“It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation 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 which is happening in the world; the great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on, because they have lost the vision of the heights form which they have fallen.” – Fulton J. Sheen
For decades, Communism and the Conscience of the West, has been recognized as the finest book ever written by a Catholic on the subject of Communism. Dedicated to Our Lady in prayerful hope for the conversion of Russia, this is one of Fulton Sheen’s most forgotten yet most important books. In Communism and the Conscience of the West, Sheen explains the problems with society stemming from Socialism and Communism, which continue to infect universities and political discourse today. This timeless book exposes Communism’s defects, its attitude toward the family, the decline of historical liberalism, and the rise of the antireligious spirit that pervades our world. Readers will be impressed as Sheen diagnoses the issues facing our once peaceful cities, with history being put on trial, scrubbed, rewritten, and explained in terms of class hate. While Communism destroys human freedom, Sheen illustrates how man is free as a result of two guarantees: one economic and the other spiritual. The economic enables man to call something his own which is outside of himself. The spiritual is the soul, which makes man independent of an earthly tyrant or a political dictator. In short, man’s soul is his own on the inside, as his property is his own on the outside. Sheen carefully illustrates how even though we are living at a time when man has all the material conditions necessary for his happiness, “having lost the purpose of life which religion supplied, modern man became increasingly frustrated as his disappointed hedonism turned to pessimism. Thus man, who isolated himself from the religious community, now by reaction finds himself absorbed by the political community as despair becomes the dominant note of contemporary philosophy and literature.” For anyone seeking to understand one of the greatest threats to the Faith and our world, Communism and the Conscience of the West will be your guide. Below is some quotes from the book:
The Church condemned Fascism in the Encyclical Non Abiamo Bisogno which was written in Italian because Fascism was a national phenomenon; it condemned Nazism in the German language in the Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge because Nazism was a racial phenomenon. It condemned Communism in the universal language of Latin in the Encyclical Divini Redemptoris, because Communism is an international phenomenon. Communism in its turn has concentrated its attakcs principally upon the Church, for the instinct of Communism is infallible when it comes to knowing its enemy. (the Church) is not opposed to Communism because Communism is anti-capitalistic. If by Capitalism is meant, not diffused ownership of property, but monopolistic Capitalism in which capital bids for labor on a market, and concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, then from an economic point of view alone, the Church is just as much opposed to Capitalism as it is to Communism. Communism emphasizes social use to the exclusion o f personal rights, and Capitalism emphasizes personal rights to the exclusion of social use. The Church says both are wrong, for though the right to property is personal, the use is social. It therefore refuses to maintain Capitalism as an alternative to the economic side of Communism. Monopolistic Capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of a few capitalists, and Communism in the hands of a few bureaucrats, and both end in the proletarianizaiton of the masses. The true Christian must rid himself of the delusion that in opposing Communism the Church thereby puts itself in opposition to all those who would seek thus to change the present economic system. The Christian concept denies there is an absolutely owned primate property exclusive of limits set by the common good of the community and responsibility to the community.
… Those who have felt the sting of uncharitable fellow men who made fun of their race or color and refused to give them the hand of fellowship are also likely material for Communism, not because Communism can give them recognition, which it does not in practice, but only because they get a chance to get even with those who were unkind. Those, too, who have never been able to think clearly, and who have by much reading and little thinking taken more than they can digest, flock to Communism where they will have to do no thinking whatever, but where their very obedience to a dictator will give them the illusion of power. Because they became disillusioned with their freedom, which produced chaos in their souls, they look for a Communist dictatorship outside themselves to organize their chaos. Because they lost the power of self-regulation from within, they seek a Communist-imposed regulation from without; because they lost the goals of existence and the purpose of life, they invite a Communist tyranny to impose a goal and dictate a purpose; because they have been isolated from their fellow men, they seek a restoration into a community not on the basis of spirit and love, but of matter and force…. A distinction must be made between the ideology and the person, between Communism and Communists. Communism is to be hated as a doctor hates pneumonia in his sick child; but the Communists are potential children of God and must be loved as the sick child is loved.
The great issue at stake is not individualism or collectivism, because neither of these is of primary importance; it is not between free enterprise and socialism in the economic order, for neither of these matters tremendously; rather the struggle is for the human soul. This is another way of saying that the crisis centers around freedom in the spiritual sense of the world…. since evil is not wholly external, a war will not eliminate it. Any world war is really an objectification of evil in the lives of men. A macro-cosmic war is the reflection of micro-cosmic war inside of individual hearts….. As long as the Christian thinks that there are only two directions he can take, “Right” or “Left,” not only will he make no contribution to the world, but he will make the world worse by failing to recognize that additional to the horizontal plane of life, there is also the vertical which leads to God and where there are the two more important directions of “inward” and “upward.” …. The Revelation of Fatima was a most poignant reminder to Christians that the so-called problem of Russia is the problem of Christians: that by prayer, penance and reparation, and not by war, abuse and attack will Russia join the society of freedom-loving nations.