Now, you might be puzzled as to what Fulton J. Sheen has to do with bunny rabbits or with socialism.
Did you know that the wild rabbit can travel up to 25 miles a day? Could....and that is a mile an hour, if the rabbit is not sleeping, which it would be doing, so more than a mile an hour, if needed for safety, food, or setting up a new warren.
That rabbits need freedom for survival is true even of house pet rabbits. This need for movement and freedom is not merely a natural drive, but a need for the rabbit to be a rabbit, and not a cat or a dog, which a rabbit is nothing like.
Now, Fulton J. Sheen had a lot to say about communism. He spoke eloquently and intellectually, but also practically about what communism does to the soul, the mind, the heart of a person, of a nation.
One of the best points Sheen made in one of his talks was that when he was teaching in a Catholic university, (he taught philosophy for 25 years), was that the Catholic teachers knew both sides of the argument concerning communism. These professors could argue, like St. Thomas Aquinas, as Sheen notes, both sides.
I gave my house rabbit freedom to run around a very large walled-in garden. It was safe in that garden. When we moved into that house, it had been abandoned for a while and the garden was half-full of briars. It took us a month to clear back the heavy, stubborn briars. At the end of the large garden, we left some in a contained area. This was Sooty's special play area. If Sooty needed space, the rabbit would go into the tangled briars for time-out.
One of my favorite memories was a mid-summer night when Sooty did not come back in when we called at the patio door. It was getting dark, and we were concerned, as Sooty slept inside.
I remember my husband standing on top of the briar patch calling Sooty, who apparently did not want to come in. Finally, I put food in its dish and stood by the patio door. The rabbit came out quickly and popped into the house for din-dins.
Now, we understood Sooty's needs and habits, but also the danger from owls and other predators, which would eat this little rabbit.
Sooty had freedom within limits. This is not the case for those living under communism as Sheen points out.
Our rabbit was free because we loved it and had a relationship with it. As Sheen points out, Catholicism is a relationship with God, not with a system.
Sooty knew whom it was obeying-a kind person who was feeding it and concerned.
We do not have that kind of relationship with tyrannies. Socialism and communism, as Sheen points out, create an anonymous "they" and we give that "they" power, or they take it.
The they is only so powerful as we make it in the West. and we have created a monster.
It is hard for me to convince people who are excellent Catholics of the danger of socialism. These good people in Europe cannot see how the society, the family, their own wildness, that is their own individual dignity have been eroded by group think and the "they" who control their lives.
The arguments usually end up centered on how wonderful the baby-killing national health system are for people. I cannot help those who desire such systems to determine who lives or who dies, who is fit for the utilitarian world and who is fit to serve the state as opposed to those who are a burden on the state.
I cannot convince group-think Catholics who do not really know the other side of the argument.
Catholicism gives real freedom. As an institutional Church, the Catholic Church knows both sides of the argument. And, she preaches a relationship, not merely dogmas. As Sheen points out, to be free, one needs order and law, but God's laws not man's. And, socialism and communism both re-define man.
That is the problem. I did not re-define my rabbit. It was a rabbit, not a person.
The person is not merely a cog in the wheel of the state; the person does not exist for the state.
To know the arguments might help some Catholic who are socialists to repent.
There is also a misunderstanding between the term materialism and consumerism. This must be corrected. Too many Catholics think materialism is merely being caught up in the buying and accumulating of things-that is consumerism. Materialism is the philosophical idea that the world is all there is-there is no afterlife.
The goal of both communism and socialism is materialism-the denial that the ultimate goal of men and women is heaven. Those isms make earth the goal and earthly comforts the work of humankind.
This is not the case. The popes knew that materialism changes the definition of what it means to be human.
Be a Catholic. Fulton J. Sheen in this chapter mentioned that a communist told him that the encyclical on communism by the pope was the best understanding of the system he ever saw. The same is true for the encyclicals on socialism. Nothing has changed. A rabbit is a rabbit, a man a man, and a system which replaces God for security and identity is a tyranny.
Here is Pope Leo XIII.
In fine, the rewards and punishments of a future and eternal life having been handed over to oblivion, the ardent desire of happiness has been limited to the bounds of the present. Such doctrines as these having been scattered far and wide, so great a license of thought and action having sprung up on all sides, it is no matter for surprise that men of the lowest class, weary of their wretched home or workshop, are eager to attack the homes and fortunes of the rich; it is no matter for surprise that already there exists no sense of security either in public or private life, and that the human race should have advanced to the very verge of final dissolution.
...
Even family life itself, which is the cornerstone of all society and government, necessarily feels and experiences the salutary power of the Church, which redounds to the right ordering and preservation of every State and kingdom. For you know, venerable brethren, that the foundation of this society rests first of all in the indissoluble union of man and wife according to the necessity of natural law, and is completed in the mutual rights and duties of parents and children, masters and servants. You know also that the doctrines of socialism strive almost completely to dissolve this union; since, that stability which is imparted to it by religious wedlock being lost, it follows that the power of the father over his own children, and the duties of the children toward their parents, must be greatly weakened. But the Church, on the contrary, teaches that "marriage, honorable in all,"[13] which God himself instituted in the very beginning of the world, and made indissoluble for the propagation and preservation of the human species, has become still more binding and more holy through Christ, who raised it to the dignity of a sacrament, and chose to use it as the figure of His own union with the Church.
more here and here
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13apost.htm
http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P12CH42.HTM
On this organic conception which alone is living, in which the noblest humanity and the most genuine Christian spirit flourish in harmony, there is marked the Scripture thought, expounded by the great Aquinas: Opus Justitiae Pax—The work of justice shall be peace—a thought which is applicable to the internal as to the external aspect of social life. It admits of neither contrast nor alternative such as expressed in the disjunction, love or right, but of the fruitful synthesis, love and right. In the one as in the other, since both radiate from the same Spirit of God, We read the program and the seal of the human spirit; they complement one another, give each other life and support, walk hand in hand along the road of concord and pacification, while right clears the way for love and love makes right less stern, and gives it a higher meaning. Both elevate human life to that social atmosphere where, even amid the failings, the obstacles and the difficulties of this earth a fraternal community of life is made possible.
But once let the baneful spirit of materialist ideas predominate; let the urge for power and for predominance take in its rough hands the direction of affairs; you shall then find its disruptive effects appearing daily in greater measure; you shall see love and justice disappear; all this as the sad foretaste of the catastrophes that menace society when it abandons God.
to be continued....
to be continued....