The book Communism and the Western Conscience revolves around the single, unsettling idea that Communism, in all its intellectual and practical aspects, is on the Western world's conscience. There is nothing to prevent the breakdown of the old order into a new and dreadful completeness, according to Fulton J. Sheen, because the West has lost the spiritual sensibility that made it great, reducing both man and the cosmos to totally material and base reality. As a result, Communism emerges as the obstinate, neurotic child of a permissive, neglectful father.
Communism and the Conscience of the West has proven to be a prophetic witness to the grave perils of decadent, individualistic liberalism and atheistic, collectivist totalitarianism equally since it first appeared in 1948, during the icy days of the Cold War. While the Cold War has ended and the Soviet Union has disintegrated, these threats have persisted and even spread. Because the fundamental war persists: the moral and spiritual battle for humanity's very essence.