From an Address of Pope Pius XII, July, 1952:
"It is as if everything had conspired to make it more difficult and even impossible for Christians to preserve their personal dignity.
"The technique and industry of advertising, of propaganda, of the wireless and the cinema, allow the mind scarcely any repose. From the first, they bar the entrance to any inner recollections. A type of person comes into being who cannot bear to be alone, even an hour with himself, or with his God.
“Industrialization, which surrenders the individual to work and industry, is obtruding its methods upon agriculture.
“Social life is characterized by the highly complex dependence of individuals, and the individual family, upon public authority, upon technical economic and social controls, upon centralization and organization. City life determines, ever more relentlessly, the form of human existence, the individual-being unendingly swallowed up by the mass.
"The deep tragedy of this development lies in the fact that it has its full effects just at the moment when philosophers of a purely materialistic stamp, knowing well what they are about, desire to destroy human personality and to make the individual an element in the mass, for which end they ruthlessly exploit every technical and socio-economic situation for their own ends."
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