Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (72 page)

I saw a woman that for twenty-seven years had been proprietor of a disorderly house, and I saw her come down the aisle, close her doors, turn the girls out of her house, to live for God. I saw enough converted in one town where there were four disorderly houses to close their doors; they were empty; the girls have all fled home to their mothers.

Out in Iowa a fellow came to me and spread a napkin on the platform—a napkin as big as a tablecloth. He said, “I want a lot of shavings and sawdust.”

“What for?”

“I’ll tell you: I want enough to make a sofa pillow. Right here is where I knelt down and was converted, and my wife and four children, and my neighbors. I would like to have enough to make a sofa pillow to have something in the house to help me talk to God. I don’t want to forget God, or that I was saved. Can you give me enough?”

I said, “Yes indeed, and if you want to make a mattress, all right, take it; and if you want enough of that tent to make a pair of breeches for all the boys, why take your scissors and cut it right out, if it will help you to keep your mind on God.”

That is why I like to have people come down to the front and publicly acknowledge God. I like to have a man have a definite experience in religion—something to remember.

With an optimistic outlook and the power of radio broadcasting, Fulton John Sheen spread the message of Roman Catholicism. An intensely persuasive thinker and speaker, he gained fame as the priest who helped convert such well-known writers as Heywood Broun and Clare Boothe Luce to Catholicism. The longtime teacher of the philosophy of religion at Catholic University reached his largest audience through radio and television sermons in the 1940s and 1950s. At a time when comedian Milton Berle (“Uncle Miltie”) dominated early network television, Fulton Sheen’s piercing eyes and homely sermons gained him the counterpoint title of “Uncle Fultie,” which he accepted with a smile; it demonstrated his reach through the new medium. He continued propagating the word until his death, as an archbishop, in 1979.

“The Cross and the Double Cross,” below, was part of a sermon on his radio show, “The Catholic Hour,” on April 6, 1941. Addressing himself to the menace of another world war, Bishop Sheen pointed to the image of the swastika as the “double cross,” a parody of the German emblem from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film,
The Great Dictator
.

To Bishop Sheen, however, the image of the double cross represents far more than a military threat; it is any movement away from Christian faith. He offers words on war from Mussolini and von Moltke, but then he counters with New Testament passages, including the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the peacemakers”), to emphasize that “the hope of the world is in the Cross of Christ.” His forceful conclusion about “America’s power of regeneration” relies heavily on Christian imagery; the Resurrection on Easter, Bishop Sheen explains, comes only after the death of Jesus on Good Friday.

***

THERE IS NO
such thing as living without a cross. We are free only to choose between crosses. Will it be the Cross of Christ which redeems us from our sins, or will it be the double cross, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, the fasces?

Why are we a troubled nation today? Why do we live in fear—we who define freedom as the right to do whatever we pleased; we who have no altars in our churches, no discipline in our schools, and no sacrifices in our lives? We fear because our false freedom and license and apostasy from God have caught up with us, as they did with the prodigal. We would not accept the yoke of Christ; so now we must tremble at the yoke of Caesar. We willed to be free from God; now we must face the danger of being enslaved to a citizen of the foreign country. In seeking to live without the Cross, we got a cross—not one of Christ’s making or our own, but the devil’s!

The basic spirit of the modern world for the last century has been a determination to escape the Cross. But has the world escaped Calvary? What did Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, China, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Austria, France, and other nations get within the past two years but a cross? What is England fearing today but a cross? What do we fear today, but a cross? What does the world fear, but a diabolically cruel tortured cross made of guns, hammers, sickles, and bombs—the thing that started out to be a cross and then double-crossed itself because it has double-crossed the world?

And that threat throws us into a terrific dilemma. Can we meet that double cross without the Cross? Can a democracy of ease and comfort overcome a system built on sacrifices? Can a nation which permits the breakup of the family by divorce defeat a nation which forcefully bends the family to the nation? Can they who for seven years tightened their belts, gave up butter for guns, endured every conceivable limitation, be conquered by ease and comfort? Dr. Alexis Carrel was right in saying that in America “a good time has been our national cry. The perfect life as viewed by the average youth or adult is a round of ease or entertainment; of motion pictures, radio programs, parties, alcohol, and sexual excesses. This indolent and undisciplined way of life has sapped our individual vigor and imperiled our democratic form of government. Our race pitifully needs new supplies of discipline, morality, and intelligence.”

The rise of militarism and the gospel of force in the modern world is a result of the vacuum created by the abandonment of the Cross. Europe was nourished on Christian virtues; it knew obedience to authority, self-discipline, penance, and the need of redemption. But when it began to starve through the abandonment of the bread of the Father’s house, it
seized, like the prodigal, on the fodder of militarism and the glorification of fame. Like the empty house of the Gospel, the modern world swept itself clean of the Cross of Christ, but only to be possessed by the devils of the double cross. As Voltaire said, “If man had no God, he would make himself one!” So too, we might add, if man had no Cross, he would make himself one. And he has. Apostate from Calvary, the glorification of military virtues in these states is the feeble compensation for a yoke that is sweet and a burden that is light. As Mussolini said on August 24, 1934, “We are becoming a warlike nation—that is to say, one endowed to a higher degree with virtues of obedience, sacrifice, and dedication to country.” This so-called heroic attitude toward life is being invoked in deadly earnest by millions in Germany and Russia, and by all who espouse their cause in other nations. In the days when the Cross lived in the hearts of men, war was considered a calamity, a scourge sent by God; but now in the days of the double cross, it is justified as the noblest of virtues for the sake of the nation as in Italy, the race as in Germany, and the class as in Russia. They believe what von Moltke wrote in 1880: “Without war the world would become swamped in materialism.” Imagine! To save us from materialism, we must have war! He is right in saying that to save us from materialism we must have sacrifice. He is wrong in saying it must come from war. But if there is no Cross to inspire it, whence shall it come but from the double cross?

We in America are now faced with the threat of that double cross. To revert to our theme. Our choice is not: Will we or will we not have more discipline, more respect for law, more order, more sacrifice; but, where will we get it? Will we get it from without, or from within? Will it be inspired by Sparta or Calvary? By Valhalla or Gethsemane? By militarism or religion? By the double cross or the Cross? By Caesar or by God?

That is the choice facing America today. The hour of false freedom is past. No longer can we have education without discipline, family life without sacrifice, individual existence without moral responsibility, economics and politics without subservience to the common good. We are now only free to say whence it shall come. We will have a sword. Shall it be only the sword that thrusts outward to cut off the ears of our enemies, or the sword that pierces inward to cut out our own selfish pride? May heaven grant that, unlike the centurion, we pierce not the heart of Christ before we discover his divinity and salvation.

Away with those educators and propagandists who, by telling us we need no Cross, make possible having one forged for us abroad. Away with those who, as we gird ourselves for sacrifice based on love of God and Calvary, sneer, “Come down from the Cross” (Matthew 27:40). That
cry has been uttered before on Calvary, as his enemies shouted, “He saved others, himself he cannot save” (Mark 15:31). They were now willing to admit he had saved others; they could well afford to do it, for now he apparently could not save himself.

Of course, he could not save himself. No man can save himself who saves another. The rain cannot save itself, if it is to bud the greenery; the sun cannot save itself if it is to light the world; the seed cannot save itself if it is to make the harvest; a mother cannot save herself if she is to save her child; a soldier cannot save himself if he is to save his country. It was not weakness which made Christ hang on the Cross; it was obedience to the law of sacrifice, of love. For how could he save us if he ever saved himself? Peace he craved; but as Saint Paul says, there is no peace but through the blood of the Cross. Peace we want; but there is none apart from sacrifice. Peace is not a passive but an active virtue. Our Lord never said, “Blessed are the peaceful,” but “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The Beatitude rests only on those who
make
it out of trial, out of suffering, out of cruelty, even out of sin. God hates peace in those who are destined for war. And we are destined for war—a war against a false freedom which endangered our freedom; a war for the Cross against the double cross; a war to make America once more what it was intended to be from the beginning—a country dedicated to liberty under God; a war of the
militia Christi
: “Having our loins girt about with truth and having on the breastplate of justice… the shield of faith… the helmet of salvation” (Ephesians 6:10–17). For only those who carry the sword of the spirit have the right and have the power to say to the enemies of the Cross, “Put thy sword back into its scabbard.”

The great tragedy is that the torch of sacrifice and truth has been snatched from the hands of those who should hold it, and is borne aloft by the enemies of the Cross. The Pentecostal fires have been stolen from the altar of God and now burn as tongues of fire in those who grind the altars into dust. The fearlessness born of love of God which once challenged the armies of Caesar is now espoused to Caesar. We live in an age of saints in reverse, when apostles who are breathed on by the evil spirit outdare those animated by the Holy Spirit of God. The fires for causes like communism, nazism, and fascism, that burn downwards, are more intense than the fires that burn upwards in the hearts of those who pay only lip service to God. But this passion by which men deliver themselves over to half-truths and idiocies should make us realize what a force would enter history again if there were but a few saints in every nation who could help the world, because they were not enmeshed in it; who would, like their Master on the Cross, not seek to save the world as
it is, but to be saved from it; who would demonstrate to those who still have decent hearts, as we believe we have in America, that it is possible to practice sacrifice without turning the world into a vast slaughterhouse. There is no escaping the Cross!

That is why the hope, the real hope of the world, is not in those politicians who, indifferent to divinity, offer Christ and Barabbas to the mob to save their tumbling suffrage. It is not in those economists who would drive Christ from their shores like the Gerasenes, because they feared loss of profit on their swine. It is not in those educators who, like other Pilates, sneer, “What is truth”—then crucify it. The hope of the world is in the crucified in every land; in those bearing the Cross of Christ; in the mothers of Poland who, like other Rachels, mourn for their children; in the wives weeping for their husbands stolen into the servitude of war; in the sons and daughters kissing the cold earth of Siberia as the only one of the things God made that they are left to see; in bleeding feet and toil-worn hands; in persecuted Jews, blood brothers of Christ, of whom God said, “He who curses you, I shall curse”; in the priests in concentration camps who, like Christ, in other Gethsemanes, find a way to offer their own blood in the chalice of their own body.

The hope of the world is in the Cross of Christ borne down the ages in the hearts of suffering men, women, and children, who, if we only knew it, are saving us from the double cross more than our guns and ships.

We in America are now brought face to face with the heritage of a freedom derived from God. The hour has struck when we have to take up a cross. There is no escaping the Cross. Who shall give it to us? Shall it be imposed by chastisement, or shall it be freely accepted by penance? I believe in America’s power of regeneration. I believe we can remake ourselves from within in order that we be not remade from without. I believe in the future of America; but I believe in it only as I believe in Easter—after it has passed through Good Friday.

Cincinnati-born Louis Finkelstein studied for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, taught Hebrew theology and the study of the Talmud, and was elected chancellor of that center of Jewish learning in 1951. Until his death in 1991, he was widely regarded as the preeminent voice of Conservative Judaism in America.

In a 1958 address to a rabbinical assembly, he spoke of a series of conversations that Roman emperor Hadrian had in the year 130 with a Jewish sage named Y’Hoshua Ben Chananyah. “Under Hadrian’s rule, Rome had reached the zenith of its power,” recounted Dr. Finkelstein. “Yet Y’Hoshua Ben Chananyah, who had keen eyes and was a great sage, foresaw the time, not far off, when this empire would be a great ruin. It couldn’t help but be a great ruin, because it was surrounded by enemies and its own citizens did not want to be soldiers. The only way to survive was to take barbarians, as they called them, and train them to be soldiers to hold back the other barbarians, and then it was only a question of time before these barbarians would go over to their brother barbarians and attack Rome, which actually happened within 250 years.”