24 These noble appeals for sacred liberty have a timely echo in our days on the lips of those "whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God" ( Act. xx 28) - timely even though they were to find no hearing by reason of the decay of faith or the perversity of men or the blindness of prejudice. To Us, as you know well, Venerable Brethren, are especially addressed the words of the Lord: "Cry out give yourself no rest, raise your voice like a trumpet" ( Isai . lviii. I), and all the more that "the Most High has made His voice heard" ( Psalmus xvii. 14), in the trembling of nature and in tremendous calamities: "the voice of the Lord shaking the earth," ringing in our ears a terrible warning and bringing home to us the hard lesson that all but the eternal is vanity, that "we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come ( Hebr . xiii. 14), but, also, a voice not only of justice, but of mercy and of wholesome reminder to the erring nations. In the midst of these public calamities it behooves us to cry aloud and make known the great truths of the faith not only to the people, to the humble, the afflicted, but to the powerful and the rich, to them that decide and govern the policy of nations, to make known to all the great truths which history confirms by its great and disastrous lessons such as that "sin makes the nations miserable" ( Prov. xiv. 34), "that a most severe judgment shall be for them that bear rule" ( Sap . vi. 7), with the admonition of Psalm ii.: "And now, ye kings, understand; receive instruction, you that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear . . . embrace discipline lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from the just way." More bitter shall be the consequences of these threats when the vices of society are being multiplied, when the sin of rulers and of the people consists especially in the exclusion of God and in rebellion against the Church of Christ: that double social apostasy which is the deplorable fount of anarchy, corruption, and endless misery for the individual and for society.
Source: Communium Rerum (Vatican.va)