques- 6 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? tion was: What kind of a world do you desire? If some were looking at Pius XII with hope, and some with fear, it was because he had probed deeper into the soul of Europe than any man in high position had dared to probe, and there from the depths of that soul had brought up an almost forgotten truth which men have looked at as if they were seeing the ghost of a buried civilization. What was that truth ? Let me answer it by ask- ing a question in my turn. When the nations made peace so precariously in 1918, what kind of a world did they desire at that time? Oh, I know that with the voice of an American President they claimed that it was to be a peace of justice, a peace of equal- ity, a peace of fair dealing. But what did they mean by justice? What did they mean by equality? What did they mean by fair dealing? What could they mean by them if they had forgotten the basis on which justice and equality and fair dealing must always rest? And in saying this I do not intend to indict only the statesmen of Europe and to raise American representatives on a pinnacle of right- eousness. The only path to truth I know is humility, a clearsighted view of one’s own shortcoming and ignorance and weakness and folly. If all the world would practice that humility, perhaps it would be able, in this darkest of its hours of foreboding, to see the truth. And God grant that the way to humil- ity for the nations may not have to be what it is for so many single human beings, the way of humilia- tion and suffering and despair ! “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32), said the Son of Man. What then, is the truth which was spoken by Pope Pius XII and which will free WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? 7 the world from the shackles of its blind urge to self- destruction ? When men begin to make over a world after the devastating catastrophe of a war, what kind of a world have they in mind? Is it a world in which the same old round of rivalries starts all over again, with new groups holding all the prizes, while the others promptly begin to intrigue and to arm in order to win them away? It certainly is, if the thoughts which possessed them in the recent past are still in control of their minds. If they merely think in terms of force, of combinations of power and of money and of armed battalions, what other kind of a world can they desire? What is the use of talking, as our statesmen are beginning to talk, of right and justice and order and equality, liberty and civilization, if those fair words have only the per- sonal meaning which each speaker wishes to attach to them? What kind of a world do you desire?—after the war and after the peace? There is one answer to that question which will be the test. Shall it be a world in which the individual man, the individual human person, will find his dignity secure and the fulfilment of his destiny made possible ; or will it be merely the same old world in which the human per- son is just the pawn in the hideous game of power politics as it has been played by the world’s politic- ians, for the enrichment of a few and the enslave- ment of the many? Shall it be a world in which private passion and ambition win the prizes, or one which is organized in such a way as to insure that the human person finds it fully possible to fulfill his last end, in this world and in the next? If it is to be a world of order and of justice and 8 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? of liberty, then be very sure that it will be a world of law. I do not mean merely that international law which is but a series of agreements between nations and depends for its observance on the uncertain and oft-changing good will of those who guide the na- tions. I mean a law that is deeper than all human law. I mean the eternal law of God. Human law is only the positive enactment of a nation, often only of a temporary and passing majority in that nation. The eternal law of God is an unchanging thing; it is behind every just human law, because it is writ- ten on the minds and hearts and consciences of men by man’s Creator. There is a voice which we call the voice of conscience; it is “that voice which teaches even to the illiterate and to uncivilized tribes what is good and what is bad, what is lawful, what for- bidden, and makes men feel themselves responsible for their actions to a Supreme Judge” (Summi Pon- tificatus, NCWC, p. 13). It is this voice which, when it speaks to us, tells our reason what we are to do and what we are to avoid if we are to make our conduct in accord with the eternal law of God. When this voice speaks, we recognize at once that there is within us a law which only our reason can discover. To this law our own wills are subject; it is not subject to the changing whims of our wills. It is the law of our own nature. It is the result of our being created by God. It is at once the sign and the purpose of the creation of our nature. This law we call the Natural Law. Out of it comes that “uni- versal norm of morality,” the “denial and rejection” of which, the Holy Father tells us, is “the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which we deplore in modern society” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC., p. 13). WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? 9 Now this “universal norm of morality” is a standard of conduct, not only for each individual man or woman or child, but for those groups, form- ed out of mankind, which we call nations and states. If individual men and women do not recognize it as the rule of their private dealings with each other, they cannot, of course, expect it to operate when nations deal with each other. But, alas, even in na- tions where men recognize that norm in their private conduct, they often reject it in the public or social actions for which ultimately they also are responsi- ble. And it is out of this rejection, the Holy Father tells us, that comes what so vividly he calls the “spir- itual and moral bankruptcy of the present day” for, at the “head of the road which leads to (this) bank- ruptcy,” “stand the nefarious efforts of not a few to dethrone Christ: the abandonment of the law of truth which He proclaimed and of the law of love which is the life breath of His Kingdom” ( Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 10). And so at last the Holy Father has probed into the depths of the human soul and brought up out of it a forgotten truth which in very deed men stare at as the ghost of a buried civilization. It is as if he had said to all mankind: “When you abandoned the religious basis on which lies our whole social and political system, you began to undermine the very material prosperity and safety of that system itself. If that statement seems to you a paradox, it is be- cause you have forgotten the sources from which sprang your own civilization. It is nevertheless true that when you reached up to dethrone Jesus Christ from His rightful place as King of the World, you took the first step towards overthrowing your own earthly kingdoms.” 10 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? During this month of April we will pursue these thoughts further in the Catholic Hour. If the world permanently rejects this universal norm of moral- ity, and if it persists in organizing itself along the lines of cupidity and passion, what are the disasters to which it runs the risk of exposing itself? It will break up the unity of the human race and place law at the mercy of the “changeful tides of human will” ; and it will attribute to the state a power over the destiny of human persons which will turn it from a benevolent ruler into a despotic tyrant. After that we can then see what is the true Catholic answer to this agonizing problem. Meanwhile, let me conclude by quoting the stir- ring words which Pope Pius used in his Encyclical of last October: “We feel we have a duty to raise with still greater insistence the eyes and hearts of those in whom there yet remains good will to the One from Whom alone comes the salvation of the world—to the One Whose almighty and merciful Hand can alone calm this tempest—to the One Whose truth and Whose love can enlighten the intellects and inflame the hearts of so great a section of mankind plunged in error, selfishness, strife and struggle, so as to give it a new orientation in the spirit of the Kingship of Christ” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, P. ID- THE EVIL OF RACISM Address delivered on April 14, 1940. Last Sunday I pictured the world putting to itself the agonizing question: What kind of peace will follow the present struggle in Europe? And I also pictured His Holiness, the Pope, answering that question by asking another : What kind of a world do you want? If it is to be a world founded on the shifting sands of private passion, of mere desire or hatred, then we will have a world not unlike that world we know which has drifted blindly into the present chaos and confusion. But if you want a world which is founded on conviction and principle, on the rock of an unchanging norm of morality, then we can await the coming of peace with something like pleasure and hope. Today I want to go more deeply into that mat- ter of what kind of a world we want, and I will do it once more by asking a question, which is more than a mere query for information. It is a chal- lenge. That question is: When you get the kind of a world you want, whose world will it be? Now do not think that this is an idle question. It goes down into the very heart of our present world perplexities. It is not merely an investiga- tion into the state of the world at large, an academic excursion into the complex field of international re- lations. It is an examination of conscience. It is a searching probe into the minds and hearts of in- dividual people in this as in every nation on the face of the globe. In a recent widely circulated article, the well- known writer, Walter Lippmann, wrote these strik- ing words : “This war is not a war about frontiers, 12 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? and it cannot be settled by drawing lines on a map, or by devising projects that are to be considered when the war is over. This is a civil war of the west- ern world, resulting from the anarchy which has followed the breakdown of the centers of authority and order. This anarchy will continue, it will expand and become ever more destructive, unless there is forged in the fires of the war itself—under the pres- sure of necessity and in the mood of heroic devo- tion—the hard core of an enduring union” (Some Notes on War and Peace , p. 46, Macmillan, 1940). In these words it seems to me that Mr. Lipp- mann has put his finger on the inner source of the uneasiness which has come upon our modern world. In another part of the same article he speaks of the '‘anarchy in which for more than twenty years the moral standards of the western world have been disintegrating” (Ibid., p. 45). That anarchy of which he speaks—what is its origin and whither will it lead us? Is it something which exists only as a disease which afflicts Europe, something which we can behold with the pity with which we assist at the bedsides of those who are ill and at the same time with the self-complacency of men who are them- selves in the best of health ? I do not think so. I believe that this disintegra- tion of moral standards which has brought the pres- ent anarchy upon Europe, which has palsied the minds and hands of the leaders of Europe so that they seemed unable any longer even to wage proper war upon each other, I believe that this anarchy, this paralysis of moral force, afflicts our own coun- try as well. Now how did that come about? What is its origin, and what is its nature? Where did it start? THE EVIL OF RACISM 13 My address on this Catholic Hour last Sunday pointed out the first answer to this question which was given by Pope Pius XII in his Encyclical of last October. It is the loss of the knowledge of an un- changeable criterion of morality. Pope Pius continues his teaching by recalling to our minds the high vision of humanity which once animated and enlightened men’s minds, a vision “which makes us see the human race in the unity of one common origin in God . . .; in the unity of na- ture ... in every man ; ... in the unity of his imme- diate end and mission in the world; in the unity of dwelling place, the earth ... ; in the unity of our supernatural end, God Himself ... ; in the unity of means to secure that end” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 17). Unity of origin; unity of destiny; unity of na- ture; unity of common earthly habitation; unity of common earthly resources ; and unity in the right to the means to develop these resources for the com- mon good. This is indeed a “marvelous vision” of unity, as Pope Pius calls it. It was a vision that could have brought peace and happiness to the world. And it was not a mere will-of-the-wisp, a mere idle day dream of foolish weak thinkers, who would build a new world order on the unsubstantial clouds of theory. It was a vision that was founded on the solid and undeniable facts of our human life. We all have the same origin from the “one God and Father of us all” ; we all have the same destiny to achieve our perfection finally under the protection of that one God and Father; we have all received from that one Creator the same nature of body and soul, will and intellect and imagination and memory and feeling; we have all found our dwelling place on 14 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? this one small planet spinning away in the midst of uncounted constellations of galaxies of mighty suns ; we have all been given the same material resources by which to sustain our existence, to perfect our na- tures, and to achieve happiness on this earth and hereafter; and we have all been granted the right by the Creator of them to use these resources as means to this perfection, this immortal destiny. This is the vision of human unity which Pope Pius calls to our minds and which the human race, the race of the poor and the simple and the unknown millions, looks back upon with nostalgic and pathe- tic longing. For we must now ask ourselves : What have we made of that vision? Where is it today? Was it a poor trick which some mocking demon dangled before our eyes, the while we mortals soiled the fair face of the earth with each other’s blood and “played such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep”? No ; it was no dream, no foolish fancy. It was what we were supposed to be, had we only known and recognized the truth. Poor erring children of a loving Father, we have dissipated our inheritance. We have denied our common origin from one loving God and sought it in the slow ascent up through lower animals from slimy creatures that crawled out of the ocean to the dry land. We have taken our glorious destiny and cut off its better part, eternity, and broken it up into small pieces and distributed its pieces among a favored few. We have denied our common nature and made it one with the lower ani- mals whose whole purpose in creation was to serve the welfare and happiness of a higher creature, man, who, in his turn, was meant to be only a little less than the angels. We have divided up this com- THE EVIL OF RACISM 15 mon earthly habitation into small parcels that shall be the possession of some groups, but not of all. We have denied to the others who do not possess, or have been dispossessed, the very right to the means of securing their due welfare and temporal happi- ness. We have brought about a world in which, to use Pope Pius’ bitter words, “one nation’s will to live [is] tantamount to a death sentence for an- other” (Pius XII and Peace , NCWC, pp. 38-39). Is not all this the natural result of the original denial of our common source in the creative Hands of God? Can anything else but disunion and strife come from a false and confusing account of the nature and destiny of man? It is a strange but in- evitable consequence of every attempt to deify man in his own right that he is by that very fact cast down into a position more ignoble than that of the beasts which serve him. Let us not be surprised, then, that this false philosophy has led great nations to exalt so highly their own people as to deny any human rights to other races that may exist amongst them. When you take selfishness and exalt it into a national pol- icy, you may think that you have reached the last height of human ambition; you may think that you have broken once for all the bonds that tie you to the rest of men; you may fondly imagine that you can then make over the world and all men to your own image and likeness, and, if they refuse, break them and cast them out into an exterior darkness where forever they will be forgotten outcasts. You may do all this, but never forget that when you violate the law of the nature that is yours, then nature will at last turn and rend you in punishment of the viola- tion. 16 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? In his Encyclical of last October, Pope Pius XII listed this folly as the first of the “many errors which derive from the poisoned source of religious and moral agnosticism ,, > about which I spoke last Sunday. “The first of these pernicious errors, wide- spread today,” he said, “is the forgetfulness of that law of human solidarity and charity which is dic- tated and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever they belong, and by the redeeming Sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ on the Altar of the Cross to His Heavenly Father on behalf of sinful mankind” ( Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 16). This first evil which flows from the denial of the place of God in the affairs of the world, and which we call by the name of the evil of Racism, is a pervading poison which can only destroy those who entertain it. You who hate or despise other races and strive to push them down into some posi- tion inferior to your own, do not think that the worst damage is done to those whom you have made the object of your hatred. The most serious victims of hatred are not those who are hated, but those who hate. Oh, it is true that you may deprive them of material goods, of liberty, and of equality. But you have done something infinitely worse to yourself. You have poured into your soul a poison that will corrupt it and ultimately make it a stranger to God Himself. For Catholics, “The dogmatic basis of this atti- tude is the unity of the human race, the fact of Revelation that all men are created to the image and likeness of God and are the object of His love and Providence. The universality of this proposition is so stringent that to exclude from it formally any THE EVIL OF RACISM 17 single branch of the human race would be to forfeit one’s place in the Christian family and to deny the Faith. And since it is an article of Faith, it fol- lows that just and charitable treatment of every race is a moral precept of the highest order. To violate the precept on the basis of denying its dogmatic foundation would be, for a Catholic, to render one- self guilty of heresy, that is, of formal separation from the Catholic Church” (Which Way, Democ- racy, by Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., pp. 233-234, Macmil- lan, 1939). But there is an even higher precept than the one based on this primal dogmatic fact. “The for- mal teaching of Jesus Christ was one of brotherly love for all men. It was not restricted to one’s rela- tives, acquaintances, or friends. He declared : T say to you : love your enemies, do good to those who hate you’ {Matt, v: 44). This inclusion of all men with- out distinction of race is a fundamental of our Faith” (Parsons, ibid., p. 234). Christ did not bid us say: “Let my enemy first love me, and then I will begin to love him.” No! He said, without distinc- tion : “Love your enemy”. Thus the Christian Revelation added to the dogma of the unity of the human race that second dogma of the universality of the love of Christ. Along with these two dogmas of our Faith, Pope Pius, in his October Encyclical, reminded us of an- other. It is “the unity of [mankind’s] relations with the Son of God, image of the invisible God, in Whom all things have been created . . . {Collossians i: 16) ; in the unity of its ransom [redemption], effected for all by Christ, Who, through His holy and most bitter Passion, restored the original friendship with God which had been broken, making Himself the 18 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? Mediator between God and men: ‘For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (I Timothy ii: 5)” (Summi Pontifi- catus, NCWC, p. 17). If, therefore, there exists among men that ugly thing we call race hatred, if there are those amongst us who yield themselves to the passion of contempt for any other race, white or black, let them know that they are not only false to the teachings of the Founder of our Church, but they are actually creat- ing for themselves a punishment which is reserved for those who violate the second Great Command- ment : “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” It means that they have forgotten that great last will and testament of Christ: “This is my command- ment, that you love one another, as I have loved you” (John xv : 12). In the beginning of this address, I asked the question: Whose world will it be? And so my ans- wer now is : Everybody’s world. Not the poor man’s world or the rich man’s world, not the white man’s world or the black man’s world, but everybody’s world. Is it not a wonderful thing that men have been privileged to dream a vision of a world in which there will be peace between all men, forever? It is no vain dream. It has only to be willed to come true. But if we desire to abolish the anarchy which breeds ill-will among men and nations and races, we must first make up our minds to abolish the anarchy of minds and hearts which has come from the disin- tegration of the “moral standards of the western world.” Let us begin by loving our neighbor, nay, by loving our enemies, and we shall have restored to mankind the lost vision of the unity of the human race. THE EVIL OF STATISM Address delivered on April 21, 1940. Every American who is not somehow tied up with some foreign political movement will give assent to the proposition that human liberty con- sists in the respect which the State, and every gov- ernment within it, is bound to extend to certain in- alienable rights which are possessed by every human being. Even some American followers of foreign political movements, especially the Com- munists, are accustomed to repeat that definition of liberty as if it were their own. We have not yet got to the place in this country where a public leader ca,n flout that definition, even if his ultimate though concealed purpose is precisely to do away with the liberty which it describes. I said that we look on liberty as being contain- ed in the respect which the State must extend to our inalienable rights. If the State does not have to re- spect rights wherever they exist, then we have no liberty, because in very truth we will have no rights. A right that is at the mercy of any group of men, be it a majority or a minority, is no right at all, and we will waste our breath in trying to defend it. The people of this country fought a Revolution to vindicate this principle, and they set up a gov- ernment which has survived to this day for no other reason than that it has never ceased to maintain that principle. The principle has been violated in practice more than once, I admit, but following that violation there has inevitably followed in our courts a reversal of the violation and the restoration of his 20 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? rights to the persecuted victim of official tyranny. Whether the victim be white or black, sooner or later the principle has been again asserted, so we can say that it is still in command of our national life. Now during the past two Sundays on this Cath- olic Hour I have been recounting the evils which His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, in his Encyclical of last October, told us are afflicting the modern world and threatening to reduce society to a con- dition of barbarism. We saw that the first conse- quences of the rejection of the eternal law of God and an unchanging norm of morality, is a disrup- tion of the unity of the human family, and its dis- persion into selfish and often warring groups. But the Pope told us: “there is yet another error no less pernicious to the well-being of the nations and to the prosperity of that great human society which gathers together and embraces within its confines all races” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 22). He is speaking of an error that is directed against that very liberty which we know to be the cornerstone of all human government. It is the error which would make the State supreme over every man in every department of human life, “to consider the State”, as the Pope puts it, “as some- thing ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directed” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 25). There is no need on my part to show you that such an omnipotent State is nothing less than an engine of tyranny. For to set up the State as a totalitarian machine which reaches into every man's private life, into the family, into the school, into the Church, which controls even a man’s own thoughts THE EVIL OF STATISM 21 and forbids any expression of thought except that which the State wishes to have expressed, to set up this kind of a State, is, in the eyes of all Americans, to create a dictatorship which is destructive of every human liberty. With all our hearts we reject such a conception of the State. We will fight to the end to keep it from being established over us. With this noble stand the Pope openly agrees. But he goes further. He tells us how such a State comes into being. When men surrender their liberty to a dictator, or when a dictator is able to impress his tyrannical will upon any people, that is a sign that certain ideas are operating beneath the surface which make it possible for men to demand or toler- ate a dictator. The idea of liberty is based upon a concept of man’s nature and his relation to society which makes it impossible for the instruments of society to deprive man of his inalienable rights. In the same way the idea of a, totalitarian State is also based on a concept which naturally emerges from the minds of men into a concrete reality. Those two ideas are obviously at complete variance with each other. Let us examine them a little more closely. When men think of liberty they are thinking of a state of mankind in which the powers of the State are unable to deprive men of their rights. We do not say that the State is unwilling to do that, or has agreed not to do it; but that it cannot do it. We mean that there is something in the very nature of man and of the State which makes it impossible for society to break into and to violate certain sanc- tuaries of human nature. And we mean that if the State attempts to override this moral impossibility, then it has transformed its own nature from a State 22 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? of free men into a State of slaves. All the stories of all the kings of old who ceased to rule their people for their people's good and began to rule the people for their own advantages are stories of mon- archs who transformed themselves into tyrants. Men are free under the authority of governments only when those governments are prevented by the law from violating the rights of even the weakest and the poorest of their subjects. But if liberty can be protected by an idea it can also be destroyed by an idea. Once men begin to look on the State, not as the means by which we are to achieve our perfection and happiness on this earth, but as the end to which all our activities should and must be subordinated, then we have con- ceived an idea which will result in our enslavement to the men who happen for the moment to control the government of that State. Now what are these ideas that lead to tyranny and the loss of human liberty? They are nothing less, the Pope reminds us, than the ideas “which (he says) do not hesitate to divorce civil authority from every kind of dependence on the Supreme Being — First Source and absolute Master of man and of so- ciety—and from every restraint of a Higher Law derived from God as from its First Source" (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 22). Does this seem surpris- ing to you, that the first and only guarantee of the liberty of men is the admission that the authority of the State is derived only from God our Creator? Just give that thought a moment's consideration. If the authority which any State enjoys is the creation merely of the men who made and rule the State, then is it not true that this purely human origin of government puts every man who lives under it at THE EVIL OF STATISM 23 the mercy of the men who rule it? But how can there be any liberty if there are no rights which men in power may not and cannot touch? How can there truly be any rights if rights become only a gracious grant of men in power, to be given or re- voked at will ? How can there be any rights or any liberty, unless there exists some Power out- side of men from whom they got those rights and that liberty ? How can any government be anything but tyrannical, capricious, and arbitrary, if its au- thority to rule has only a human origin ? What pro- tection, what guarantees, can there be that our hu- man personality will be respected if we are to be called on to render obedience only to our fellow men ; and if that is what we have to do, what is that but human slavery? Listen again to the words of Pope Pius XII: “Thus they [who deny the Higher Law derived from God] accord the civil authority an unrestricted field of action that is at the mercy of the changeful tide of human will, or of the dictates of casual historical claims, and of the interests of a few. Once the authority of God and the sway of His law are denied in this way, the civil authority as an inevitable re- sult tends to attribute to itself that absolute auton- omy which belongs exclusively to the Supreme Maker. It puts itself in the place of the Almighty and elevates the State or group into the last end of life, the supreme criterion of the moral and juri- dical order, and therefore forbids every appeal to the principles of natural reason and of the Chris- tian conscience” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 22-23 ). Now notice the terrible consequence of this profound truth taught by the Pope. It is all very 24 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? well for men to speak of liberty and of human rights, of the limitations of State authority over hu- man conducts and affairs. But if those same men do not believe or do not admit that their rights come from the law of God indwelling in human nature, and that this eternal law of God in men which we call the natural law is the very source of both the liberty of men and of the authority of the State, if they do not admit or believe these truths, then they cannot accept the American doctrine of human lib- erty. If they set up a purely human origin of liberty, and do not look for it in God, then they have become the slaves of men—and then they are slaves indeed. It is only by seeking the source of our rights outside of men that we can be free from the tyranny of men. It is only when men cannot touch our rights that our rights are safe. It is only when we seek our rights outside of man, that is, from God, that men cannot touch or destroy them. And hence it is also true that only those who believe in God as man’s creator have any right to talk of human liberty. Is it any wonder, then, that when rulers set out to strip people of their liberty, they generally begin by denying the fact of God? Because if the only source of human liberty is man’s dependence upon his Creator, God, then obviously the greatest ob- stacle to tyranny is religion. Now I know that many men who do not believe in God have spoken in burning terms of their love of liberty. But see the contradiction in which they have involved themselves. The State they have set up looks for its authority only in the fallible and changeable wills of men, that is, essentially in some despotic and tyrannical origin. Then, looking upon THE EVIL OF STATISM 25 their handiwork, they find it evil, and they must forthwith struggle to free themselves and all men from the strangling grasp of the very political sys- tem which was the only one they knew how to imagine. The sad result of this false philosophy is that they are confronted with the terrible dilemma of anarchy or tyranny. If they obey their Godless state, they are the subjects of a tyrannical dictator- ship; if they refuse to obey it, as well they must, then they are left with a nation that has no law, no right, no justice, no authority, no State—and that is anarchy. But those who believe in God and see man’s rights as flowing from His creative Hand, they have both order, justice, authority, and at the same time they can demand in the face of that authority that their personal rights be respected. In other words, they enjoy liberty. There is no other alternative. Either you look to God for the foundation of your government, or you will certainly have a tyranny. And if you reject that Godless tyranny, you end up in anarchy and disorder. But that is not the only sad result which, the Pope points out, flows from this rejection of the rule of God over mankind. He says: “The idea which credits the State with unlimited authority is not simply an error harmful to the internal life of nations, to their prosperity, and to the larger and well-ordered increase in their well-being, but like- wise it injures the relations between peoples, for it breaks the unity of supra-national society, robs the law of nations of its foundation and vigor, leads to violation of other’s rights and impedes agreement 26 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? and peaceful intercourse” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 29). Here, then, we have a further answer to the question which I put at the beginning of this series of addresses: What kind of a world do you want? We want a world in which justice, order, and lib- erty exist for the advantage of all men ; not of some men only, but of all men. We want a world in which tyranny and injustice are made, as far as can be, impossible. We want a world in which there is re- spect for others’ rights, for the sworn word of sacred treaties, for the prosperity and peace which flow from charity and justice. But if that is the kind of world we want, then let us not forget that such a world cannot come back into being unless we and all men return to the ack- nowledgment of the supreme dominion of God our Creator over our private lives, over our public so- ciety, over our States and over our governments. There never can be, for there never has been, any liberty except under the ruling hand of God. THE CATHOLIC ANSWER Address delivered on April 28, 1940. While we have been giving and listening to these addresses this month and asking ourselves what kind of a world we desire to see after the slaughter is over, the world itself has been rushing ever faster towards the abyss at the bottom of which lies black disaster. Little by little in the past half year and with quickening speed these last three weeks one country after another has been swept into the widening whirlpool of war and the rest stand trembling and fearful on its brink. Does it not seem, then, that we are foolhardy people to be dreaming of a peace and what will come with peace? Is there any chance that peace will come within our time? Is it worth while to plan the kind of a world we want after the war, when we do not even know if after the war there will be a world for which it will be worth while planning? This is the very question which tortured the soul of the Holy Father at the beginning of hostil- ities back in October. Already as he wrote, he said, “the blood of countless human beings, even non- combatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Chris- tian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrec- 28 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? tion in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 44). The state of a country like Poland was bad enough while it was at war. But the ultimate real- ity was even worse ; for two great nations that hate the name of Christ have conspired, as once before in the past, to tear it limb from limb, and even, it would seem, to wipe out the very race that inhabits it. It is indeed, as the Pope foresaw, “a real ‘Hour of Darkness' in which the spirit of violence and of discord brings indescribable suffering on mankind” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 43). Nobody can tell when the darkness will pass, or how long this night of anxiety and fear will last. Nobody can prophesy what countries will also be engulfed and when. Nobody can tell, however strongly we repel the very thought of it, if our own dear country will be dragged against its will, as others have been, by treachery from within and aggression from with- out, into a desperate struggle for its very existence. All we know now is that, as in the case of others, this will not depend entirely on our own firm desire for peace, and that, if it comes, it will come, as come fire and earthquake, and death, like a thief in the night. In such an hour there is but one thing we can draw closely to our hearts—the thought which Pope Pius XII held out to Catholic Poland, the hope of the “hour of resurrection.” When Mary the Mother of Christ, with the other Mary’s and St. John the Beloved Disciple, went sadly back to their home in Jerusalem after having seen the Body of their dear Jesus laid away cold and lifeless in a tomb, it might seem that all that made life worth living had come to an end. But burning brightly in her heart, with THE CATHOLIC ANSWER 29 a flame that warmed the other disciples, was one thing that made life tolerable, and that thing was hope—and that came from the promises of Christ. It was this hope that made it possible for her to bear the pain of the seven swords that pierced her heart. And all through the long hours of waiting she could comfort the despairing souls of her friends with a vision of what life would be when once again her Son was living and in His glory, sit- ting at the right hand of the Father in heaven. She was rewarded for her hope, we may well believe, by being the first to whom He made His presence known on Easter morning. And when He came to the others, also, then the old earth knew that its Redeemer liveth, and that a new earth and a new heaven was prepared for those that believe in Him. Now, listen to the words of Pope Pius as he, too, contemplates a world in which Christ seems dead and never more to rise again. “In such times, especially,” he says, “he who remains firm in his faith and strong at heart knows that Christ the King is never so near as in the hour of trial, which is the hour for fidelity. With a heart torn by the sufferings and afflictions of so many of her sons, but with the courage and the stability that come from the promises of Our Lord, the Spouse of Christ [the Church] goes to meet the gathering storms. This she knows, that the truth which she preaches, the charity which she teaches and prac- tices, will be the indispensable counselors and aids to men of good will in the reconstruction of a new world based on justice and love, when mankind, weary from its course along the way of error, has tasted the bitter fruits of hate and violence” (Summi Pontificatus , NCWC, p. 45). 30 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? “A new world based on justice and love.” In these words of the Pope we can see some light by which to chart our course in the months to come. A brave new world, in which men will cease to hate other men in such a way as to send against them engines designed to break their bodies and to crush their very souls. A brave new world in which a new order will arise among men, when they may begin to use the inventions of human ingenuity to help each other to a greater justice and a wider and more lasting prosperity than we have seen. Pope Pius reminds us, however, that this brave new world will not come as a result of war, of violence, of which the end is always and ever the old in- human cry: “Woe to the conquered!” “Safety,” he tells us, “does not come to peoples from external means, from the sword, which can impose condi- tions of peace but does not create peace. Forces that are to renew the face of the earth should proceed from within, from the spirit” (Summi Pontificatus , NCWC, p. 33). Now who can tell but that in the inscrutable designs of Divine Providence the spark of hope is destined to remain alive only on this continent? We have no assurance, of course, that with the spread of human invention and human malice the scourge of war will not also reach our shores and devastate our cities and our countryside. From recent events, we know, as I have said, that such immunity from war is not within our power to preserve. But we can at least be prepared in spirit ; we can at least nourish within us a great-souled de- termination that we will bend all the forces of our mind and heart for the glorious resurrection of a new order upon earth, an order of peace and jus- THE CATHOLIC ANSWER 31 tice, an order of compassion and of brotherly love. But this we will learn, whether we suffer the dreadful course or whether we mercifully escape it, this we will learn, that we cannot build a new order with reliance upon material forces and mere exter- nal aids. That folly has been tried and it has failed. It was in that dreary nineteenth century that seems now so far from us that men dreamed they could construct a civilization upon machines and upon the product of machines. With fearful retribution the machine has turned savagely upon them, and from the air and along the roads and on the sea and under the sea, it is meditating, in its steely inhuman heart, the destruction of its former master and creator. No, we shall have no new order which neglects the interior forces which alone give dignity to the person of man. What a hollow mockery it was that persuaded us that it could be otherwise! When we hoped that we were on the verge of an era in which there would be no more poverty, and at the same time built our hopes on things that can only inten- sify poverty and spread it over large areas of the earth, we were indulging in the age-old folly that tries to find happiness in the things that are not God’s. But how could man, a creature of God, find anything to bring happiness to him apart from his Creator, God? How could he have dreamed the splendid dream of liberty for all men, and then look to build that liberty on the “quicksands of change- able and ephemeral standards that depend only on the selfish interests of groups and individuals’’ (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 83)? How could he have planned for prosperity and security and 32 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WTANT? then have drawn his plans upon the sand of in- dividual preference which any wind or any storm of human perversity could wipe away? How could he have hoped for peace or justice or fair dealing between individuals or nations, and then have root- ed his hopes in the fragile soil of treaties which have no meaning for men for whom mutual trust itself has no meaning? No. That was all a folly and the fires of war are burning it all away. But the fires of war will not of themselves give birth to a new world. And if the fires of war do not touch us here in this coun- try, will we be able to say that we, too, have left all that materialistic folly behind us? Maybe the sufferings of this “civil war of the Western world” will have left us untouched, and God grant that they may. But if they do, are we to be condemned by our blindness and selfishness to prepare for our- selves in another day the retribution which the materialism of Europe has so inevitably brought upon it in these days of ours? For be sure of this. This disaster to civiliza- tion which we are witnessing from afar was not merely the doing of some wicked men in power in various countries. The disaster is only the natural result of a great apostasy, of a false hope in the power of unaided human forces. It is the terrify- ing but inevitable proof that man cannot save him- self even in the temporal and material world when he relies upon himself alone. He may build great cities, he may amass great fortunes which last for a time, he may make himself the most marvelous inventions that may seem to promise unheard-of- prosperity, but the higher he builds, the more he invents, and the harder and more enthusiastically THE CATHOLIC ANSWER 33 he works, the more surely is he storing up ultimate disaster for himself, as long as he seeks the source of his strength within himself alone. And the more he seeks this strength within himself the more surely will that disaster come. But this is not the worst. The worst is that there are among us many men, great and small, rich and poor, who sincerely see their Creator as the source of all their liberty, their prosperity, their security. But these sincere men are just as power- less as the others, just as surely doomed to war and disaster and downfall, because all the others along side of whom they work, have lost this deep abid- ing faith in their Creator. Does this mean, then, that this world as we know it is doomed to failure and destruction and we can do nothing at all about it? I do not say that. For if we lose hope, what light is there left in the world? We have the promises of Christ, that if we seek our salvation in God and in Him alone, we shall behold the resurrection. We have also His word that without Him we can do nothing. Build your world on your own human resources and He who sits on high will mock you. Over and over and over again this has come to pass. We have seen it as never before in our own time. And yet we never learn. Shall we never learn? Shall we abandon this vision of a brave new world? Shall we give up hope that justice and love will return among men and once more rule their relations with each other? That we cannot do. There are enough men and women remaining in this country as in all others to keep alive that hope which is based on the prom- ises of our Savior, Christ. I do not mean that these 34 WHAT KIND OF A WORLD DO YOU WANT? men and women are only within the limits of the Catholic Church. Far from it. In every corner of this great land of ours, there are people who have preserved their simple faith in Christ the Son of God, in His saving grace and in life everlasting. To all these men and women I speak this afternoon. And I speak not only in my own name, or in the name of the Catholic Church in the United States, but, I dare to say it, in the name of the Pope of Rome himself. Years before he died, the great Pope Pius XI often remarked that the time would come soon when all believers, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, would find themselves fighting together in the same battleline against a common enemy, the enemy that denies the fundamental fact of belief in God. There was in his mind a clear recognition of the undoubted truth that our times have brought about a sharp and fundamental division among men. On one side those who bring the dark forces of atheism and pag- anism into all the ordinary affairs of human exis- tence; on the other are those who still believe that the Divine Hand rules the affairs of men, and that the wills of men can find no light or peace unless it be in conformity with the will of God. This thought of his was echoed by the present Holy Father when, in his Encyclical of last October, he spoke to those who, “Though not belonging to the visible body of the Catholic Church, have given noble and sincere expression to their appreciation of all that unites them to Us in love for the Person of Christ or in belief in God” (Summi Pontificatus, NCWC, p. 8). To all of these also the Holy Father issued his appeal for a return of society to submis- sion to the will of God in all human affairs. THE CATHOLIC ANSWER 35 And let me end this address and this series of addresses by this simple word of reminder: That society will at last return to the arms of its loving Father when each one of us, each in his own way and according to the light that has been given him, strives to do his best for God, for himself, for his neighbor, and keeps alive in his heart a burning hope for the hour of resurrection. CARDINAL HAYES STATES PURPOSE OF CATHOLIC HOUR