The Woman and the Atom
by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
1952
TAKEN FROM THE WORLD'S FIRST LOVE
There is an excuse for some anxiety today, but no one has a right to
be without hope. Yet the prophets of gloom abound, and the disciples of
hope are few. But before giving reasons for hope, it is well to
inquire why there is so much apprehension today. 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 the 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 suddenly made all humanity fear
that which the individual alone previously feared, namely, death. Death
has unexpectedly become a phenomenon that not only the person must
face, but society or civilization itself. Those who denied personal
immortality used to take refuge in collective immortality, saying that,
although the individual perished, society would be preserved. The
atomic bomb has made collective immortality a myth and restored
personal immortality as the great problem of our age.
The second reason for fear is that religion has again become the
primary factor of human life, and not for religious but for political
reasons. All through pre-Christian and Christian history, wars were
religious. The Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, all fought
religious wars. They fought them in the names of their gods, and
against peoples who believed in other kinds of gods. In Christian
times, wars were still religious. Islamism is a religion and, as
such, crushed Christianity, reducing the number of Bishops in
Africa from seven hundred and fifty in the seventh century, to only
five in the eleventh century, so that Africa now has to be
re-evangelized. Islamism is a religion believing in God but fighting
against those who believe that God revealed Himself in His Divine Son,
Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. There was no quarrel among the
combatants in the older wars about the end of man, namely, his union
with God. There was only a quarrel about the means to
that end.
But today all this has changed. There are no more struggles of the
gods against gods, or of inferior religions against Christianity, but
rather the absolutely new phenomenon of an antireligious force opposing
all religion. Communism is not an atheism which intellectually denies
God in the manner of the sophomore who has just read the first fifteen
pages of a textbook in biology. Rather, Communism is the will
to destroy God. It does not so much negate the existence of
God; rather it challenges Him, changes His essence into evil, and makes
man in the form of a dictator, the Lord and Master of the world.
Whether we will it or not, we are being confronted not with a choice
between religions, but with the supreme alternative of God or anti-God.
Never before were democracy and belief in God so nearly identified;
never before were atheism and tyranny so much a twin. The preservation
of civilization and culture is now one with the preservation of
religion. If the anti-God forces of the world conquer, culture and
civilization will disappear, and we will have to start all over again.
This brings us to the third characteristic of our modern fear, namely
the dissolving of man into nature. Man to be happy must maintain two
relationships: one vertical with God, the other horizontal with
fellowmen. In modern times, man first serves his vertical relations
with God by indifference and irreligion, then his horizontal relations
with neighbor by war and civil strife. Man tried to compensate for the
loss of both by the new dimension of depth, in which he sought to lose
himself in nature. He, who once was rightly proud of being made to the
image and likeness of God, began to boast that he was his own creator
and that he made God to his image and likeness. From this false
humanism came the descent from the human to the animal, when man
admitted he came from the beast, and immediately proceeded to prove it
by acting like a beast in war. More recently he has made himself one
with nature, saying that he is nothing more than a complex arrangement
of chemical elements. He now calls himself "the atomic man,' as
Theology becomes Psychology, Psychology becomes Biology, Biology
becomes Physics.
We can understand what Cournot meant when he said, that God in the
twentieth century would leave men to the fate of mechanical laws of
which He Himself is the author. The atomic bomb acts on humanity as
excessive alcohol acts on a human. If a man abuses the nature of
alcohol and drinks to excess, alcohol renders its own judgment. It says
to the alcoholic: "God made me. He intended that I be used rationally,
that is, for healing and for conviviality. But you have abused
me. I shall therefore turn against you, because you have turned against
me. From now on you will have headaches, dizziness, an upset stomach;
you will lose your reason; you will become a slave to me, and this
although I want you not."
So with the atom. It says to man: "God made me. He put atomic
fission in the universe. That is how the sun lights the world.
The great power which the Omnipotence has locked within my heart was
made to serve you for peaceful purposes: to light your cities, to drive
your motors, to ease the burdens of men. But instead, like Prometheus,
you have stolen this fire from heaven and used it for the first time to
destroy noncombatants. You did not first use electricity to kill a man,
but you first used atomic fission to annihilate cities. For that
reason, I shall turn against you, make you fear what you should love,
make millions of hearts shrink in terror from your enemies, doing to
you what you have done to them, and turn humanity into a victim of
Frankenstein, cowering in bomb shelters from the very monsters you have
created."
It is not that God has abandoned the world, but that the world has
abandoned God and cast its lot with nature divorced from Nature's God.
Man throughout history has always become wicked when, turning his back
on God, he identified himself with nature. The new name for nature is
Science. Science rightly understood means reading the Wisdom of God in
Nature, which God made. Science wrongly understood means reading the
proofs of the Book of Nature while denying that the Book ever had an
Author. Nature or Science is a servant of man under God; but divorced
from God, Nature or Science is a tyrant, and the atom bomb is the
symbol of that tyranny.
Since man trembles before Nature without God, the only hope for
mankind must be found in nature itself. It is as if God in His
Mercy, when man turned his head away from the heavens, still left hope
for him in the very nature toward which he now lowers his eyes.
There is Hope and great Hope, too. The Hope is ultimately in God, but
people are so far away from God they cannot immediately make the
leap. We have to start with the world as it is. The Divine
seems far away. The start back to God must begin with nature. But
is there anything unspoiled and unshattered in all nature with which we
can start the way back? There is one thing, which Wordsworth
called our "tainted nature's solitary boast." That hope is in The
Woman. She is not a goddess, she is not divine, she
is entitled to no adoration. But she came out of our physical and
cosmic nature so holy and good that when God came to this earth He
chose her to be His Mother and the Woman of the world.
It is particularly interesting that the theology of the Russians,
before they were overwhelmed by the cold heart of the anti-God, taught
that when the world rejected the Heavenly Father He sent His Divine
Son, Jesus Christ, to illumine the world. Then they went on to predict
that, when the world would reject Our Lord as it has done today, on
that Dark Night the light of His Mother would arise to illumine the
darkness and lead the world to peace. The beautiful revelation of Our
Blessed Mother at Fatima in Portugal from May to October, 1917, was
another proof of the Russian thesis that, when the world would fight
against the Saviour, He would send His Mother to save us. And her
greatest Revelation took place in the very month the Bolshevik
Revolution began.
What was said on those occasions is too well known to be repeated. Our
present concern is with the Dance of the Sun which took place on
October 13, 1917. Those who love the Mother of Our Lord need no further
evidence of this event. Since those who unfortunately do not know
either would take proof only from those who reject both Our Lord and
His Mother, I offer this description of the phenomenon by the atheist
editor of the anarchist Portuguese newspaper O Seculo,
who was one among the 70,000 who witnessed the incident that day.
It was "a spectacle unique and incredible. ... One can see the immense
crowd turn toward the sun which reveals itself free of the clouds in
full noon. The great star of day makes one think of a silver plaque,
and it is possible to look straight at it without the least discomfort.
... The astonished eyes of the people, full of terror, with heads
uncovered, gaze into the blue of the sky. The sun has trembled, and has
made some brusque movements, unprecedented, and outside of all cosmic
laws. According to the typical expressions of the peasants 'the sun
danced.' The sun turned around on itself like a wheel of fireworks, and
it fell almost to the point of burning the earth with its rays. ... It
remains for those competent to pronounce on the danse macabre
of the sun, which today at Fatima has made Hosannas burst from
the breasts of the faithful and has naturally impressed even
freethinkers and other persons not at all interested in religious
matter."
Another atheistic and antireligious sheet, O
Ordem, wrote: "The sun is sometimes surrounded with crimson
flames, at other times aureoled with yellow and at still others, red;
it seemed to revolve with a very rapid movement of rotation, apparently
detaching itself from the sky, and approached the earth while radiating
strong heat."
Why should Almighty God have chosen to verify the
1917 message of Our Lady about the end of World War I, about the
beginning of World War II in 1939 if men did not repent, through
nature's one indispensable light and heat? We may only conjecture.
There are three possible ways of interpreting the
Miracle of the Sun. The first is to regard it as a warning of the
atomic bomb, which, like a falling sun, would darken the world. It
conceivably might be a portent of the day when man, Prometheus-like,
would snatch fire from the heavens and then rain it down as death on
Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
On the other hand, it could be seen as a sign of hope, namely, that the
Woman who came out of nature is mightier than the forces of nature. The
atomic bomb explodes through fission, or one atom rending and tearing
another atom. But atomic fission is the way the sun lights the
world. God put atomic fission in the universe; otherwise we would
not have discovered it. At Fatima, the fact that Mary could take this
great center and seat of atomic power and make it her plaything, the
fact that she could swing the sun "like a trinket at her wrist," is a
proof that God has given her power over it, not for death, but for
light and life and hope. As Scripture foretold: "And now, in heaven, a
great portent appeared; a woman that wore the sun for her mantle." (Apoc. 12:1.)
There is a third way of viewing the Miracle of the Sun and that is to regard it as a miniature and a cameo of what may yet happen to the world, namely, some sudden cataclysm or catastrophe which would make the world shake in horror as the 70,000 shook at Fatima that day. This catastrophe would be a precocious or uncontrolled explosion of an atomic bomb which would literally shake the earth. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. Einstein and Lindbergh in their scientific writings have mentioned it as a danger. But better than either testimony is the address the Holy Father gave at the opening session of the Pontifical Academy of Science on February 21, 1943 --- two years before the first atomic bomb was dropped.
Since atoms are extremely small it was not thought seriously that
they might also acquire practical importance. Today, instead, such a
question has taken an unexpected form following the results of
artificial radioactivity. It was, in fact, established that in the
disintegration, which the atom of uranium undergoes when bombarded by
neutrons, two or three neutrons are freed, each launching itself ---
one being able to meet and smash another uranium atom.
From special calculation it has been ascertained that in such a
way (neutron bombardment causing a breakdown in the uranium atom) in
one cubic meter of oxide power of uranium, in less than one
one-hundredth of a second, there develops enough energy to elevate more
than sixteen miles a weight of a billion tons: a sum of energy which
could substitute for many years the action of all the great power
plants of the world.
Above all, therefore, it should be of utmost importance that the energy originated by such a machine should not be let loose to explode --- but a way found to control such power with suitable chemical means. Otherwise there could result, not only in a single place but also for our entire planet, a dangerous catastrophe.
On October 13, 1917, believers and unbelievers
prostrated themselves upon the ground during the Miracle of the Sun,
most of them pleading to God for Mercy and Forgiveness. That whirling
sun, which spun like a giant wheel and thrust itself to the earth as if
it would burn it with its rays, may have been the harbinger of a world
spectacle that will draw millions to their knees in a rebirth of faith.
And as Mary revealed herself in that first Miracle of the Sun, so may
we look forward to another revelation of her power when the world has
its next rehearsal for the Dies Irae.
Devotion to Our Lady of Fatima is actually a petition to a Woman to
save man from nature made destructive through the rebellious intellect
of man. At other moments in history, she was a Mediatrix of Her Divine
Son for man; but here she is a Mediatrix for nature. She seizes the
original atomic power which is the sun and proves it is hers to use for
peace. And yet it is not apart from man that she would save him
from nature, as it was not apart from her free consent that God would
save humanity from sin. Man must cooperate through penance. At Salette,
Our Lady asked for penance. At Lourdes, three times the Blessed Mother
said: "Penance, penance, penance." At Fatima, the same penitential
antiphon is struck time and time again. The atom will not destroy
man, if man will not destroy himself. An atom in revolt is only a
symbol of man in revolt. But humanity in repentance will purchase a
nature in complete control. Like the threatened destruction of Nineveh,
the threat of another World War is conditional. The Blessed Mother
revealed at Fatima in 1917 that World War I would end in another year.
If men repented, she said, a great era of peace and prosperity would
come to the world. But if not, another World War, worse
than the first, would begin in the reign of the next Pontiff. (Pius XI.) The Civil War in Spain in 1936 was thus
looked upon by Heaven as the curtain raiser and the prologue of World
War II. This war would be the means by which "God will punish the world
for its crimes by means of war, of hunger, and of persecution of the
Church and the Holy Father.
"To prevent this I come to ask the consecration of Russia to My
Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation on the first
Saturdays. Russia will scatter her errors throughout the world,
provoking wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be
martyred, the Holy Father will have to suffer much, and various nations
will be annihilated."
There then comes a missing paragraph, which the Church has not yet
given to the world. It probably refers to these times. Then, as if to
indicate that it will be a Time of Trouble, comes the concluding
paragraph: "In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy
Father will consecrate Russia to me, and it will be converted and a
certain period of peace will be granted to the world."
Repentance, prayer, sacrifice --- these are conditions of peace, for
they are the means by which man is remade. Fatima throws a new light on
Russia, for it makes a distinction between Russia and the Soviets. It
is not the Russian people that must be conquered in war; they have
already suffered enough since 1917. It is Communism that must be
crushed. This can be done by a Revolution from within. It is well
to remember that Russia has not one, but two atomic bombs. Her second
bomb is the pent-up sufferings of her people under the yoke of slavery,
and when that explodes it will be with a force a thousand times greater
than that which comes from the fission of an atom! We need a
Revolution, too, as well as Russia. Our revolution must be from within
our hearts, that is, by the remaking of our lives. As we proceed with
our Revolution, the Revolution in Russia will grow apace.
O Mary, we have exiled Thy Divine Son from our lives, our councils, our education and families! Come with the light of the sun as the symbol of His Power! Heal our wars, our dark unrest; cool the cannon's lips so hot with war! Take our minds off the atom and our souls out of the muck of nature! Give us rebirth in Thy Divine Son, us, the poor children of the earth grown old with age! "Advance Woman, in Thy Assault upon Omnipotence!" Shame us all into enlisting as Thy warriors of peace and love!
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