Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius
May 29, 2016
Spiritual Ponderings
Wisdom of Fulton Sheen
 
“Far better it is for you to say: "I am a sinner," than to say: "I have no need of religion." The empty can be filled, but the self-intoxicated have no room for God.” ―  Fulton J. Sheen.  The wisdom of Archbishop Fulton Sheen has always impressed me.  He had a way of explaining things about religion and the modern world that made me think about the world and faith in new ways.  The following quotes continue to be from his book: Thoughts for Daily Living and are in bold.  My commentary will once again be in normal font.
 
When a nation becomes more interested in the conflict of opinion than in maintenance of principle, the hour has struck for it to reexamine its conscience.  When virtue and vice, patriotism and disloyalty, filth and purity are put into a boxing ring, in which the spectators have no other interest than to watch them knock out one another’s brains, then the moment has come when there is nothing left so sacred that one out to die in its defense, and nothing so evil that one ought to oppose it with all his strength.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke.  Like it or not, we human beings need boundaries.  A hotel for example desires for us to be comfortable and part of the way they make us comfortable is by making it a rule that we must wear clothes in the hallway.  Instead of taking away our freedom it allows our freedom to flourish.  If there was no such law many of us would stay locked up in our hotel room.
                (1) Loss of purpose.  When the engineer of a city waterworks becomes totally indifferent as to whether the pumps supply water to the citizens or not, he is at a loss to understand why they should fume and rage at their empty faucets.  The murderer, who cannot accept the first principle that life is sacred, cannot get into his head why society should be so “vindictive” against him.  The conductor of a train who believes that he should be “Broad-minded” about whether his train goes to Washington or Buffalo, cannot sympathize with irate passengers who are so “reactionary” as to believe  that the train should travel to the destination to which it was appointed.  When citizens lose a sense of the value and the meaning of life, they cannot see why right is any more important than wrong from that point on, ethics is reduced to the level of a sporting event or a smorgasbord.
                The goal of life is to be the best person possible and not to have the most pleasurable experiences possible.  If morals come down to how we feel then we really cannot hold rapists and murders accountable because they felt like doing what they did.  This is absurd.  The Catholic Church believes that all laws are meant to give structure to society so that we can all live in peace and harmony not so that we can get as most personal pleasure as possible. 
 
                Ignoring the end or goal of life, the only interest left is in the choice of means.  Power then becomes more important than ethics, as our power to make atomic energy exceeds our moral capacity to decide how to use it.  If men forget that the purpose of the chair is something on which they sit, they can live peacefully in the same room.  But when the purpose of a chair is ignored, as it is in a brawl, then the chair becomes a means of combat, one individual decides it is a good instrument with which to smash heads.  Such a combat regardless of where it is staged, can be interesting only to those who have lost inner peace and order, and have forgotten the supreme goal of life.
                You can’t win the race without knowing the finish line. 
 
                The second reason for the overemphasis on conflict of opinion is to be found in the emptiness of heart.  Man’s inner world, being without meaning, is painful and frustrating.  To compensate for it, he tries to create the same disorder outside that he finds inside.  As Franz Werfel put it, “He turns away from his inner world because its emptiness is more pain full than the emptiness of the factual world, which is at least relieved by noise and hubbub.”  When the human soul loses its own order, it becomes the instrument of destruction.  When personality is directed to God and neighbor, there is an inner peace, but when the soul is torn from its appointed order, like an airplane motor that is ripped from the wing and tears into the cabin, there is nothing but chaos and confusion.
 
Peace is the tranquility of order and order implies the subordination of senses to reason, reason to faith, body to soul and the whole personality to God.