The End of the Road For 25,000 Americans

Every 2 1/2 minutes, someone in the United States tries to commit suicide. Most of them fail. Yet each year 25,000 Americans are successful – a strange but necessary usage of the world! Although suicide is called the “West Coast weakness,” every West Coast clergyman knows the troubled people who come West because they found life in the EAst intolerable. The “West Coast weakness,” is simply the end of the road for many who have traveled a long way, and when the golden symbols of a new life in the West grow pale, restricted by the forbidding vast Pacific, they then and there abandon all hope — and finally life itself.

The suicide of Marilyn Monroe — young, beautiful, affluent, and a symbol of pleasure – has done much to throw the spotlight on this grim national problem and to arouse the Medical Profession to give it special attention. Although the Medical Profession tends to call it a “health” problem, its incidence is highest among the successful and well-to-do who can afford medical help. The facts here are startling. According to reports, practically all of the 25,000 suicides in the United States are white, and the overwhelming majority. Protestant. It would be easy to draw conclusions from this, but safer to ask questions. Is the Negro’s psychology special protection against suicide? If so whites might profit from the study. Or, is the Roman Catholic confessional pastorally more effective than the counseling of the Protestant clergyman? And if so, why? Since suicide is a matter of life and death, we ought not to be squeamish about any sources that will throw light on the problem.

It would seem safe to infer from the relatively high incidence of suicides among white Protestants that suicide occurs more frequently among the “haves” than the “have-nots.” The suicide is frequently a person who has gotten out of life what he wants, only then to find that he no longer wants life. He has learned from experience what others have heard but do not believe- that success, fame, wealth are not themselves able to make life desirable.

Life without God and without the transcendent and supra-personal affirmations of the Christian faith – even in Beverly Hills, Nob Hill, or Chevy Chase – becomes the stuff out of which suicide is made. Those who have drunk from the golden goblets and find themselves still tortured by indefinable thirst, seeing no solution, come to regard existence as a disease, and suicide as a cure. An intellectual assault has long been waged by academic institution and stage, author and playwright, positivist scientist and moral relativist, against the Central Affirmations of the Christian faith. But alongside this sophisticated attempt to discredit Christianity is the grim, chilling, existential demonstration by thousands of Americans whose suicide argues, in a language hard to be refuted, that unless the God of Christianity is in heaven, life is hell, and suicide a successful redemption.

The Vacation and the Kremlin and the Italian Elections

The countenance which Pope John shows to the Kremlin is softer than that of his predecessor, and it is evoking considerable speculation among political and ecclesiastical pundits. This has not been diminished, to say the least, by the recent Italian elections. Premier Amintore Fanfani’s “opening to the left,” which involved an alliance between his Christian Democrats and the Marxist but non-Communist Socialist Party, received a setback. The Christian Democrats polled their smallest share of the vote since World War II, while considerable, and surprising, gains were registered by the Communists and the free enterprise Liberal Party.

Commenting on the observation made by some that the Roman Catholic Church was at least partly responsible, The Wall Street Journal had this to say:

“In previous years, Church leaders had equated voting for the Communists with sin, and have also generally disapproved of most parties other than the Christian Democrats. This year, Pope John stressed tolerance and even met with Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s son-in-law. The Communists attempted to use this incident as proof that the Church no longer condemned political support of the far left. The Large Italian Communist vote is generally considered a protest vote against current politicians and economic conditions – whoever or whatever they may be – rather than evidence of widespread ideological support of Marxism. Many Italian Communists also consider themselves good Catholics.
“The Communist total made it the largest Red Vote in the free world. Worried one diplomat here, ‘It is something for the whole Western world to be concerned about when Communists can gain substantially in a free election’.””

That the free world’s largest Red vote should take place in the shadow of the Vatican is an embarrassment around the world welcome and covet, but everywhere we go we talk weapons (which are indispensable enough), and forget that people- redeemed people- are the ultimate weapon in a fallen society. We lack one thing: in our living, we lack a hunger for abundant life; in our hostility to the Communist lie, we lack a passion for the truth that sets men free.

Those who try to save the nation and the world by methods aimed to compensate for the vanishing awareness of Christian truth and for the vanishing sense of Christian responsibility are engaged in a hopeless task. Trying to save a person on the assumption that the Gospel of redemption is dispensable is the one sure way to insure their doom.