Friday, June 25, 2010

"Philosophies at War" by Fulton Sheen

The following, written in 1943, is an interesting reflection on today. I will post more on this work as it is very prophetic...


The basic principle of democracy is the sacredness of the individual as a creature endowed by God with inalienable rights. The basic principle of Nazism and other totalitarian systems is that the individual has no rights except those given him by the Party or the State. In America, freedom resides in man; in Nazism, freedom resides in the race. In America, man endows the State with rights which he received from God; in Nazism, the State endows man with rights which it got from Hitler. One of the best expressionsof this totalitarian idea – that the individual has no value because all value resides in collectivity – is to be found in that influential German, Karl Marx, who in 1843 rejected the democratic conception of man saying: “That each man has a value as a sovereign being is an illusion, a dream and a postulate which affirms that every man has a soul.”

Fulton Sheen, Philosophies at War, 1943.

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