"Godlessness would go on and on if there were no catastrophes."

By Bishop Fulton Sheen

“Because the signs of our times point to a struggle between absolutes we may expect the future to be a time of trials and catastrophes 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, 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 it when it is repudiated. The chaos of our times is the strongest negative argument that could ever be advanced for Christianity. Catastrophe becomes a testament 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 His followers should be different in spirit from those who were not His followers. ‘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.

From:

Fulton J. Sheen, “Communism and the Conscience of the West,” Chapter 1: “The Decline of Historical Liberalism.”