Myth of progress takes a hammering

Sometimes it takes a time of humiliation and suffering for a nation to come to its senses. For the United States of America, World War II was just such a time, encouraged on its path of self-recovery by speakers such as Fulton J. Sheen who had a vast radio audience.

In a broadcast on April 12, 1942, Sheen stated that the war would bear fruit for Americans:

We are being stripped of our rags of self-righteousness and as we're stripped of these we will begin to be great. First of all we are beginning to die to that false notion that there's no such thing as evil. How often we have said in our schools in the last generation ‘There's no distinction between right and wrong’; ‘Good and evil are only points of view’; ‘There's no absolute’. But now we're dying to that false notion. We are all pointing our fingers across the seas and we're saying, ‘They're evil’, ‘They're wicked’, ‘These men are devils’.

Well if they're wrong then there must be a right. […] We're being forced onto God's side.

Fulton John Sheen was an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. Ordained a priest in 1919, Sheen quickly became a renowned theologian. For 20 years he hosted the night-time radio program The Catholic Hour on NBC (1930–1950) before moving to television and presenting Life Is Worth Living.

The theme of his broadcast of April 12, 1942, just a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the US into World War II, was how his nation could learn from the suffering and sorrow enveloping them.

Above all the battlefields of the world, beyond the din of national slogans, or the scheming of foxes amid the debates of politics, or the selfish classes of economic forces… [good] will rise again not because of any reshuffling of politicians, or any new theory of economics, for their eyes for politics again will fail, economists again will blunder, foxes will be caught in their own traps, and schemers will be caught in their own schemes but because … 

And he goes on to talk about how victory in life comes through a willingness to suffer and die for the good and the true. 

Sheen looks at all the countries around the world enveloped in the world war or suffering under internal aggression as in Mexico where the government had been killing priests and persecuting Christians.

Sheen now applies the consequences of the "evil hour" of suffering and sacrifice testing Americans. As well as awakening them to the reality of evil, and the powerplay of the devil, he identifies other boons for a nation that had been heading on the wrong path: 

We're being stripped, too, of another rag, the false rag of self-expression.

[There are educators in the United States] who are still talking about self-expression. They want no discipline, no authority, no restraint.

But fortunately we're being stripped of that now by the war and sacrifices being imposed upon us. Now, like Nicodemus, we're beginning to see that nations, like men, must be reborn before they can live.

And finally, we're being stripped of another rag, the rag of progress. We've been saying up to this time that progress was in an ascending straight line; that the mere fact that we lived we got better – the blind cosmic forces were sweeping us on until we became kind of supermen.

But this war reveals to us just the contrary, namely, that no life becomes better unless it dies to the lower self.

This spring which we are now enjoying is not an ascending progress from the old spring. It is a result of the death of the old one.

So must all nations and civilizations die in this hour of darkness before they will come to the day of their victory. 

There will be an hour of humiliation, of this there is no doubt. Our choice as a nation is not between being humbled and not being humbled. The choice is who shall humble us. Will it be our enemies or will we humble ourselves?

Can we pass through that hour of that will bring us to the day of peace and if, therefore, we pass through that hour in such a way that labor lifts up its hand as Christ lifted up his in the carpenter shop in service of his father and, if capital like Joseph of Arimathea gives of its wealth for the service of [society]…

We have been like little eagles quite satisfied with the little nest of this world of ours, smug, satisfied and self-complacent. We forgot that we had immortal souls, we forgot that our souls had wings and we're destined for God who can carry us to heights above the earth. Because we forgot this destiny, God had to stir up this nest of America to unearth us from our smug worldliness and to make us realize that we had another destiny..

That destiny was for Americans of the war years as it is now,  to know love and serve the God for whom they and we were made.

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