War and Guilt

Nineteen addresses delivered in the nationwide Catholic Hour. This series of talks is a call to America to return to God; not by lip-worship, but by prayer, penance, reparation, by re-kindling in our consciences the Justice of God, and by emblazoning before our eyes the Christ of Judgement in order that all of us, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics may, by a re-birth of the moral law, save America and salvage the world. “Nothing,” declares Fulton J. Sheen, “is as relentless in unmasking a false way of life as war.” World War II exposed mankind’s collective failure to bring the tranquility of order from the wreckage of the “war to end all wars,” choosing instead to build again a godless world upon the unsure foundations of atheistic materialism, unabashed liberalism, and depraved communism. In these nineteen addresses, broadcast from December 15, 1940, to April 13, 1941, Archbishop Sheen confronts the irrational, irreligious and violent spirit of the age and exhorts the Western world to return to God with all its heart, “by prayer, penance, reparation, by rekindling in our consciences the justice of God, and by emblazoning before our eyes the Christ of Judgment.” Delivered with prophetic zeal and fierce honesty, War and Guilt shows the way to accept the reality of fallen nature and to acknowledge mankind’s burden of guilt with fortitude and humility, proving in the process that the Gospel slices more deeply than any sword, “reaching the very division between soul and spirit.”