We have been reading about the “radio priest”—the young Catholic Father who broadcasts his beliefs from a small chapel in Michigan, and gets as many as three hundred and ninety thousand letters a day from members of the radio audience. He employs eighty-three secretaries to handle this mail—a larger payroll, you must admit, than most young shepherds command. He speaks against birth control, pacifism, and internationalism; and in favor of the multiplication of the body as commanded by God, and of the sanctity of patriotism. This, it seems to us, is a phenomenal leadership. We get accustomed to thinking of the radio merely as an instrument for increasing the sale of trademarked products and the vanity of tenors; yet here is an advocate of the sanctity of patriotism and other barbarous causes, with so many listeners and converts that he can’t handle them without secretaries. We happen to be, in a small way, on the other side of the fence from Father Coughlin on all his points; but we must confess, after reading the statistics about his audience, that being on the other side of the fence from him is like standing all alone in a million-acre field. What an impressive thing it is! Talking against internationalism over the radio is like talking against rain in a rainstorm: the radio has made internationalism a fact, it has made boundaries look so silly that we wonder how mapmakers can draw maps without laughing; yet there stands Father Coughlin in front of the microphone, his voice reaching well up into Canada, his voice reaching well down into Mexico, his voice leaping national boundaries as lightly as a rabbit—there he stands, saying that internationalism will be our ruin, and getting millions of letters saying he is right. Will somebody please write us one letter saying that he is wrong—if only so that we can employ a secretary?
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