Fulton Sheen on the Signs of Our Time & Antichrist
‘Signs of Our Times’
sermon delivered on January 26, 1947
I want those to be my first words of greeting to you as they will be the concluding words of each broadcast. They embody three ideas: God is love; God loves you; and since love is reciprocal may you love God in return.
This is the 17th year I have had the privilege of addressing you on the Catholic Hour and it is probably safe to say that at no time in those years-not even during the war when we saw victory ahead-have the souls of men been more in the dark about the future, less insecure about the present. We are living in the twilight of a civilization, and for that reason, we have entitled this series Light Your Lamps. Under this title we will discuss in eleven broadcasts a subject which we were unable to discuss the last few years, and it will be that which is contained in the Papal Encyclical Divini Redemptoris: the all important subject of Communism.
It is very difficult to do justice to any phase of this encyclical in the sixteen minutes allotted to me, so this year I shall write a much fuller treatment of each broadcast which will be put into pamphlet form and which the National Council of Catholic Men will send to you free each week if you make your request known to them.
Why is it that so few realize the seriousness of our present crisis? Partly because men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much selfaccusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times. If there is no fixed concept of justice how shall men know it is violated? Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world. The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on.The tragedy is not that the hairs of our civilization are gray; it is rather our failure to see that they are. The very day Sodom was destroyed, Scripture describes the sun as bright; Balthasar’s realm came to an end in darkness; people saw Noah preparing for the flood one hundred and twenty years before it came, but men would not believe. In the midst of seeming prosperity, world-unity, the decree to the angels goes forth but the masses go on their sordid routines. As our Lord said: “For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, even till that day in which Noah entered into the ark, and they knew not till the flood came, and took them all away; so also shall the coming of the Son of man be.” (Matthew 24:38, 39) Well may Our Saviour say to us what He said to the Saducees and Pharisees in His time: “When it is evening, you say: It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning: Today there will be a storm, for the sky is red and lowering. You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?” (Matthew 16:2, 3)
Do we know the signs of these appointed times? Most of us are able to face the unpalatable fact that not a single positive major objective for which we fought this war has been achieved. Few realize that barbarism is not only outside us, but beneath us, that science by making us spectators or reality has blinded us to the necessity of being actors, while the atomic bomb by putting human power in our hands has hidden the weakness of our hearts.
The signs of our times point to two inescapable truths, the first of which is that we have come to the end of the post-Renaissance Chapter of history which made man the measure of all things. More particularly the three basic dogmas of the modern world are dissolving before our very eyes. We are witnessing:
1)The liquidation of the economic man, or the assumption that man who is a highly developed animal has no other function in life than to produce and acquire wealth,and then like the cattle in the pastures, be filled with years and die.
2)The liquidation of the idea ofthe natural goodness of man who has no need of a God to give Him rights, or a Redeemer to salvage him from guilt, because progress is automatic thanks to science-education and evolution, which will one day make man a kind of a god as H.G. Wells said, with his feet on the earth and his hands among the stars.
3)The liquidation of rationalism, or the idea that the purpose of human reason is not to discover the meaning and goal of life, namely the salvation of the soul, but merely to devisenew technical advances to make on this earth a city of man to displace the city of God.
We are witnessing the death of Historical Liberalism (and I shall in these broadcasts always understand Liberalism as such) which like a sundial is unable to tell the time in the dark and which can function only in a society whose basis is moral and when the flotsam and jetsam of Christianity is still drifting about the world. Historical Liberalism is a parasite on the Christian Civilization and once that body upon which it clings ceases to be the leaven of society, then Liberalism itself must perish. The individual liberties which Liberalism emphasizes are secure only when the community is moral and can give an ethical foundation to these liberties. It may very well be that Historical Liberalism is only a transitional era in history between a civilization which was Christian and one which will be definitely anti-Christian.
The second great truth to which the signs of the times portend is that we are definitely at the end of a non-religious era of civilization, which regarded religion as an addendum to life, a pious extra, a morale-builder for the individual but of no social relevance, an ambulance that took care of the wrecks of the social order until science reached a point where there would be no more wrecks; which called on God only as a defender of national ideals, or as a silent partner whose name was used by the firm to give respectability but who had nothing tosay about how the business should be run.
The new era into which we are entering is what might be called the religious phase of human history. But do not misunderstand; by religious we do not mean that men will turn to God, but rather that the indifference to the absolute which characterized the liberal phase of civilization will be succeeded by a passion for an absolute. From now on the struggle will be not for the colonies and national rights, but for the souls of men. There will be no more half-drawn swords, no divided loyalties, no broad strokes of sophomoric tolerance, there will not even be any more great heresies, for they are based on a partial acceptance of truth. The battle lines are already being clearly drawn and the basic issues are no longer in doubt. From now on men will divide themselves into two religions-understood again as surrender to an absolute. The conflict of the future is between the absolute who is the God-man and the absolute which is the man God; the God Who became man and the man who makes himself God; brothers in Christ and comrades in anti-Christ.
The anti-Christ will not be so called, otherwise he would have no followers. He will wear no redtights, nor vomit sulphur, nor carry a trident nor wave an arrow tailas the Mephistophiles in Faust. This masquerade has helped the devil convince men that he does not exist, for he knows that he is never so strong as when men believe that he does not exist.When no man recognizes, the more power he exercises. God has defined Himself as “I am Who am” and the Devil as “I am who am not.”
Nowhere in Sacred Scripture do we find warrant for the popular myth of the devil as a buffoon who is dressed like the first “red.” Rather is he described as an angel fallen from heaven, and as “the Prince of this world” whose business it is to tell us that there is no other world. His logic is simple: if there is no heaven there is no hell; if there is no hell, then there is no sin; if there is no sin, then there is no judge, and if there is no judgement then evil is good and good is evil.
But above all these descriptions, Our Lord tells us that He will be so much like Himself, that he would deceive even the elect-and certainly no devil we have ever seen in picture books could deceive even the elect. How will he come in this new age to win followers to his religion? He will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live; induce faith in astrology so as to make not the will but the stars responsible for sins; he will explain Guilt away psychologically as inhibited eroticism, make men shrink in shame if their fellowmen say they are not broadminded and liberal; he will be so broadminded as to identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong, truth and error; he will spread the lie that men will never be better until they make society better and thus have selfishness to provide fuel for the next revolution; he will foster science but only to have armament makers use one marvel of science to destroy another; he will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is “vital”; he will increase love for love and decrease love for person; he will invoke religion to destroy religion; he will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived; his mission he will say will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and Fascism: which he will never define; he will organize children’s games, tell people who they should and should not marry and unmarry, who should bear children and who should not; he will benevolently draw chocolate bars from his pockets for the little ones and bottles of milk for the Hottentots; he will tempt Christians with the same three temptations which he tempted Christ: The temptation to turn stones into bread as an earthly Messias will become the temptation to sell freedom for security, as bread became a political weapon, and only those who think his way may eat; The temptation to work a miracle by recklessly throwing Himself from a steeple will become a plea to desert the lofty pinnacles of truth where faith and reason reign, for those lower depths where the masses live on slogans and propaganda. He wants no proclamation of immutable principles from the lofty heights of a Church, but mass organization through propaganda where only a common man directs the idiosyncracies of common men. Opinions not truths, commentators not teachers, Gallup polls not principles, nature not grace-and to these golden calves will men toss themselves from their Christ.
The third temptation in which Satan asked Christ to adore him and all the Kingdoms of the world would be his, will become the temptation to have a new religion without a Cross, a liturgy without a world to come, a city of man without a city of God, a religion to invoke a religion, or a politics which is a religion-one that renders unto Caesar even the things that are God’s.
In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.
He will set up a counter-Church which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, whom he nevertheless refuses to adore, modern man in his loneliness and frustration will hunger more and more for membership in a community that will give him enlargement of purpose, but at the cost of losing himself in some vague collectivity. There will be verified the paradox, that the very objections with which men in the last century rejected the Church will be the reasons why they will now accept the counter-Church.
The last century rejected the Church because it was infallible; it refused to believe that any so-called Vicar of Christ could be immune from error when he spoke on matters of faith and morals as chief shepherd of Christendom. But the 20th century will join the counter-Church because it claims to be infallible when its visible head speaks ex-cathedra from Moscow on the subject of economics and politics, and as chief shepherd of world Communism.
The Church was critically spurned in the last few centuries because it claimed that it was Catholic and universal, uniting all men on the basis of one Lord, one faith and one Baptism. No man, the 19th century claimed could be a good American, a good Frenchman or a good German if he accepted shepherding, albeit spiritual, from a spiritual head. But in the new era, what the modern lost soul will take particularly about the counter-Church, is that it is catholic or international. It breaks down all national boundaries, laughs down patriotism dispenses men from piety to country which the Christ enjoined, makes men proud that they are not Americans, French, or British, but members of a revolutionary class under the rule of its Vicar who rules not from the Vatican, but the Kremlin. The 19th Century rejected the Church on the ground that it was intolerant, excommunicating heretics who did not accept the apostolic traditions, teaching as it did that Christ founded only one Church, that Truth is one, that its dogmas were like living things, and that like a babe, one had to accept the whole child or nothing. But in this evil hour, the sons and grandsons of those who so objected are embracing the counter-Church simply because it purges its heretics, liquidates it Trotskyites, and excommunicates all those who do not accept the party line that there may be not one fold and one shepherd, but one anthill and one anteater.
The Liberal world rejected the Church because it was too dogmatic with its exact definitions of Hypostatic Union and Immaculate Conception; too hierarchical with its bishops who derived their authority from the Apostles, and claimed to be guardians of the faith and morals of the people. But lo and behold, millions today are embracing the counter-Church for these reasons; they love its infallibly defined dogmas of Dialectical Materialism, Economic Determination and its Labor Theory of Value; they like its hierarchy or approved party leaders who as bishops of the new counter-Church who derive authority from the Apostles, Marx and Lenin, and who in their role of secret police keep the errant in the party line, even indeed to the consummation of the world.
Because the signs of our times point to a struggle between absolutes we may expect the future to be a time of trials for two reasons: Firstly, to stop disintegration. Godlessness would go on and on if there were no catastrophes. What death is to a sinful person, that catastrophe is to an evil civilization: the interruption of its Godlessness. Why did God station an angel with a flaming sword at the Garden of Paradise after the Fall, if it were not to prevent our first parents from entering the garden and eating of the tree of life, which, if they ate they would have immortalized their evil. God will not allow unrighteousness to become eternal. Revolution disintegration, chaos, must be reminders that our thinking has been wrong, our dreams have been unholy. Moral truth is vindicated by the ruin that follows when it has been repudiated. The chaos of our times is the strongest negative argument that could ever be advanced for Christianity. Catastrophe becomes a testimony to God’s power in a meaningless world for by it God brings a meaningless existence to nought. The disintegration following an abandonment of God thus becomes a triumph of meaning, a reaffirmation of purpose. Adversity is the expression of God’s condemnation of evil, the registering of Divine Judgment. As hell is not sin, but the effect of sin, so these disordered times are not sin, but the wages of sin. Catastrophe reveals that evil is self-defeating; we cannot turn from God without hurting ourselves.
The second reason why a crisis must come is in order to prevent a false identification of the Church and the world. Our Lord intended that those who are His followers should be different in spirit from those who were not. “I have taken you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” (John 15:19) Though this is the Divine intent it is unfortunately true that the line of demarcation between the followers of Christ and those who are not is often blotted out. Instead of black and white, there is only a blur. Mediocrity and compromise characterize the lives of many Christians. Many read the same novels as modern pagans, educate their children in the same godless way, listen to the same commentators who have no other standard than judging today by yesterday, and tomorrow by today, allow pagan practices such as divorce and remarriage to creep into the family; there are not wanting, so-called Catholic labor leaders recommending Communists for Congress, or Catholic writers who accept presidencies in Communist front organizations to instill totalitarian ideas in movies. There is no longer the conflict and opposition which is supposed to characterize us. We are influencing the world less than the world influences us. There is no apartness. Well indeed might St. Paul say to us what he said to the Corinthians (2 Corintians 6:14,15) “what has innocence to do with lawlessness? What is there in common between light and darkness? What harmony between Christ and Belial?” St. Paul is here asserting that those who were sent out to establish acenter of health had caught the disease, therefore, they lost the power to heal. Since the amalgamation of the Christian and the pagan spirit has set in, since the gold is married with an alloy, the entirety must be thrust into the furnace that the dross may be burned away. The value of the trial will be to set us apart. Evil must come to reject us, to despise us, to hate us, to persecute us, and then shall we define our loyalties, affirm our fidelities and state on whose side we stand. How shall the strong and weak trees be manifested unless the wind blows? Our quantity indeed will decrease, but our quality will increase. Then shall be verified the words of Our Master: “He that gathereth not with me, scattereth.” (Matthew 12:30)
There are Times of Troubles and it is not so much a Third World War that is to be feared, as the re-birth of Leviathan, the coming of the Day of the Beast, when there will be no buying or selling unless men have been signed with the sign of the Beast who would devour the child of the Mother of Mothers. All great minds, non-Christian and Christian see these days a perilous. Spengler believed we are at the winter of civilization; Unamuno at the end of a Christian culture; Fisher at the death-rattle of European civilization; Sorokin at the end of sensate culture; Berdyaev at the end of the days of reason illumined by faith; Marx at the collapse of capitalism; Lippman, at an hour when men feel it is no longer wise, necessary or useful to pass on to succeeding generations the good Christian heritage of the past; Toynbee, at the third stage of crisis in the Greek drama, the first of which (Hybris) was pride that came from material prosperity showing itself in power; the second(Nemesis) of which was arrogance or contention against God, in which man arrogates to himself the attributes of Deity, and finally (Ate) disaster where Divine justice will humble the vain pretension of man; Going back further, Lord Gray at the close of the First World War said that the lights were being put out of Europe and they would not be lighted again in our generation. Before that a great German poet and a Russian novelist warned people of the signs of the times. Writing in 1834 in Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heine warned, look out for Germany when the Cross of Christ no longer casts its spell over his people. “Christianity has-and that is its fairest merit-somewhat mitigated that brutal German lust for battle.But it could not destroy it; and once the taming talisman, the Cross is broken, the savagery of the old battlers will flare up again, the insane rage of which Nordic bards have so much to say and sing. That talisman is brittle. The day will come when it will pitiably collapse. Then the old stone gods will rise from forgotten rubble and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and Thor will leap up and with his giant hammer start smashing Gothic cathedrals . . .and when you hear a crash as nothing ever crashed in world history, you’ll know that the German thunder has hit the mark. At that sound the eagles will fall dead from the sky and the lions in the farthest desert of Africa will pull in their tails and slink away into their royal caves. A play will be performed that will make the French Revolution seem like a harmless idyll in comparison…”
In 1842 Heine, this friend of Karl Marx the founder of Communism, saw the evil effects of his philosophy and warned: “Communism is the secret name of the dread antagonist setting proletarian rule with all its consequences against the present bourgeois regime. It will be a frightful duel. How will it end? No one knows but gods and goddesses acquainted with the future. We only know this much: Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy…
“It would be war, the ghastliest war of destruction-which would unfortunately call the two noblest nations of civilization into the arena, to the ruin of both: France and Germany. England, the great sea serpent always able to crawl back into its vast watery lair, and Russia which also has the safest hiding places in its vast fir forests, steppes and icy wastes-those two, in a normal political war,cannot be annihilated even by the most crushing defeats. . .That, however, would only be the first act of the great melodrama, the prologue, as it were. The second act is the European and the World Revolution. . .Will the religious doctrines of the past rise in all countries, in desperate resistance-and will perhaps this attempt constitute the third act?. . .How could that drama end? . .
“I do not know; but I think that eventually the great sea serpent will have its head crushed, the skin of the Northern bear will be pulled over his ears. There may be only one flock and one shepherd-one free shepherd with an iron staff, and a shorn-alike, bleating-alike human herd!
“Wild, gloomy times are roaring toward us, and a prophet wishing to write a new apocalypse would have to invent entirely new beasts-beasts so terrible that St. John’s older animal symbols would be like gentle doves and cupids in comparison. The gods are veiling their faces in pity on the children of man, their long-time charges, and perhaps over their own fate. The futures smells of Russian leather, blood, godlessness, and many whippings. I should advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their backs.” (Heinrich Heine, Works of Prose, ed. by Hermann Kesten, pp. 51-53).
And Dostoievsky: “Every member of society spies on the others, and it is his duty to inform against them . . . all are slaves, and equal in their slavery. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned . . ., slaves are bound to be equal .. . A teacher who laughs with children at their God, and at their cradle is on our side; the lawyer who defends an educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims and could not help murdering them to get money is one of us; the school boys who murder a peasant for the sake of sensation are ours; the juries who acquit every criminal are ours; the prosecutor who trembles at a trial who fears he shall not be advanced enough is ours; among officials and literary men we have lots, and they don’t know it themselves. . .We will proclaim destruction, we will set fires going, we will set legends going, every scurvy group will be of use. Well there will be an upheaval; there’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before. Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness,and the earth will weep for its Gods.” The Holy Father says that we are at the return of the early centuries of the Church, while many others believe we are saved from utter chaos only by habits of thinking, rules the road and conventions which depend for their validity on beliefs which have long been abandoned. With the family disintegrating with one divorce for every two marriages in thirty-five major cities in the United States, with five divorces for every six marriages in Los Angeles-there is no denying that something has snapped. Beyond all these and other tragic facts, such as the attempt to ground peace on compromises between powers, rather than on justice and pledges such as the Atlantic Charter, the startling fact stands out that our times-and our times alone-have witnessed for the first time in human history, the persecution of the Old Testament by the Nazis and the persecution of the New Testament by the Communists. Anyone who has had anything to do with God is hated today, whether his vocation was to announce His Divine Son, Jesus Christ, as did the Jew, or to follow Him as the Christian.
And those of us who have followed the systematic and organized world campaign for atheism, which insinuates itself ever into government bureaucracies, and are familiar with the anti-God attacks, are compelled to say to one’s adversaries: “You have non convinced us that there is no God, but you have convinced us that there is a devil!”
Every now and then in history the devil is given a long rope, for we must never forget that Our Lord said to Judas and his band: “This is your hour.” God has His day, but evil has its hour when the shepherd shall be struck and the sheep dispersed. Has the Church made the preparations for just such a dark night in the decree of the Holy Father outlining the conditions on which a Papal Election may be held outside of Rome?
Though we speak of the emergence of the anti-Christ against Christ, think not that it is because we fear for the Church. We do not; it is for the world we fear. It is not infallibility we are worried about, but the world’s lapse into fallibility; we tremble not that God may be dethroned, but that barbarism may reign; it is not Transubstantiation that may perish, but the home; not the sacraments that may fade away, but the moral law. The Church can have no different words for the weeping woman than those of Christ on the way to Calvary: “Weep not over me; but weep for yourselves and for your children.” (Luke 23:28) The Church has survived other great crises in her nineteen centuries of existence and she will live to sing a requiem over the evils of the present.The Church may have its Good Fridays but these are only preludes to its Easter Sundays, for the Divine Promise shall never be made void: “. . . and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) “Whosoever shall fall upon that stones shall be bruised.” (Luke 20:18) Never before in history has there been such a strong argument for the need of Christianity, for men are now discovering that their misery and their woes, their wars and their revolutions increase in direct ratio and proportion to the neglect of Christianity. Evil is self defeating; good alone is self-preserving.
These three practical recommendations in conclusion: 1) As Christians we must realize that a moment of crisis is not a time of despair, but of opportunity. The more we can anticipate the doom, the more we can avoid it. Once we recognize we are under Divine Wrath, we become eligible for Divine Mercy. It was because of famine the prodigal said: “I will arise, and will go to my father. . .” (Luke 15:18) The very disciplines of God create hope. The thief on the right came to God by a crucifixion. The Christian finds a basis for optimism in the most thorough-going pessimism, for his Easter is within three days of Good Friday.
As we look about the world and see the new barbarism move whole populations into slavery we may ask: “Why do so many innocent people suffer. God should have pity on them.” God does. One of the surprises of heaven will be to see how many saints were made in the midst of chaos, and war and revolution. When John saw a”. . . great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, and in sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands: And they cried with a loud voice saying: Salvation to our God, who sitteth upon the throne, and the ancients, and the four living creatures: and they fell down before the throne upon their faces, and adored God.” (Apocalypse 1:9-11) “And one of the ancients answered and said to me: These that are clothed in white robes, who are they? and whence came they? And I said to him: My Lord thou knowest. And he said to me: These are they who are come out of the great tribulation and have washed their robes, and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” (Apocalypse 7:13, 14)
After Our Divine Lord had pictured the catastrophes that would fall upon a morally disordered civilization, after He foretold how the military would “take it, and their holy places be abominated, He did not say “Fear,” but “When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand.” (Luke 21:28)
(2) Jews, Protestants and Catholics alike, and men of good will, must realize that the world is serving your souls with an awful summons-the summons to heroic efforts at spiritualization. Catholics ought to stir up their faith, hang a crucifix in their homes to remind them that we too have to carry a cross, gather the family together every night to recite the rosary that through corporate prayer there might be intercession for the world; go to daily Mass that the spirit of love and sacrifice might be sprinkled in our business, our social life and our duties. More heroic souls might undertake the Holy Hour daily, particularly in parishes conscious of the needs of prayers of reparation as well as petition, conducting such devotions in their churches. As for Jews, Protestants and Catholics alike an alliance is necessary not to fight against an external enemy, for our “wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places,”(Ephesians6:12) but rather a unity on the basis of men of good will, who believe in the moral law, the family, God and the Divinity of Christ. It is not a unity of religion we plead for that is impossible when purchased at the cost of the unity of truth, but a unity of religious peoples, wherein each marches separately according to the light of his conscience, but strikes together for the moral betterment of the world, through prayer, not hate. In a word, if anti-Christ has his fellow-travelers then why should not God and His Divine Son? The Roman sergeant who built a temple for the Jews was a fellow traveller with them in their belief in God. The woman at Tyre and Sidon became a fellow traveler of Christ. The forces of evil are united; the forces of good are divided. We may not be able to meet in the same pew-would to God we did-but we can meet on our knees.
You may be sure that no sordid compromises nor carrying of waters on both shoulders will see you through. Those who have the faith had better keep in the state of grace and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray. The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about. As St. Peter told the Romans in the days of delirium: “Seeing then that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness?” (2 Peter3:11)
The only way out of this crisis is spiritual, because the trouble is not in the way we keep our books, but in the way we keep our souls. The time is nearer than you think. In 1917 Lenin addressing a group of students in Switzerland said: “This revolution may not come in my lifetime.”Within three months he was leading it. The struggle is so basically spiritual, so much concerned with the forces of Christ and anti-Christ, that there is a definite planned policy put into practice by the Communists in Korea. They go to the Christian homes converted by missionaries and ask: “Do you believe in Christ?” If the householder answers in the affirmative, the Communist says he will be back next week. If then he answers: “I believe in Stalin” he keeps his house and his land.Otherwise it is confiscated and he is liquidated. And you think the struggle is between individualism and collectivism!
Because the struggle is between the Kingdom of mass-atheism and the Kingdom of God there are two especially whose intercession we much invoke because they both are conquerors of evil. To the first, St. Michael, we pray: “O Michael, Prince of the Morning, Who didst once conquer Lucifer who wouldst make himself God, save us from our world of little gods. When the world once cracked because of a sneer in heaven, thou didst rise up and drag down from the seven heavens the pride that would look down on the most high. So now:
O Michael, Prince of the Morning, Who didst once conquer Lucifer who wouldst make himself God, save us from our world of little gods. When the world once cracked because of a sneer in heaven, thou didst rise up and drag down from the seven heavens the pride that would look down on the most high. So now:
“Michael, Michael of the mastering
Michael of the marching on the mountains of the Lord,
Marshal the world and purge of rot and riot
Rule through the world till all the world would be quiet:
Only establish when the world is broken
What is unbroken is the Word.”
“It was to Thee as the Woman that was given the power to crush the head of the serpent who lied to men that they would be as gods. May thou who didst find Christ when He was lost for three days,find Him again for our world has lost Him. Give to the senile incontinence of our verbiage the Word. As Thou didst form the Word made flesh in Thy womb, form Him in our hearts. Be in our midst as tongues of fire descend upon our cold hearts and if this be night, then come O Lady of the Blue of Heaven, show us once again the Light of the World in the heart of a day.”
God love you!