Fulton J. Sheen

"If there is continuity in the universe, it is fitting that there should be intelligent beings without bodies which are called angels."

"If all things in this universe exist, it is because they participate in the Being of God, if there are some things with life, it is because they are reflections of the life of God; if there are beings endowed with intellect and will — like men and angels — it's because they are a participation of the Sovereign Intellect which is God."

"Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday; unless there is a cross, there will never be an empty tomb; unless there is the torn flesh, there will never be the glorified body."

"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."

"Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth."

"Since a week ago last Saturday, we can no longer expect them to defend the law of God. These sects will work out the very logic of their ways, and in 50 or 100 years there will be only the Catholic Church and paganism. We will be left to fight the battle alone, and we will.""

"There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing."

"The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law."

"All our anxieties relate to time. … The major problems of psychiatry revolve around an analysis of the despair, pessimism, melancholy, and complexes that are the inheritances of what has been or with the fears, anxieties, worries, that are the imaginings of what will be."

"It takes three to make love."

"The nobler our loves, the nobler our character. To love what is below the human is degradation; to love what is human for the sake of the human is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of the Divine is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is sanctity."

"No one can understand Communism who does not believe in the devil. The Communists believe in the devil. The Communists organized a so-called "patriotic" church. A few brain washed were to be in charge of the churches because they were loyal to the anti-God regime. One of the first orders given by the Communists to them was that the prayer to Prayer to Saint Michael be no longer said because it invoked the protection of St. Michael against "the wickedness and snares of the devil." As one Communist judge said: "We are those devils." It is hard for many in the free world to believe that there are not only bad men, but evil men. Bad men steal, rape, ravage and plunder. Evil men may not always do these things, but they seek to destroy goodness, virtue, morality, decency, truth and honor. Bad men who steal admit honesty; evil men who do not steal, call dishonesty "honesty," totalitarianism "democracy," slavery "freedom." Evil men can be nice at table, polite with women, courteous in Washington, refined in London and calm in Geneva. But the principle which guides their every move is the maxim of Lenin: every lie, trickery, knavery and deceit must be used to."

"False compassion, which is gradually growing in this country, is a pity that is shown, not to the mugged, but to the mugger; not to the family of the murdered, but to the murderer; not to the woman who was raped, but to the rapist. ... There are some judges — some, in some of our courts; there are some social workers — not all; there are sob sisters; there are the social slobberers, who insist on compassion being shown to the muggers, to the dope fiends, to the throat slashers, to the beatniks, to the prostitutes, to the homosexuals, to the punks: so that today the decent man is practically off the reservation."

"The only argument the world will listen to now is the argument of personal holiness. It has heard all the rest and rejected them."

"Some will not look on suffering because it creates responsibility."

"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."

"All my sermons are prepared in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. As recreation is most pleasant and profitable in the sun, so homiletic creativity is best nourished before the Eucharist. The most brilliant ideas come from meeting God face to face. The Holy Spirit that presided at the Incarnation is the best atmosphere for illumination. Pope John Paul II keeps a small desk or writing pad near him whenever he is in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament; and I have done this all my life — I am sure for the same reason he does, because a lover always works better when the beloved is with him."

"When the record of any human life is set down, there are three pairs of eyes who see it in a different light. There is the life as I see it. as others see it, and as God sees it."

"Another instance of how our Lord associated Peter with himself was in the payment of the temple tax. It is the only time in scripture where God ever associates a human being with himself under the personal pronoun we.... Now at the time of the payment of the temple tax our blessed Lord told Peter to pay it, and he said to pay it “for me and thee.” Then he adds, "that we may not scandalize." Here he makes himself one with Peter. Peter is associated with the Master in a way that no one else can ever be associated. We — Christ and Peter. That is why papal encyclicals begin with the word we."

"We live in a sensate age. We are no longer governed by Faith, we are no longer governed by reason. We are governed by feelings."

"Atheism is not a doctrine; it is a cry of wrath."

"Before you deny God, ask yourself why you deny Him. Is it because of the way you live? A poem of Arthur Hugh Clough satirized those who wish there was no God because He interferes with their dishonesty, their lawlessness, or their license."

"No man has need of religion who is self-righteous, who is all he wants to be and all he ought to be."

"Hitler had no need of God: in his own conceit, he was a god."

"The man who has never made a mistake has no need of an eraser; just so the man who has never done anything wrong has no need of a Redeemer."

"If there is no difference between right and wrong, how can Hitler be wrong and how can we be right? Why are we at war, if it is not because right is more precious than life?"

"It makes no difference whether you have any rules in football; it depends upon how you play. It makes no difference whether you believe triangles have three sides; it depends on how you draw. Can we not see that if we believe wrongly, we will act wrongly?"

"The trouble with Hitler and other tyrants is that they practice what they preach. Because their doctrines are wrong, their deeds are wrong. Because Nazism as a creed is wrong, its workings are wicked."

"Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace unless there is soul peace. World wars are only projections of the conflicts waged inside the souls of men and women, for nothing happens in the external world that has not first happened within a soul."

"Christian theology is, in a certain sense, a psychology, since its primary interest is the soul, the most precious of things. Our Lord balanced a universe against a soul and found the soul worth more than gaining a world."

"The modern man is no longer a unity, but a confused bundle of complexes and nerves. He is so dissociated, so alienated from himself that he sees himself less as a personality than as a battlefield where a civil war rages between a thousand and one conflicting loyalties. There is no single overall purpose in his life. His soul is comparable to a menagerie in which a number of beasts, each seeking its own prey, turn one upon the other. Or he may be likened to a radio, that is tuned in to several stations; instead of getting any one clearly, it receives only an annoying static.If the frustrated soul is educated, it has a smattering of uncorrected bits of information with no unifying philosophy. Then the frustrated soul may say to itself: "I sometimes think there are two of me a living soul and a Ph. D." Such a man projects his own mental confusion to the outside world and concludes that, since he knows no truth, nobody can know it. His own skepticism (which he universalizes into a philosophy of life) throws him back more and more upon those powers lurking in the dark, dank caverns of his unconsciousness. He changes his philosophy as he changes his clothes. On Monday, he lays down the tracks of materialism; on Tuesday, he reads a best seller, pulls up the old tracks, and lays the new tracks of an idealist; on Wednesday, his new roadway is Communistic; on Thursday, the new rails of Liberalism are laid; on Friday, he-hears a broadcast and decides to travel on Freudian tracks: on Saturday, he takes a long drink to forget his railroading and, on Sunday, ponders why people are so foolish as to go to Church. Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion: when that shifts, his frustrated soul shifts with it."

"The revolt of the modern child against his parents is a miniature of the revolt of the modern world against the memory of 1900 years of Christian culture and the great Hebrew, Grecian and Roman cultures which preceded them. Any respect for that tradition is called "reactionary," with the result that the modern soul has developed a commentator mentality which judges yesterday by today, and today by tomorrow. Nothing is more tragic in an individual who once was wise than to lose his memory, and nothing is more tragic to a civilization than the loss of its tradition."

"[N]o man hates God without first hating himself."

"Anxiety increases in direct ratio and proportion as man departs from God."

"There are no plains in the spiritual life; we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an "indifferent" soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite rejects it."

"All intense interest in luxury is a mark of inner poverty. The less grace there is in the soul, the more ornament must be on the body."

"It is assumed by many reformers that the principal and major cause of unhappiness is economic insecurity, but this theory forgets that there are economic problems only because men have not solved the problems of their own souls. Economic disorder is a symptom of spiritual disorder."

"There is not a single striving or pursuit or yearning of the human heart, even in the midst of the most sensual pleasures, that is not a dim grasping after the Infinite."

"[T]here is a tremendous egotism and conceit in those popular articles and lectures entitled,"My Idea of Religion," or "My Idea of God." An individual religion can be as misleading and uninformed as an individual astronomy or an individual mathematics."

"By professing no ideal in morality, these nice people can never be accused of not living up to their creed. This is the great advantage that they have over the Christians — whose creed is so lofty that they can often and truly be accused of failing to meet its demands."

"We find only what we seek: nature has many secrets to give us, but she will not surrender them until we sit down patiently before her and obey her laws. Only by such submission do we receive."

"In contrast to the pride of those who deny their guilt to escape self-criticism is the humility of God, who made a world which added not to His glory and then made man to criticize Him."

"By denying any ultimate standard outside of self, one can escape all self-blame and go through life on a perpetual mission of face saving."

"[H]e is of the intelligentsia (which means he has been educated beyond his intelligence)."

"[P]eace of soul implies tranquillity of order, with material things ordered to the body, the body to the soul, the personality to neighbor and to God. Peace of mind is subjective tranquillity — a narrower thing. It requires great moral effort to attain peace of soul, but even those who are indifferent to right and wrong sometimes achieve peace of mind (which the Scriptures call "false peace")."

"We justify want of faith by saying, "I don't go to church, but I am better than those who do," as one might say, "I don't pay taxes or serve the nation, but I am better than those who do.""

"The very good never believe themselves very good, because they are judging themselves by the Ideal."

"Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong."

"Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man."

"The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society."