Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 4:
What do you imagine a normal life to be? As a matter of fact, people without religion live in only one room of their mental house, and that very often is the cellar. Those who do not utterly degrade themselves live far too superficially, content to be lost in the mere round of external events. Reason itself should tell them that they are blinding themselves to higher and nobler aspects of human personality.
Again the question comes: What self do you want to be? If the self you have in mind is only your lower self, then religion would be a boon to you if it stopped you from sinking to that level. People who think life is no more than the raw stuff of animal passion and appetite, who give to all their impulses a free rein, and who talk of living dangerously, are fools. It's all very well to say: "Burn the candle at both ends. It gives a lovely light." The trouble is that it soon burns out, leaving one in stygian darkness. And it has all been tried before, as thousands could tell you from their own bitter experience.
You do not do justice to the secularist. He has a future in view - the turning of this world into a paradise by human efforts only, quite independently of God and religion. But it is he who refuses to face realities. He refuses to face the fact that there is something radically wrong with human nature. Man is a fallen being and not naturally perfectible. All his achievements contain within themselves the seeds of their own collapse. Any new order the secularists may devise will be just as subject to corruption as previous systems. It is the man who knows that the outcome of all merely human efforts is bound to be imperfect, and who knows that God intends to bring humanity to perfection, who is best fitted to deal with the problems even of this world.
Yes, even though the irreligious deny it. If a man will not be faithful to his duties to God, he is not likely to be faithful to duties to himself by self-discipline, or to his fellow men by justice and charity. If he will not be true to God, why should he be true to his fellow men who are so much less than God? Rationalists, who abandon and ridicule religion, loudly protest that they are none the worse for that. But the unbelieving Renan saw through that. He declared that to attempt to preserve the Christian Code of virtue without the Christian Creed would be like trying to live on the perfume from an empty bottle. Renounce the Creed, and the Code of Christian conduct will also go. From another viewpoint experience also proves that. For men who definitely abandon Christian standards of conduct soon feel impelled to attack and destroy belief in the Christian religion. Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia were examples enough of that.
It teaches the only sound realism. The violent breaking up of a Christian civilization which tried to get on without the Christian Faith which created it will force unbelievers to admit defeat. The secularism of the rationalists will never lead to the justice and peace God alone can give. Christ Himself has warned us that one doesn't gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. The policy of rationalists, therefore, is one of defeatism. But the Christian outlook is not defeatist. It offers justice and peace in so far as these are possible and to the degree in which men put Christian principles into practice. Realism compels us to admit that not every single human being in the world is likely to do so.
As long as the human race persists, religion will persist. Religion is part of man's very nature and he will never be able to get away from it entirely. If people haven't got the right religion they'll invent a wrong religion. The mystery of life forces every thinking man to lift his thoughts ! to something beyond it, and that is always a stepping-stone to a religion of | some sort.
"THAT CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Radio Analysis"
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