What a great man was Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He was probably the most visible Catholic to many Americans in the 1950’s. He helped reduce the amount of prejudice toward Catholics by combining a great sense of humor, religion, and philosophy into a great 30 minute weekly TV episode, called “Life Is Worth Living”. He was a virulent anti-Communist, and was also a great American.
Born May 8, 1895 in El Paso, Illinois, he went on to become the biggest single Catholic presence on radio and TV in the 20th century, at least until Mother Angelica and EWTN arrived on the scene in the 1980’s. He was ordained as a priest in Peoria, Illinois in 1919. In 1930 he began his broadcast career, hosting the Sunday evening Catholic Hour program on NBC Radio. The rest is history. Radio, books, TV, and numerous speaking engagements around the world made Archbishop Sheen a one-man catechism, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. He was placed on TV in a death slot, opposite Milton Berle, one of the highest rated comics of the 1950’s. He went on to get 20 million viewers on 123 TV stations, receiving the Emmy Award for “Most Outstanding TV Personality”. Today, he even has his own website where you can purchase his shows and recordings. He died in 1979. Earlier that year, he had been told by St. Pope John Paul II that he had been a loyal son of the Church, and that he had spoken well.
For some reason, the Vatican has delayed his scheduled beatification in the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois. Those of us who grew up with this great saint of the Church hope that all of this confusion with his sainthood will soon be cleared up. We know that he is a holy man. May God eliminate all of the perceived roadblocks to the day when St. Fulton J. Sheen becomes a reality. To pray the novena for his canonization, click here.
Below are a few of Archbishop Sheen’s most famous quotes:
“GOD LOVE YOU!”
“The Rosary is the best therapy for these distraught, unhappy, fearful, and frustrated souls, precisely because it involves the simultaneous use of three powers: the physical, the vocal, and the spiritual, and in that order.”
“If I were not a Catholic, and were looking for the true Church in the world today, I would look for the one Church which did not get along well with the world; in other words, I would look for the Church which the world hates. My reason for doing this would be, that if Christ is in any one of the churches of the world today, He must still be hated as He was when He was on earth in the flesh. If you would find Christ today, then find the Church that does not get along with the world. Look for the Church that is hated by the world, as Christ was hated by the world. Look for the Church which is accused of being behind the times, as Our Lord was accused of being ignorant and never having learned.”
“Very few people believe in the devil these days, which suits the devil very well. He is always helping to circulate the news of his own death. The essence of God is existence, and He defines Himself as: ‘I am Who am.’ The essence of the devil is the lie, and he defines himself as: ‘I am who am not.’ Satan has very little trouble with those who do not believe in him; they are already on his side.”
“. . . discussion is also a most excellent means to avoid making a decision.”
“Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.”
“Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.”
“Broad mindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.”
“If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.”
“The Soviet Union is like the Cross without Christ, while American culture is like Christ without the Cross.”
“America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance – it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.”
“Baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it.”
“Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.”
“Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.”
“I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
“It’s like being a Knight of the Garter. It’s an honor, but it doesn’t hold up anything.”
“Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.”
“Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.”
“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
“Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.”
“Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.”
“Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.”
“The Church is like Noah’s ark that was full of both clean and unclean animals. It must have had an unholy smell, and yet it was carrying eight persons to salvation. The world today is tearing up the photographs of a good society, a good family, a happy, individual personal life. But the Church is keeping the negatives. And when the moment comes when the world wants a reprint, we will have them.”
“Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love? ”
“The only way to win audiences is to tell people about the life and death of Christ. Every other approach is a waste.”
“The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.”
“The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.”
“The simple shepherds heard the voice of an angel and found their Lamb; the wise men saw the light of a star and found their Wisdom.”
“An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”
“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
“There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I do”
“Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.”
“Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.”
“Joy is not the same as pleasure or happiness. A wicked and evil man may have pleasure, while any ordinary mortal is capable of being happy. Pleasure generally comes from things, and always through the senses; happiness comes from humans through fellowship. Joy comes from loving God and neighbor. Pleasure is quick and violent, like a flash of lightning. Joy is steady and abiding, like a fixed star. Pleasure depends on external circumstances, such as money, food, travel, etc. Joy is independent of them, for it comes from a good conscience and love of God.”
“There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church. . . . As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do.”
“This brings us to our second point: namely, why the Blessed Mother, in the 20th century, should have revealed herself in the significant little village of Fatima, so that to all future generations she would be known as Our Lady of Fatima. Since nothing ever happens out of Heaven except with a finesse of all details, I believe that the Blessed Virgin chose to be known as Our Lady of Fatima as a pledge and a sign of hope to the Moslem people, and as an assurance that they, who show her so much respect, will one day accept her divine Son too. Evidence to support these views is found in the historical fact that the Moslems occupied Portugal for centuries. At the time when they were finally driven out, the last Moslem chief had a beautiful daughter by the name of Fatima. A Catholic boy fell in love with her, and for him she not only stayed behind when the Moslems left, but even embraced the Faith. The young husband was so much in love with her that he changed the name of the town where he lived to Fatima. Thus, the very place where our Lady appeared in 1917 bears a historical connection to Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed.”
“Truth must be sought at all costs, but separate isolated truths will not do. Truth is like life; it has to be taken on its entirety or not at all. . . . We must welcome truth even if it reproaches and inconveniences us – even if it appears in the place where we thought it could not be found.”
“Nothing is more harmful to a man than his resistance to Grace.”
“So much do the will and its sin become wedded together that a soul will say, Let me alone. I made my bed and I will lie in it.”
“Those who hate Truth and fear Goodness are not far from the kingdom of God. They are fighting against it, and yet they know theirs is a losing battle. The more violently men hate truth, the more they think about it; the more they fear the goodness that demands perfection, the more they know it is what they really seek.”
“Once we accept him, we find we were truly deceived. It was only the skin of the heavenly fruit that seemed bitter. The meat ravishes the soul. At first glance, God seems to be taking away our happiness, but in the moment of surrender we discover he has deceived us. He has merely taken away the dross to give us the gold of his eternity.”
“Sin was the act by which man refused to see created things for what they were – stepping stones to God, a means to an end – and began instead to clutch at them as ends in themselves. That is what sin is, still. As a man loses his sense of humor when he cannot see the point of a pun, so he loses his humor in its entirety when he ceases to see the point of the universe, which is that all things are revelations, symbols, reminders of God who made them. To take things as ends in themselves is to overrate them, treating them with a solemnity which is not warranted.”
“Every person carries in his heart the blueprint of the one he loves.”
7 thoughts on “The Great Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen”
Why did Rochester get stuck with this outrageously, Alinsky-loving, left-wing Bishop Sheen? But it gets much worse, how this Rochester version of Bishop Sheen was totally unlike the Bishop Sheen we esteemed and admired, years before. Many Catholics were delighted that Bishop Sheen was
showing up in Rochester, and expected that with his grand style, so characteristic of his performances on TV, Bishop would strongly condemn the obscene classroom sex education program which pro-Alinsky nuns were forcing on parochial school children, starting in 1966. Rochester’s Catholics thought that Bishop Sheen, the pre-eminent Apostle of the Our Lady of Fatima’s message of sexual modesty, purity and chastity, especially for children,
would serve notice on the nuns to cease and repent their sexual scandalizing of their students, or face excommunication, and eviction from their convents for refusing his just order. The Diocesean Sex-Ed program was nothing less than explicit instructions teaching grade-school children how to commit the sins of the flesh which send more souls to hell than for any other reason, as Our Lady warned the world at Fatima. Catholic youngsters were forced to watch sexual intercourse performed by fornicating adult actors in Planned Parenthood movies. Every Catholic student had to personally handle condoms and place them on plastic replicas of penises, to the nuns’ perverse satisfaction. After a month or two, concerned Catholics wondered why new Ordinary Sheen hadn’t ended this program of pornography re-packaged as parochial school Sex-Ed. So one lady, wife of a prominent Rochester physician, assembled the raw Sex-Ed curricula contents in a box to go show them to Sheen at a public venue. She arrived and pleaded with Bishop Sheen to examine the immoral pictures the nuns compelled their traumatized students to not only view, but draw down on paper, to the last pubic hair. Sheen rose up in horror from his seat and shouted to the good woman, ”How dare you! Don’t show me this!” Then he twirled his red taffeta-lined cape around his shoulders and stomped off in a flair of indignation. It seemed Sheen could not be shocked into recovering his sense of duty to innocent children, under his pastoral care, who were being emotionally and spiritually harmed by nuns making them consume pornography against their will. After that, Sheen left Rochester, quite unceremoniously, after less than two years. This month, the current Bishop of Rochester requested a stay of Bishop Sheen’s beatification while an investigation could take place of Sheen, personally, and an examination of his assignments be done to determine if he illegally transferred pedophile priests from one parish, or Diocese, to another, to shield those sex criminals from detection and arrest, no matter how many children they molested. The current Rochester Bishop is on ”pins and needles” because his Diocese, earlier this year, declared Bankruptcy in Federal Court, due to the Diocese facing 500 million dollars in liabilities for 500 cases of sexual abuse of children by its pedophile priests. Plus, the Rochester Diocese may be included in Federal RICO prosecutions of bishops and priests in cases involving child molestation currently focused on Pennsylvania Dioceses. The Rochester Bishop must show due diligence and full cooperation with Federal and State Courts and investigative agencies, so, self-defensively, he is throwing Sheen ”under the bus”, along with any chance of undeserving Sheen making Saint.
The Bishop Sheen who served as the Ordinary of the Diocese of Rochester, New York, in the late 1960’s, was not the Bishop Sheen, who was the greatest Catholic writer and speaker in America ’til then. Rochester Sheen was a miserable phoney who shamelessly sought an alliance with Marxist Saul Alinksky as his ”social justice” advisor. Please check Sheen in Internet Archive to see all the articles/reports of how he slavishly courted Trotksyite Alinsky to work with him. Alinsky wrote ”Reveille for Radicals” which he dedicated to Lucifer, the arch-enemy of God and rebel against all Divine Order. Sheen heartily approved his Diocesan nuns openly collaborating with Satanist Alinsky’s community organizing activities in Rochester. But wasn’t Bishop Sheen the foremost anti-Communist authority in America, the Catholic expert who knew the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy and its insidious dialectical lying inside-out?
The way the church is rushing thru so-called canonizations these days, the only real-world explanation for this is wicked church politics.
What about Miguel Pro? The freemasons have a real problem with this true martyr being canonized. So far, go figure, no canonization for him while other favorites of those running the Vatican get canonized in hurry.
FJS is probably laughing and maybe petitioning God to prohibit Jorge Bergolgio from canonizing him. It took Lucille Ball to knoch FJS out of no. 1.
Not to worry, there was a time when the church woke up one day to see that it was taken over, top to bottom, by heretical Arians. Fast forward to today and the Bergoglian heresy takeover. The Arians had the bank accounts, the treasuries, the beach houses, the cathedrals, the bishoprics, etc but like St Athanasius said, “we have the faith.”
Merry Christmas! Guy, Texas
No need to rush this…he was a great failure as diocesan bishop. He did great things but also was a bit of a self promoter. Let’s take the proper time to get all the info.
Bp. Jenky did not help the cause with his lawsuit and lack of prudence.
If God wills Bp. Sheen will be beatus when God wills.
“For some reason, his beatitude has been held up.”
You don’t know what the reason is?
No, but I’m guessing politics…
“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown” Jonah 3:4
While reading through Archbishop Sheen’s brilliant quotes, it is easy to think of how utterly pathetic I am as a Catechist. Then I remember Jonah’s 8 reluctant words that turned a nation.
OK, I admit, I still wish for Sheen’s gift instead…