Religion: Signs of the Times

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"He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live; induce faith in astrology so as to make not the will, but the stars, responsible for sins; he will explain guilt away psychologically as repressed sex, make men shrink in shame if their fellow men say they are not broad-minded and liberal ; he will identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong, truth and error; he will spread the lie that men will never be better until they make society better and thus have selfishness to provide fuel for the next revolution ; he will foster science but only to have armament makers use one marvel of science to destroy another; he will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is 'vital'; he will invoke religion to destroy religion; he will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived; his mission, he will say, will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and Fascism, which he will never define." The Ape of God. "In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Be cause his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.

"He will set up a counter-church which will be the ape of the Church because he, the devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. ... In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man in his loneliness and frustration to hunger more and more for membership in a community that will give man enlargement of pur pose, without any need of personal amend ment and without admission of personal guilt. . . .

"Jews, Protestants and Catholics should unite against a common foe. It is not a unity of religion we plead for that is impossible when purchased at the cost of the unity of truth, but a unity of religious peoples. ... In a word, if anti-Christ has his fellow-travelers, then why should not God and His Divine Son? . . . We may not be able to meet in the same pew —would to God we did — but we can meet on our knees."

* From a manuscript which Msgr. Sheen, associate professor of philosophy at Catholic University of America, will edit for later publication.

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