Address delivered on January 17, 1943      For the benefit of those who may not have heard the Catholic Hour the last two Sundays, I shall briefly summarize the general theme of these broadcasts:  A war involves nations and alliances;  a revolution involves ideas.  Now there are three distinct ideologies involved in this war:  Totalitarianism, which we described last Sunday; the secularist culture of the Western World; and the Christian order.  Today and next Sunday we shall describe the secularist culture of the Western World.      By the secularist ideology we mean the attempt to preserve human and democratic values on a non-moral and non-religious foundation.  Secularism means the separation of the parts of life, for example, education, politics, economics, and the family, from their center which is God.  Each department of life is considered as having absolute autonomy and in no way to be brought under the sway of ethical principles of the sovereign law of God.      Condemnation of the secularism of the Western World is not condemnation of the Western World.  There is the same distinction between them as between a sick man and his disease.  We regard the disease as evil, but the man as good.  In an impersonal order, we make a distinction between the ship and its barnacles.  The ship in its passage through the seas picks up barnacles which impede its free passage through the waters;  the ship must occasionally be taken to drydock to have the barnacles scraped away.      Now Western civilization, or what some call democracy, may be likened to s ship.  America, in particular, is a good ship.  It carries the precious cargo of belief in inalienable rights and liberties, in the value of the human person, in representative government and equal opportunities.  it is freighted down with the precious cargo of the four freedoms of which our President spoke: Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.  It is freighted down also with the cargo of the right of sanctuary, for America has been in the past, and is now, a sanctuary for the persecuted as no other land on the face of God’s earth has been a sanctuary.  Finally, this ship is good for it is freighted down with the precious cargo of all those values which make you and me proud to call ourselves Americans.      The barnacles of which I speak constitute what we have already called the passive or the soft barbarisms from within; and they are a danger to Western civilization, not quite as open as Totalitarianism, but just as insidious.  These barnacles might be called superstitions or false dogmas; in any case they are assumptions of sensate culture which the press, education, and public opinion accept as unchallenged truths.  today we shall consider three of these barnacles: Progress, Scientism, and Materialism- and then we shall attempt to scrape them off.     The superstition of Progress asserts itself in some such fashion as this, in our class rooms, best sellers, and high class journals:  Man is naturally good and indefinitely perfectible, and thanks to great cosmic floods of evolution will be swept forward and will become better and better until he becomes a kind of god.  Goodness increases with time while evil and error decline.  history represents the gradual but steady advance of man up the hill of the more abundant and happy life.  No special institutions, no moral discipline, no divine grace are necessary for the progress of man, for progress is automatic, due to the free play of natural forces and the operation of freedom in a world released from the superstition of religion.  Because evil and sin are only vestigial remnants from the bestial past, evolution and science and education will finally eradicate them.  Such is the superstition of Progress.       This superstition confuses mechanical advancement with moral betterment.  there is no denying the fact that there has been great progress in the material order, but mechanical development does not necessarily imply moral development.  Progress in "things" is not necessarily progress in "persons."  Planes may go faster, but man does not necessarily become happier.  Progress in medicine is not necessarily progress in ethics, and mastery over disease is not necessarily mastery over sin.  Conquest of nature does not mean conquest of selfishness.  Time does not always operate in favor of human betterment;  because a man is sick, time does not necessarily make him better.  Unless the evil is corrected, time operates in favor of disease, decay, and death.       The superstition of Progress denies human responsibility.  When human goodness is attributed to automatic laws of nature, but never to good will;  when evil is explained in terms of environment, heredity, bad milk, insufficient playgrounds, and those naughty ductless glands, but never to a perverse will, then the world, however-much it may talk about freedom, is most in danger of losing it.  True progress is ethically and not cosmically conditioned;  it depends not on the refinement of animal impulses, but on their deliberate control through human intention.  There is really therefore only one true progress in the world and that consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.       History does not prove we are making progress;  instead of evolving from savagery to civilization, we seem to be devolving from civilization to savagery.  The interval between the Napoleonic War and the Franco-Prussian War was fifty-five years;  the interval between the Franco-Prussian War and the first World War was forty-three years; and the interval between the first World War and this one was twenty-one years.  Fifty-five, forty-three, twenty-one years– and each war more destructive than the former, and at a time when man materially had more to make for happiness than at any other period of history.  Is that Progress?  With great truth does the present Holy Father say:  "They boasted of progress when they were in fact relapsing into decadence."     The sad and tragic fact is that modern man under sufficient stress, and even amidst comforts spiced with lust, will do deeds of evil as terrible as any recorded in history.  Barbarism is not behind us;  it is beneath us.  And it can emerge at any moment, unless our wills, aided by the grace of God, repress it.  the modern superstition of man’s indefinite perfectibility without God’s sustaining graces, forgets that history is creating ever increasing possibilities for chaos and wars.  Our modern mechanical ability to move quickly can go hand in hand with power to do more evil.  Let no one deny it:  Our scientific progress has outstripped our moral progress.  We are a more comfortable people than our ancestors, but are we necessarily a happier people?  The myth of necessary progress is exploded.  But that is no reason why the Liberals who were so optimistic about Progress should now fall into a hellish despair.  Because the evil in the world does not evolve right does not mean there is no right!  It only means that we have to put it right;  and in order to do this we may have to learn the lesson of a Cross, and the travail of Gethsemane.  Maybe we had better get back again to God!      By the superstition of Scientism is not meant science but rather that particular abuse of it which affirms that the scientific method is the only valid way of knowing anything.  It is this superstition that makes people say: "Science tells us," instead of "the Scriptures say," or "the Church tells us," or the "accumulated wisdom of the centuries assures us," or "the moral law bids us."  Science is supposed to be the last word on any subject.  Hence there is no place for values, tradition, metaphysics, revelation, faith, authority, or theology.  God has no purposes in the universe, first of all because there is no God and secondly because there are no purposes.      Science is a very valid and necessary way of knowing, but only of knowing those things which are subject to experimentation and to the methods of a laboratory.  The great values of life- such as justice, truth, charity- are beyond such experimentation.  No one yet has ever been able to put a mother’s love into a test tube, and yet who will deny its reality?  Nor can one throw a man into a cauldron to boil to see if he gives forth the unmistakably green fumes of envy and jealousy.       Scientism has ruined higher education in the United States by prostrating itself before the god of counting and by assuming that anyone who has counted something that has never been counted before is a learned man.  It makes no difference what you count, but in the name of heaven, count!  A certain Western University awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for a thesis on the "Microbic Content of Cotton Undershirts."  A mid-Western University has counted the ways of washing dishes, and certain Eastern Universities have counted the infinitives in Augustine, the datives in Ovid, and the four ways of cooking ham, while another counted the "psychological reactions of the post-rotational eye-movement of squabs."     In the madness of specialization we have come to know more and more about less and less;  but in the meantime we have lost ourselves in the maze of numbers.  Fed with huge quantities of undigested facts our judgment has become hampered, and we have only unrelated bits of information instead of wisdom, which alone is true knowledge.  Go into any Catholic school in the United States tomorrow and take out a child in the first or second grade and ask him: "Who made you?" "What is the purpose of life?" "Are you different from an animal?"  Any such child aged seven or eight could give you a complete philosophy of life.  But ask a Ph.D. who counts the microbes on cotton undershirts why he is here or where he is going,  and he could not tell you.  He would not have a five-cent gadget in his house five minutes without knowing its purpose;  but he would live ten, twenty, or sixty years without knowing why he is here or where is is going.  What is the use of living unless we know the purpose of being a man?       It is not true, as is so often asserted, that modern youth is revolutionary because he has lacked sufficient economic advantages.  Never in the history of the world did youth have so many.  The modern youth is revolutionary because he has no purpose in life and hence doubts the worthwhileness of living amidst plenty.  Anything that loses its purpose becomes revolutionary.  When a boiler loses its purpose it explodes; when a man loses his purpose he revolts.      We are paying the penalty for divorcing our science from God.  Nature, which science studies, belongs to God- and when man turns against God, nature or science turns against man.  Francis Thompson beautifully spoke of this when he found that the whole world turned against him because he would not answer the call of God:

"I tempted all His servitors, but to find My own betrayal in their constancy, In faith to Him their fickleness to me, Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit." (The Hound of Heaven)

     That is the true story: nature will be false to anyone who is untrue to its Maker.  For years scientists have been discovering the wonders of nature, finding in the tiny atom a miniature of the great solar system.  But instead of glorifying God for the order, law, and harmony they found in His universe, many of them vainly assumed that because they discovered the laws they were the authors of the Book of Nature, instead of only its proof readers.  Tearing nature away from God, nature now turned against them; for refusing to serve God, nature refused to serve man.  The result: That science, which was supposed to be our servant, is now our master.  Why do millions in the world shrink in terror from a machine in the air?  Why does man use his technique to destroy man?  Why do children crouch in dread and mothers dig like moles into the bowels of the earth as bombs fall from the skies, and all hell is let loose, if it is not because something had got out of our control?  Maybe we had better get back again to God!      The superstition of Materialism affirms that man has no soul and there is no future life.  Man is not a creature made to the image and likeness of God but a "psychoanalytical bag with a physiological libido" or a "stimulus response mechanism," the end of whose life is the acquisition of money, the ceaseless enjoyment of pleasure, and the avoidance of sacrifice.  Such is the superstition of Materialism.      It simply is not true that peace follows material prosperity, and unhappiness follows the want of it.  The major frustrations of life are not economic.  Glance around at those who possess abundance of material goods.  does happiness increase with wealth?  There is more frustration among the rich than among the poor.  It is the former who are most addicted to selfishness, who are satiated and unhappy.  Sin and evil do not disappear with the advent of gold.  Society can become inhuman while preserving all the advantages of great material prosperity.      If there are no standards outside the material how shall we judge the new acquisitive society which is arising- based on the acquisitiveness of power?  As fortunes dwindle, as taxes eat up inheritances, and as bureaucracies begin to administer vast sums of money formerly administered by capitalists and bankers, envious, greedy, and lustful men will seek to become dispensers of that social booty- and who shall say that these new financiers of power are wrong?  Given no standards other than materialism, wherein responsibility is dis-joined from power, and we will have a new capitalism.

"Bidding the law makers curtsey to their will; Hooking both right and wrong to the opposite To follow as it draws." (Shakespeare)

     The modern man wants back his soul:  He wants the intelligentsia to stop the nonsense of regarding him as an animal, a libido, a toolmaker, or a voter, and to begin to look at him as a creature made to the image and likeness of God.      It is pathetic to hear people asking: "What can I as an individual do in this crisis?"  So many feel that they are like robots, like cogs in a great machine, and that they would like to get away from it all, even if it meant climbing back into the Catacombs.  Like the Jews in exile they hang their harps on the trees, and ask how can they sing a song in a foreign land.       In plain, simple language, all these individuals want their souls back.  They want to be whole again.  They are sick of being thrown into a Darwinian pot to boil as a roast, or into a Freudian stew to squirm as a libido, or into the Marxian sandwich to be squeezed between two conflicting slices of capital and labor.  They want to possess that which makes them human, gives meaning to politics, economics, psychology, sociology- namely, the soul.      The modern view of the war is wrong, and if we go on following it we will end in blind alleys, frustrated hopes, and unhappy existences.  It is not nearly as funny as we thought to make a monkey out of a man.       The millions of our boys on the battlefronts of the world, fighting for their lives and for great moral issues, will recover their souls.  Amidst wounds and death, fire and shell, they will get close to the meaning of life and to that something within them that makes them human.  They will be angry when they look back on the way some of them were educated.  They will come to hate not only the enemy they meet in battle, but the intelligentsia who told them they were only animals.  They will begin to realize that they were robbed of their greatest possession- faith in the soul.  For a while they will wander around the battlefields like Magdalen in the Garden saying: "They have taken away my Lord; and I know not where they have laid him."  But when they do stumble on Him, as Magdalen did when she saw the red livid marks of nails, they will enter once again into the possession of the soul.  And when they come marching home there will be a judgment on those who told them that they had none; they will live like new men and they will give a rebirth to America under God.      Why do we mention these barnacles on the ship of democracy?  Because they are endangering a sound American life; because they belong to an outmoded way of thinking that is dying with this World War;  and because we are called upon in this war to be the moral leaders of the world.  Never before was a greater task thrust into any nation’s hands than is now thrust into our own.  We have a great vocation and we must be worthy of it.  The great ship of America will one day be called upon to cross the seven seas to bring food, clothing, order, and peace to the enslaved nations of the world.  And we do not want that ship to be held up in its mission by barnacles and false superstitions.  May I therefore ask you- Jews, Protestants, and Catholics- those of you who believe that progress is conditioned on morality, and that over and above science there is a knowledge of God, to do what you can to make a Holy Hour a day that America may be worthy of its high calling.  For it will be only with shipyards of prayer and sacrifice and love of God and His law that we can build an ark that will resist the floods of blood let loose in this World War!      America awake!  you have a high summons!  Walk worthy of your vocation.  Purge yourself!  Repent!  Your greatness is in your return to God!     

I have been wondering where the intelligent Christian discussion is about the "War on Terror."  The Christian conversation has been virtually absent among conservative Christian leaders who have taken hold of the Social Gospel as of late.  And it is grossly distorted, virulent, and unintelligent among the Christians of the radical religious left.  You may be surprised to discover that there was a strong faith-based anti-war movement during World War II.  Historians say that it flourished among groups more aligned with the principles of socialism, and that the movement quickly changed gears after Germany invaded Russia.  Suddenly, then, war was OK.  I have listened to the Catholic Hour recordings of the late Bishop Fulton Sheen for years.  My belief that the thinkers of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s have the most important message to give us today is confirmed by the work and message of Bishop Sheen.  Over the next few weeks, I will be presenting transcripts from his 1943 Broadcasts on the Catholic Hour titled, "The Crisis in Christendom."  In part, the series is Bishop Sheen’s critique of the anti-war movement of his time.  It is also a critique of the Social Gospel, which has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the Christian Church recently.  These two things which were over-running the Church in America during World War II, along with some other concerns, formed the basis for Bishop Sheen’s thesis that there was a "Crisis in Christendom."  He pushes the Christian conversation beyond the mechanics and ideologies surrounding the war, and into the more important Christian question- namely, war or no war, humanity is spiritually ill and is need of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  The crisis in Christendom? – We’ve left that central teaching of the faith behind. As the historical context is strikingly and forbodingly similar to the context the American Church finds itself today, Bishop Sheen’s discussion has never been more relevant than now. His is a voice from the past- a prophetic voice- which eerily speaks to the reality of American Christendom today.  Print it out, e-mail it to your friends, and enjoy it at your leisure.

January 3, 1943    War and Revolution      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)      These broadcasts approach the war from the divine point of view, because it is the only explanation which fits the facts. The great mass of the American people are frankly dissatisfied with the ephemeral and superficial commentaries on what is happening.  Being endowed with intelligence they want to know why it is happening. A recent poll revealed that one-third of the people did not know what the war was about. We all know what we are fighting against; we want to know what we are fighting for. We all know that we are in a war; we want to know what we must do to make a lasting peace.  We know whom we hate; but we want to know what we ought to love. We know we are fighting against a barbarism that is intrinsically wicked; we want to know what we have to do to make the resurrection of that wickedness impossible.      In this broadcast we will show what the war is not and then what the war is. Let us begin by clearing away three false conceptions of the war.      First, this war is not merely a political and an economic struggle, but rather a theological one. It is not political and economic, because politics and economics are concerned only with the means of living. And it is not just the means of living that have gone wrong, but the ends of living.  Never before in the history of the world have there been so many abundant means of life.  Never before was there so much power, and never before have men so earnestly prepared to use that power for the destruction of human life. The basic reason why our economics and politics have failed as a means to peace is because both have forgotten the end and purpose of life. We have been living as if civilization, culture, and peace, were by-products of economic activity instead of the other way round. Politics and economics alone are as incapable of curing our ills as an alcohol rub is incapable of curing cancer; and if we assume they will cure, or that they are primary, then this world war will end in socialism and socialism is only an obligatory and enforced organization of the means of living to prevent utter ruin. In a word, it is not our politics that has soured, nor our economics that has rusted; it is our hearts.  We live and act as if God had never made us. That is why I say this war is not political and economic in its fundamental aspects; it is theological.      Second, this war has not been caused merely by evil dictators. It is too commonly assumed that our milk of international peace has curdled, because a few wicked dictators poured vinegar into it. Hence if we could rid the world of these evil men, we would return to a world of comparative prosperity.  What a delusion! These dictators are not the creators of the world’s evil; they are it’s creatures.  They are only boils on the surface of the world’s skin; they come to the surface because there is bad blood beneath.  It will do no good to lance the boils, if we leave the source of the infection untouched.  Have we forgotten that from 1914 to 1918 our cry was "Rid the world of the Kaiser and we will have peace"? Well, we got rid of the Kaiser, but we had no peace. On the contrary, we prepared for another war in the space of twenty-one years. Now we are shouting, "Rid the world of Hitler and we will have peace." We must rid the world of Hitler, but we will not have peace unless we supply those moral and spiritual forces the lack of which produced Hitler. There are a thousand Hitlers hidden under the barbarism of the present day.  Peace does not follow the extermination of dictators, because dictators are only the effect of wrong philosophies of life, they are not the causes. They come into environments already prepared for them, like certain forms of fungi come into wet wood. Nazism is the disease of culture in its most virulent form, and could not have come to power in Germany unless the rest of the world were sick. Were we honest we would admit that we are all citizens of an apostate world, a world that has abandoned God. For this apostacy, we are all in part responsible, but none more than we Christians who were meant to be the salt of the earth to prevent its corruption. No! It is not the bad dictators who made the world bad; it is bad thinking.  It is, therefore, in the realm of ideas that we will have to restore the world!      Third, this war is not like any other war. When hostilities cease, we will not go back again to our former way of life. This war is not an interruption of the normal; it is rather the disintegration of the abnormal. We are definitely at the end of an era of history. The old wells have run dry; the staff of unlimited progress on which we leaned, has pierced our hands; the quicksands of our belief in the unqualified goodness of human nature have swallowed the superstructure of our materialist world. We are now face to face with a fact which some reactionaries still ignore, namely, that society can become inhuman while preserving all the technical and material advantages of a so called advanced civilization.  We will not get back again to the same kind of a world we had before this war; in fact, he who would want to do so would want the kind of world that produced Hitler.  The world is pulling up its tents;  humanity is on the march. The old world is dead.      That brings us to what the war is.  There are really two great events in the modern world:  The war and the revolution.   A war involves nations, alliances, men, armies, defense plants, guns, and tanks. A revolution involves ideas.  A war moves on a horizontal plane of land, territory, and men; a revolution moves on the vertical plane of ideology, doctrine, dogmas and creeds and philosophies of life.  This distinction is very important, for it explains how nations can be on the same side of a war and on different sides of a revolution. Russia, for example, is on our side of the war, but Russia is not yet on our side of the revolution; please God some day it may be.      The war is only an episode in the revolution—something  incidental.  It is the military phase by which the revolution is working itself out.  The revolution is far more impor- tant and will long outlast the war, for this world war is not a conflict of nations, as was the last world war, but a conflict of ideologies.   A far more important question than ‘Who will win the war?’ is the question: ‘Who will win the revolution?’ In other words, what kind of ideologies or philosophies of life will dominate the world when this war is finished?       A revolution, we said, involved ideologies, dogmas, and creeds. How many philosophies of life are involved in this revolution? It is quite generally and falsely assumed that there are only two: The democratic and totalitarian, or the Christian and the anti-Christian. Would to God it were that simple! There are actually three great philosophies of life or ideologies involved: First, the totalitarian world view; second, the secularist or sensate view which has attached itself like a barnacle to the ship of the Western World; and, third, the Christian world view.      We will devote a broadcast to each of these later on. Suffice it presently to understand that there are three world orders struggling for the mastery of the world. We repeat. There is the Totalitarian world view which is anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and anti-human. There is the secularist world view which is humanistic and democratic, but which attempts to preserve these values on a non-religious and non-moral foundation, by identifying morality and self-interest instead of morality and the will of God. And there is the Christian world view which grounds the human and the democratic values of the Western World on a moral and religious basis. This Christian view includes not only Christians but also Jews, who historically are the roots of the Christian tradition, and who religiously are one with the Christian in the adoration of God and the acceptance of the moral law as the reflection of the Eternal Reason of God.      Our choice in this war is to be made among three dogmas: Whether man is a tool of the State, as the Totalitarian believes; or whether man is an animal, as the secularist tradition of the Western World—including too many Americans—believe; or whether man is a crea- ture made to the image and likeness of God, as the Christian believes.      There is the essence of the conflict. We simply cannot go on as we were. A nation cannot live in war as it does in peace, nor can a Church live in war as it does in peace.  What are we Catholics doing now, as Catholics, which is any different from what we did in the days of peace? Do we realize that as members of Christ’s Mystical Body on earth we must repent for the world? No occasional prayer for victory, no fulfillment of the minimum of Christian duties, no sporadic exhibitionism, fulfills either our obligation to the Church or to our country. We should know better than anyone else, as the Holy Father told us, that the whole world is in darkness because Christ has been re-crucified. May I therefore renew the appeal of last year that you make a Holy Hour every day, including in it the morning Mass.  Start tomorrow morning. Let every pastor in the United States notice the difference in the morning.  If you cannot go to Mass and Communion, spend a Holy Hour in meditation and prayer in your home.  Pray for victory? Yes! We will win that, there is no doubt! But the peace, the restoration of the moral law, a new order based on God’s justice—that will come only by a return to the mind and spirit of the Church during the first few centuries. Our bodies need not be in catacombs, but our minds must think and pray as if our bodies were.      And my friends among the Prot- estant and Jews, what are you doing now that is different from what you did in the days of false peace? Are you saying more prayers, more patiently making sacrifices in war time, and living as if God meant something in the dust of common lives? Why should not you too spend a Holy Hour a day in medi- tation and prayer that the moral law of God may win over both the indifference and the hatred of a world gone mad? To all, whomsoever you be, who writes us, we will gladly send you, free of charge, a Prayer Book for War Time, entitled "The Shield of Faith."    We have a double duty in this war, not a single one.  We must defeat the active barbarism from without, and we must defeat the passive barbarism from within. We must use our swords with an outward thrust against Totalitarianism and its hard barbarism; but we must also use the sword with an inward thrust to cut away our own soft barbarism.  We have a war to win; and we have a revolution to win.  A war to win by overthrowing the power of the enemy in battle; a peace to win by making ourselves worthy to dictateit. Victory on the field will conquer the hard barbarism. Repentence and catharsis of spirit alone will conquer the soft barbarism. Guns, ships, planes, dynamite, factories, ships and bombs will put down the first evil. Prayer, sorrow contrition, purging of our hearts and souls, meditation, reparation, sacrifice, and a return to God, will alone accomplish the second. If we merely defeat the hard barbarism and lose to the soft we will be at the beginning of cyclic wars, which will return and return until we are beaten and purged and broken in the creative despair of getting back to God.      This is the true revolution!  All the other revolutions of the twentieth century have been from without; this time we want a revolution from within. The revolutions which shook Europe during the last twenty-five years only shifted power from one class to another, and booty from one pocket to another, and authority from one party to another. This time we want a revolution that will change hearts!  A revolution like the one pictured in the "Magnifieat of the Blessed Virgin" which was a thousand times more revolutionary than the Manifesto of Karl Marx.   The trouble with all political and ecoinomic revolutions is they are not revolutionary enough! They still leave hate in the heart of men! Prayer In Time Of War (adapted from Cardinal Newman) O Lord Jesus Christ, Who in Thy mercy hearest the prayers of sinners, pour forth, we beseech Thee, all grace and blessing upon our country and its citizens. We pray in particular for the President—for our Congress—for all our soldiers—for all who defend us in ships, whether on the seas or in the skies—for all who are suffering the hardships of war. We pray for all who are in peril or in danger. Bring us all after the troubles of this life into the haven of peace, and reunite us all together forever, O dear Lord, in Thy glorious heavenly kingdom.