Friday, November 20, 2015

“Man is living in fear, but it is different from any fear in the past–first, because man used to fear God with a filial fear, which made him shrink from hurting One Whom he loved. Later on, man feared not God but his fellowman, as the world shuddered under two world wars in twenty-one years. Now we have come to the last and most awful of all the fears, in which man trembles before the littlest thing in the universe–the atom! The atomic bomb has taken our minds off existence and purpose. Yet it is still true today that how one gets out of time is not so important as how one is in eternity. The atomic bomb in the hands of a Francis of Assisi would be less harmful than a pistol in the hand of a thug; what makes the bomb dangerous is not the energy it contains, but the man who uses it. Therefore, it is modern man who has to be remade. Unless he can stop the explosions inside his own mind, he will probably–armed with the bomb–do harm to the planet itself, as Pius XII has warned. There is no such thing as the problem of the atomic bomb. There is, rather, the problem of the man who makes and uses it. Only men and nations whose personalities were already atomized could join forces with external nature to use an atomic bomb in an attack on human existence.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (World’s First Love)

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