The Wisdom of Fulton Sheen…short video reflections
As education, when it loses it’s philosophy of life, breaks up into departments without any integration or unity except the accidental one of proximity and time, and as a body, when it loses its soul, breaks up into its chemical components, so a family when it loses the unifying bond of love, breaks up in the divorce court.
One would not generally put garbage into the stomach, but too often one will put garbage into the mind.
Animals never have recourse to law courts, because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels the need to justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.
Politics has become so all-possessive of life, that by impertinence it thinks the only philosophy a person can hold is the right or the left. This question puts out all the lights of religion so they can call all the cats gray. It assumes that man lives on a purely horizontal plain, and can move only to the right or the left. Had we eyes less material, we would see that there are two other directions where a man with a sol may look: the vertical directions of “up” or “down.”
The Old Testament begins with the Genesis of heaven and earth through God making all things. The New Testament had another kind of Genesis, in the sense that it describes the making of all things new.
What the new morality resolves itself into is this: You are wrong if you do a thing you do not feel like doing; and you are right if you do a thing you feel like doing. Such a morality is based not only on “fastidiousness,” but on “facetiousness.” The standard of morality then becomes the individual feeling of what is beautiful, instead of the rational estimate of what is right.
Purity does not begin in the body but in the will. From there it flows outward, cleansing thought, imagination, and finally, the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure.
Two principles inspire much of the personal and social dealings of many a citizen in our land: “What can I get out of it?” and “Can I get away with it?” Evil is confused with good, and good is confused with evil. Revolting books against virtue are termed “courageous”; and those against God are called “progressive and epoch-making.” It has always been the characteristic of a generation in decay to paint the gates of Hell with the gold of Paradise. In a word, much of the so-called wisdom of our day is made up of that which once nailed our blessed Lord to the Cross.
The Church knows too that to marry the present age and its spirit is to become a widow in the next.