[Fr. Coughlin explains why Christian charity, not unchristian materialism, must guide economic policy.]

AN INTRODUCTION

THE chief motive in entering upon this series of lectures regarding labor and unemployment was to recall principles, the re-adoption of which will be of essential benefit to us both in regulating labor and in solving unemployment.

The logical man is only irritated by those who profess that periodic unemployment and depression cannot be avoided. They who preach such a superstition see no practical relation between cause and effect.

Thus, the first philosophic starting point relative to the eight major depressions during the past fifty years and the three industrial catastrophes during the past ten years is that there is a very definite cause or set of causes producing identical effects.

Common sense draws the conclusion that these can and must be removed if this constantly recurring effect is to be destroyed and if our constitutional government shall endure.

It has not been a pleasant task on my part to mention specifically the various ramifications of these causes which more or less are responsible for the world-wide distress. The greed of certain men, unjust competition, modern profiteering, uncurtailed mass production, class preferment, questionable taxation, and questionable international banking, the destruction of the silver market to such a degree that the dollar which you have in your pocket is actually worth only twelve cents - these and a hundred more extravaganzas form a litany of grief to which we say after each invocation: "O Lord deliver us!"

In a democracy such as we possess either in this nation, or in England, or in France, or in modern Germany, the ultimate credit or blame either for prosperity or for depression devolves upon the people themselves and the institutions which they have erected.

In a democracy such as ours it will always be necessary to entrust our government into the hands of men who are not only a success in business but who also possess and who will sustain the moral principles of Him Who both created human nature and Whose only begotten Son became like unto ourselves in all things save sin for the purpose of redeeming us and of helping us to fight life's battles.

NATURALISM

I have had occasion to say that we can expect no remedy for the thousand ills which beset human nature unless we adopt and practice the principles of religion. I refer to that supernatural religion which was brought into the world by Jesus Christ.

Counter to this statement there is the accepted opinion that supernaturalism is passe; that nature alone without the assistance of supernature is sufficient to rectify the topsy-turviness of society.

If we are serious in discovering the ultimate cause of our misery, let us pause for a while for the purpose of discovering just how beneficent and practical is this theory of naturalism; this theory which tells us that the world and politics can get along without God; that injustice and oppression can be vanquished without Him.

First of all nature is a murderess who preaches the gospel of "might is right" and "the survival of the fittest."

Watch a homely hen with her chicks as she crosses the lawn. They peck as they go. With each peck some little insect dies.

Observe the thrush as he interrupts his song to seize a worm in his beak, or a spider who stalks his captured prey.

Beneath the turbulent waves of the ocean, this same incessant murder is perpetuated. There is the walrus battling the seal; the seal gulping the salmon; the salmon living on the herring; the herring taking the minnow; the minnow sucking the larvae.

The larger, fiercer, swifter, more powerful, eternally preying upon and murdering the more defenseless!

Has not the modern industrial world learned well its lesson?

This same gospel of "the survival of the fittest" and "might is right" is also carried on in the vegetable life. It is the jungle law over again.

There is deadly struggle for soil, for moisture and for sunshine. An oak will thrust aside and finally kill a thousand weaker and smaller plants as it expands into gianthood. If plants could speak, or forests groan, a volume of heartrending sounds would rise from the green places of the world, protesting against the shallowness of nature's justice.

If your ears still retain the sound of that catch phrase, "the survival of the fittest," I ask you to consider a different angle of approach to this unchristian thought. It is this: That citizen, or Member of Congress, or Senator, or President who is bent on copying nature logically, should dip his pen into her bosom which reeks with the red blood of the slain, and write "murder and oppression" as his prime ethical principle. "Let the weaker live for the stronger. Let the poor be the pawns of the rich. As long as human laws copied after fallen nature sanction such action, then they must be moral, despite their inconsistency with Christ's revelation."

They who entrust the salvation of the world and the elimination of its heartaches to the beneficence of nature have forgotten that when she produces something fit and becoming, she also evolves something malign to attack it.

Here we have cattle, and horses, and rich pasture for them to graze upon. At the same time there is the tick, the bot, to weaken and maim them.

There is the grapefruit coming forth from nature's workshop and with it came the vine lice to kill it. The cotton-pod appears and the boll-weevil steps in. Golden ears of grain wave their proud banner of maturity and black clouds of locusts fatten upon it.

Then there is man - the best man, a man who would be a proud specimen of any nationality.

Watch how he is developed. Aside from diseases of childhood and old age, of vicious habits, of immorality, there come cancer, diseases of the heart and of the nerves. He, too, falls prey to spinal-meningitis, or to influenza. He, too, is not immune to sleeping sickness. Oh, why does nature think of asthma, of tuberculosis, of leprosy? Why does nature think out bacteria if she and her policies are the Christ and the gospel of social health?

Science may discover a preventative for one disease, but the history of medicine is the discovery of new diseases which come like thieves in the night to welter in the carnage of animal and of human life.

Pursuing this thought to another plane, we find that in his intellectual nature man left to himself follows a parallel course with lower nature. During the civilization of ancient paganism man elevated himself and his lusts to the throne of a god. In modern paganism he has levelled God to the cesspool of fallen humanity.

Until 1492 men believed that the earth was flat. And since 1492 we have gradually given ourselves over to the error that the soul is flat and was born to die in the grave of this earth.

"Might is right." "Money is wealth." "Pleasure is happiness." "Life is of the earth earthly" - these are the modern intellectual heresies copied from the constitution of a murderous nature and incorporated into the courts of men, where human rights must surrender and succumb to the supposed rights of industry and commerce; where the weaker, disorganized units of humanity must submit to the more powerful, to the wealthier!

We, before whose eyes there is unfolded the scroll of all history, we who can read of the decline of every empire which proudly unfurled a flag, need not be very deep scrutinizers of nature to conclude that her philosophy, her morals, and her efforts can do no more for us of this so-called enlightened age than she has done for the peoples of the past. Certainly, our only help is in a power above nature. Our only policy must be one learned from Jesus Christ, the Author of supernature.

BEHOLD THE MAN!

Before venturing upon the supernatural idea which Jesus Christ brought into the world for our guidance and benefit and ultimate happiness, may I recall a few vagrant thoughts on human life as it always was and always will be from the cradle to the grave.

First, there is a struggle to survive. Neither you nor I can escape it. There is a struggle to acquire information and education. There is a bitter contest to attain maturity both of mind and of body against ten thousand hostile forces of nature which surround us.

Watch the farmer as he clears his land of stumps and rocks or as he bends over his plow. See him removing the weeds which would choke his grain, or observe him as he hews the timbers, builds his house, cares for his sheep and cattle. And why? To ward off starvation, to repel the onslaughts of death and destruction.

There is the factory laborer bending over his lathe. Amidst the drowning noise of clamorous hammers which beat the mark of time as would a supervisor in a Roman slave galley, that laborer plies his trade from morning until night. And why? That he might live and that those his loved ones can also live.

Bread and butter, clothing and rest!

"By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn thy bread."

And as either farmer or laborer returns to his home at evening and looks into the depths of the setting sun he wonders, too, when his sun of life must set.

For a time he is puzzled with the mystery of it all. But he remembers the days of love when he swore everlasting fidelity to her who shares his joys and sorrows. He is not forgetful of those, his parents, who brought him into this world. He is inspired to carry on to greater extremities as his rough fingers lose themselves in the curly head which rests itself upon his knee.

He is no philosopher. But he does know that if there is such a thing as love, then there must also be such a thing as immortality.

Sweat and bread! Bread and sweat! Surely there must be other items in this life besides its labor and its food. Life would not be worth living unless there were some eternal sunset to this sweat, some eternal sunrise for love.

Thus, he carries on in sweat and in labor. He, with his millions of fellow human beings, level forests, dig coal from the depths of the earth and gold from its mines. They fabricate machinery, build locomotives, string copper wires across continents and oceans. They sweat and labor. And why? Not for industry's sake but for love's sake.

It is love that makes the wheels of civilization turn 'round and 'round. Although these wheels turn only by the sweat of the laborer's brow, he gladly suffers this fatigue because he loves himself and those who are dear to him.

Thus, they into whose hands have been entrusted the destiny of their fellowmen must bend their every effort that this first law of nature and of life may be fulfilled - the law of self preservation, of labor, of sweat, and of bread - because through this law the lamp of love remains lighten and the spirit of courage endureth. This is God's law, the first natural law of human rights which dare be assailed or countermanded and neglected only at the price of chaos and destruction.

SUPERNATURAL

In itself the law which is expressed in the ancient words "By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn thy bread" is not sufficient. Nature must be supplemented by supernature, otherwise the handicap under which the weaker live would be too great. "The survival of the fittest," the doctrine of "might is right" - these would still obtain unless the charity of Jesus Christ had come to our rescue.

Supposing that the governments of modern nations have been anxious to sustain the preliminary law of life as suggested above, what argument could they offer to explain away the catastrophe of the universal breakdown which confronts us?

Either they have been false to this first principle of all political economy, namely, that bread comes through labor and labor only, or else having practiced and accepted it they are forced to admit that in itself it has not been sufficient.

If the latter is so, then some explanation must be offered both for the causes and effects which have conspired to make a world grow weary, and so many millions of its people groan in forced idleness.

About sixteen years ago the first shock of disappointment came thundering upon those of us who believed in the efficacy of our modern, Christless, reign of nature. We lived through a war more savage and destructive than ever befell the nations of medieval or barbaric times. We survived through days and years when international law was thrown into the scrap heap. We began to catch a glimpse of our new god of political economy with his feet of clay and his heart of steel.

It was a war to end wars. But instead of having made the world safe for democracy through the instrumentality of that figment known as the League of Nations, we encounter the results of our mad materialism as they appear under the forms of revolution and the spectres of anarchy.

Behold the spectacle! Russia boasts of the largest conscripted army that ever has threatened the peace of the world; one hundred fifty million population. China almost hopelessly lost to the anarchy of the communists; India determined in its revolution - over seven hundred fifty million population. The great German nation seriously threatened with a radical upheaval. The exchequers of England, France, and Italy are spending approximately six million dollars a day for military preparations. In our own country, with its lakes and rivers teeming with fish; its mines heavy with minerals; its granaries and freighters choking with wheat; its banks teeming with money, there are approximately five million unemployed men walking aimlessly through the streets of our cities and the by-paths of our countrysides, seeking not doles but labor. In our southland literally thousands in hopeless distress while we debated how we should feed and clothe them while there was being enacted in our Congress the comedy of the ages.

While the spirit of Lincoln's birthday still broods over us in these unbecoming times, I ask you to take your stand before his national monument at Washington with the poet, George Sanford Holmes, who writes these lines so appropriate for the occasion:

"He dreams in brooding bronze; it almost seems
A word, a touch, would kindle into flame
The spark of life in that gaunt metal frame
And light those somber eyes with living gleams.
Yet as he patient vigil keeps and dreams
Deep in the shrine erected to his fame,
Glib tongues invoke the magic of his name
To purge a party and promote its schemes.
Oh, wake, immortal heart, and breathe again
Thy pulse of mercy into lesser men!
That pulse that beat in anguish for the slave,
That gave its own lifeblood to heal and save! -
That shame those hollow hearts that praise thee dead
And praising, would deny thy people bread!"

CHARITY

But even more than these verses suggest, man's noble experiment to make worthwhile progress without Jesus Christ and His principle of charity is worthy of our consideration.

There is no one so senseless and unintelligent as to charge that the American people do not spend considerable money in building orphanages, poor houses, hospitals and schools for the unfortunates of our country. The existence of these institutions is a concrete proof for our great American philanthropy.

I am citing this simply to insist as a Christian and as a Roman Catholic that these gestures of almsgiving, be they public or private, in themselves do not constitute charity, nor do they solve the situation at hand.

The public mind is oftentimes deceived by false definitions of this virtue. We find ourselves occasionally identifying it, to use the Scriptural phrase, with giving our goods to feed the poor or our bodies to be burned. These are laudable things in themselves. But they do not constitute charity. Paradoxically as it may sound, the poor man must extend charity to the rich man as well as the rich man must bestow this same virtue upon the laborer. At the same time this virtue must be possessed by both the poor and the rich. It is a two-sided coin: Upon its face there is a giving side; upon its reverse there is the having side. You must give it and still you must have it. It must not be identified merely with hospitals, with doles, with soup kitchens and other physical materialities. In his thirteenth chapter to the Corinthians St. Paul is most explicit in telling us that if he should give all his goods to feed the poor and have not charity, he is nothing. Thus, according to the Sacred Scriptures, there is no logic on the part of any Christian who defines charity by the synonym of almsgiving.

If I were asked to translate this borrowed word of charity into a simpler word I would use the one single term of "love" - Charity is love. First of all, it is loving our God with our whole heart, with our whole mind, with our whole strength. It dares not compromise His principles. It is loving our neighbor as ourselves, not less than ourselves. The man who would possess real Christian charity must acquire a new concept of his fellowman. He must regard him not merely as a piece of flesh and blood born either to be a slave or a master, a competitor or a protector. He looks beneath the accidental conditions of wealth, of social prestige, of nationality, and catches a glimpse of a real brother. He is closer in one sense to his fellowman than he is to a brother of his flesh for the simple reason that Jesus Christ, the Elder Member of our family, died for all of us without exception and introduced all of us into His common brotherhood by which we can cry: "Abbe, Father," to Him Who created us.

Behold, the maid servant in your kitchen is your sister! The denizen of the dope house, the panderer of a brothel for whom Christ also died, the laborer in your factory - he is your brother and not your economically termed employe. Your attitude towards these persons must be no whit different than were each one a Jesus Christ standing over the lathe where stands the laborer.

I use the word "brother" not in the sleek, commercial sense as it is employed in lodge rooms. I use it in the sense even superior to that for which the word originally was coined when it refers to the brother fathered by the same sire and born of the same womb in which we were conceived.

The Christian concept of charity demands this. We must accept the instruction of our Divine Redeemer that "whatsoever we do unto the least of His little ones we do unto Him."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not poetry. It is the basic law of Christianity, denied by neither Catholic nor Protestant, but rejected more or less by the modern business and industrial world about us.

There are man-made theories which plan our social relations one to the other. One emphasizes the master and servant idea. Another proclaims to us that there is an eternal conflict between the laborer and the capitalist. Then there are those in our midst who preach to us a doctrine of Marx and of Lenin with all its bloodshed, its hate, its greed. And finally there is that omnipresent political economist who persists in putting the cart before the horse as he talks to us of methods and means to acquire wealth and prosperity by following the worn-out doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But there is only one divine policy which transcends every human thought upon the subject of social relations. It is the one conceived by Jesus Christ on the hillsides of Judea and repeated by Him from the pulpit of His cross.

Pause a moment as upon the screen of your imagination there flashes the scene of the Crucifixion! Our Saviour is surrounded by a jeering crowd. His head is encircled with the regal crown of thorns. His body is arrayed with the royal purple of a thousand stripes. His hands and feet are bejewelled with the blunt nails.

With a last effort He raises His head and whispers: "Mother, behold thy son!"

Could He have said more to us with His last breath? Could He have been plainer in identifying His own brotherhood with John, our representative, who knelt at the foot of that bloody throne?

Still withal, the world rolls on preferring the Roman policy of cowardly justice which crucified Christ, rather than the heroic charity which His divine lips pronounced. How long, oh God, shall we continue to re-echo that ancient blasphemy of: "Give us Barrabas! Away with Christ!"?

Our America has prospered beyond every dream in its rapid advance towards the peak of material prosperity. But unless all history of the past has been written in vain in its effort to teach us; unless the universal spirit of discontent which broods dangerously over the entire world cannot make us pause, we need never expect to bring about a lasting settlement of the social questions which vex us. Christ was serious when He exclaimed: "Without Me you can do nothing."

I appreciate that we have been like little children concerned more with what we shall wear and wherewith we shall be clothed. Hitherto we have taken our philosophy and many of our customs without pausing to weigh their validity. How many of us have accepted the doctrine of cruel naturalism without having investigated its crueler effects? How many of our leaders, busied about the accidentals of life, have forgotten the primeval law of earthly existence - the law of sweat and labor? How many of us who are clamoring for an opportunity to labor and not for pagan doles, have forgotten Him Who once multiplied bread and love and brotherhood upon the hillsides of Judea?

ST. PAUL ON CHARITY

Now that evening has come and sober thoughts remain, I invite you to open your Scriptures at the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Pause and ponder upon that most beautiful passage as you read the inspired words:

"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

"And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

"Charity is patient, is kind; charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up, is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

"Charity never falleth away: whether prophecies shall be made void, or tongues shall cease, or knowledge shall be destroyed. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man I put away the things of a child.

"We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known.

"And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."

If the ancient Scriptures warn us that we shall earn our bread by the sweat of our brows, the Christian Testament insists upon our regarding the humblest bread winner as a second Jesus Christ. Without the adoption of these principles, my friends, there is neither peace nor lasting prosperity for our nation.

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK

"ON THE MYSTERY OF PAIN"

THE problem of pain stands in the heart of every attempt to solve the riddle of the Universe.

A thousand attempts have been made to answer it. A thousand obstacles confront its solution. The Buddhist, at one extremity, informs us that pain and sorrow and oppression are always the result of some personal sin which was committed in some previous existence.

It has been reserved for a modern sect to solve the riddle by absolutely denying the reality of pain's existence. The whole thing, according to these, is an illusion.

Here, then, the problem stands between the two extremes. We see it crying for an explanation in every innocent child who suffers in his body. We behold it asking for an interpretation in every heart that is crowned with the agony of thorns. We witness it in every God-fearing farmer or laborer whose gaunt gaze is held captive by an empty larder, by drought-stricken fields.

I suppose that this riddle of suffering would always remain cloaked in misunderstanding, were it not for the revelation of our Christian faith. Only when we turn to the crucified Christ, knowing Who He is and What He is, do we catch a vagrant ray of understanding.

Turn your eyes upon Him as He hangs upon the cross. It is not only a Man who is transfixed there. It is the guiltless God-Man. That He really suffered is certain when He exclaimed: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!"

That cry of His dispels the sophistry of those who tell us that pain is only an illusion; that it is necessarily the penalty of personal sin. That piercing, anguished cry cheers us with the thought that pain is not to be attributed to a careless Providence or that it is a mark of social inferiority. Was it not Christ Who uttered it - Christ, the Son of God; the greatest of the Sons of Man?

Looking deeper into this problem there is a clearer light cast upon its complexity by the inspired words taken from St. Paul's letter to the Colossians. "I fill up those things that are wanting of the suffering of Christ," wrote he.

In other words: the suffering baby, the sorrowing mother, the tubercular maiden, the worried father - every bed in every hospital ward, every cell in an insane institute, every honest tear and ravaging pain are nothing more than the extended pains of Christ Crucified.

How tremendous, then is the sufferer! With what dignity is the sufferer's soul surrounded! Those who are oppressed, those who are victims of injustice, those whose bodies feel the stripes of the lash of cowardice, whose brows are circled with the thorns of worry, whose hands are pierced with the nails of poverty, whose hearts are opened with the spear of calumny - they are living crucifixes who stand clear of the wrangling world about them!

We see in them not merely separate human beings that twist in agony, but souls that mirror the tragedy of Calvary throughout the ages. The rose may reflect the beauty of God; the thunder and tossing ocean, His power. All nature is but His mirror. But it is left to the shut-in, to the sufferer, to the heart-broken, pain-stricken fellow citizen of ours to reflect our God as He hangs on Calvary expiating the sins of the world.

My dear shut-ins and sufferers, I greet you this evening in the name of this vast radio-audience as those whom God loves best. I pledge you not our worthless sympathy, but I promise you our prayers. In return may I ask of you who suffer so, to remember us as Christ once remembered the thief who was crucified at His side. Remember us, the less worthy, as you suffer in the Gethsemane of your heartache, in the Pilate's Hall of your poverty, or on the Calvary of your bed of pain.