At this critical moment in history, there are two social justice priorities for the Catholic Church in the United States: the defense of life at all stages and in all conditions, and the defense of religious freedom for all. During this Fortnight for Freedom, in which the U.S. bishops are calling all Catholics to pray and work for religious freedom, it’s important to reflect on the linkage between these two great causes. As the language of the First Amendment to the Constitution indicates, religious freedom in the United States has always been understood as one of a cluster of fundamental freedoms—spheres of free thought and action essential to individual liberty and civil society.

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Address delivered on December 22, 1940, by Msgr. Fulton Sheen

Nothing in all the world is as relentless in unmasking a false way of life as war. It strips men and institutions bare and exposes them in their naked reality. It is easy to believe in any theory until it is subjected to the acid test of experience. Just as some children will not accept their mother’s caution that they must not eat too many bananas, but learn the lesson the hard way by becoming so sick that they can never look at a banana again, so too the world has tasted the bitter dregs of its own philosophy and learned by tragedy what it refuses to learn by counsel. In a false peace a false philosophy survives; but when war empties its seven vials of wrath upon the world, spurious faiths dissolve and Babels crumble. This World War is doing that very thing. It is shattering our illusions, and principally two of them which have become assumptions of our modern life: Firstly that man is naturally good and indefinitely progressive; and secondly that social perfection is attainable in this world.

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Address delivered on January 3, 1943, by Msgr. Fulton Sheen

This year it is my privilege to address you on the subject of the Crisis in Christendom. Naturally, it will concern itself with this awful cataclysm which has brought the world to the edge of a great abyss. There are two ways of looking at this war: One as a journalist and the other as a theologian. The journalist tells us what happens; the theologian tells us not only why it happens, but also what matters. If we look at this war through the eyes of a journalist or a commentator, it will be only a succession of events without any remote cause in the past, or any great purpose in the future. But if we look at the war through the eyes of God, then the war will not be meaningless, though we may not presently see its meaning. It may very well be a purposeful purging of the world’s evil that the world may have a rebirth of freedom under His Holy Law, for "Every human path leads on to God, He holds a myriad finer threads than gold, And strong as holy wishes, drawing us With delicate tension upward to Himself." (E. C. Stedman, Protest of Faith).

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Most Americans haven’t the foggiest idea that a quasi-Stalinist, violently anti-Catholic regime once existed on our southern borders. Those who don’t know how bad Mexico was in the late 1920s are about to learn, though: at least those who see For Greater Glory, a recently-released movie about the Cristero War, a passionate (and bloody) defense of Catholicism that’s remembered today, if at all, because of Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory.

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