Liberalism Lives

When Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen described the devil to his radio audience (TIME, Feb. 3), Unitarians were quick to note that Father Sheen's Satan sounded like nothing so much as a good Unitarian. Last week the Unitarians came out swinging. Hopping mad was jowlish, Netherlands-born Author Pierre van Paassen (Days of Our Years), a Unitarian minister (with no parish) since January 1946.

Unitarian van Paassen chose to speak his piece* in one of Catholicism's U.S. strongholds--Boston (which is also the citadel of Unitarianism). The occasion: one of six consecutive evening meetings addressed by such outstanding religious liberals as Dr. John Haynes Holmes and Hungary's Bishop Alexander Szent-Ivanyi. At this Unitarian equivalent of a "preaching mission," tall, 52-year-old Liberal van Paassen gave his staid Bostonian audience no opportunity to doze. If liberalism is indeed the devil, the devil is what he gave them. For a full hour and a quarter he sawed the air and pounded the pulpit in defense of human progress and the early perfectibility of man. Excerpts:

"The Kingdom of God has its eye on the future . . . orientated towards a complete change in the composition of the social order.

"Official Christianity, on the other hand, condones, sanctions and glorifies the ways of this world. . . . Christianity has made of injustice, sorrow, suffering, poverty and death, elements of a divine order. In that way it has become a reactionary power."

Believers & the Damned. "Take Monsignor Fulton Sheen, the chief radio artist of the Roman Church in this country. That priest showed conclusively in a recent broadcast, which TIME Magazine reported, what we have known since the days of the Reformation, namely this: that his church has very little in common with the Gospel of Jesus.

"In that broadcast, the Monsignor calmly divided the world of men into two opposing, irreconcilable sections . . . the believers, the camp of Christ, the servants of God; on the other side, the unbelievers, the camp of antiChrist, the servants of Satan.

". . . There are men, and Monsignor Sheen is one of them, who believe in the infallibility of an Italian gentleman called Pius XII. They believe in a place of torment for their opponents, the unbelievers . . . and they call it hell. . . .

"But, if they are believers, I must take leave to call the Dyaks of Borneo, and the natives of Nigeria and the Papuans also believers, for they believe, too, and most positively, in their demons, spooks, their grimacing medicine men, in the saving power of amulets, scarabs and other trinkets and taboos. . . . And who are the unbelievers? They are, among others, people who do not believe in survival after death, who do not believe in the resurrection of the body or in the infallibility of the Pope ... in the sacrificial and propitiating nature of the Mass. They are the unbelievers, the infidels . . . and, I suppose, also the damned in Msgr. Sheen's classification. . . ."

Smoke Screens & the Future. "The age of liberalism is dead, says the Monsignor. ... It is so dark, says Msgr. Sheen, that the liberals cannot even find the clock to see how late it is.

"And there he is somewhat right. It is dark! But it is not so dark as yet that we cannot see that a good deal of the darkness rampant in the world today emanates and derives from those smoke screens which the prelates and the priests of the Roman Church put out to confuse the American people about the real issues at stake in the universal social struggle. . . .

"In official encyclicals the Roman Church has utterly denounced every democratic institution, not vaguely but naming by name the public school, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, equal franchise, separation of church and state, liberalism, modernism, Americanism. . .. The Roman Church has systematically fought every liberal constitution in Europe and in the Americas. It has placed itself squarely across the path of modern science and research and . . . seeks to perpetuate the very evils of which democracy vows to liberate humanity. . . .

"But liberalism is not dead. Liberalism will live long after all the orthodoxies and clericalisms and obscurantisms are dead and forgotten. Liberalism lives today. Liberalism is the very stuff of which the future is made. The very fact that Msgr. Sheen speaks in the way he does is proof incontestable of the living values of liberalism. For Msgr. Sheen speaks and enjoys the right of freedom of expression by virtue of the existence of liberal . . . Unitarian principles in this Republic. . . ."

*TIME readers are still speaking theirs--see LETTERS.

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