Fulton Sheen On American Morality

 

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Venerable Fulton J. Sheen correctly identified the moment at which American morality went straight down.  When the boundary between what is moral and what is immoral, when the boundary between what is holy and what is diabolical, when the boundary between what is good, true, and beautiful, and what is ugly, destitute, and diabolical, the boundary was broken down.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Fulton Sheen gave a talk in the 1960s called Youth and Sex.  I only wish to play a couple moments of it.  Venerable Fulton J. Sheen correctly identified the moment at which American morality went straight down.  When the boundary between what is moral and what is immoral, when the boundary between what is holy and what is diabolical, when the boundary between what is good, true, and beautiful, and what is ugly, destitute, and diabolical, the boundary was broken down.

The fact that we live among people who still today carry in their minds, can actually hold the thought that some sick, twisted form of freedom is being exerted, is being claimed, is being lived by asking alleged medical professionals to snuff out, to murder, to rip to pieces, to suck out with a vacuum cleaner the gestating, beautiful child that is inside of them, how does this mindset take hold?  We’re not talking about a mindset that is thought of and is practiced and is then defended by a few people.  We’re talking about a mindset here that is nearly a majority opinion.  As a matter of fact, sadly, amongst my fellow Roman Catholics, there’s a majority of them poorly catechized, lost souls who actually believe that contraception and abortion, in some instances, is part of magisterial – that means Church – teaching.  It’s not.  But they have been convinced by a diabolical clergy that has lost the faith and has lost touch with the reality that no Christian can possibly counsel the slaughtering of non-combatants in war.

Is war hell?  Yes, which is why it used to be fought, again, with decorum and with tradition.  It used to be fought so that victory could be won but not so that total annihilation of entire civilizations would be carried out.  You won’t find any instance of this in history.  The ones that you do are usually kneecapped.  They’re usually not brought to fruition.  Why?  It was almost impossible for men to be capable of carrying out such atrocities.  But don’t worry, brother, not only are we the greatest country in the history of the world.  America is the greatest killing country in the history of the world.  That’s right, we got good at it, like George Carlin says.

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Here is a part of the clip from Venerable Fulton Sheen where he traces the end of our attachment to the boundaries placed by a Christian moral code.  He gives it to you down to the minute in history when it occurred.  Those of you that say, [mocking] “Why don’t you talk about something that matters?”  I received an email from a gentleman the other day informing me that, [mocking] “You know, I like all that talk about morality and all that, but that ain’t gonna fix our problems.  You need to start having candidates on your show.  We’s gotta get about the business of fixing Muricah.  We can only fix it if we have the right politicians.”  I haven’t written him back yet, but if he’s listening, sir, where are those politicians called from?  Where do we get them from?  Oh, that’s right, they’re chosen from the American people.  Where are they educated?  That’s right, they’re educated in American schools.  Where do they go to church?  They go to American churches.  As George Carlin famously says, again: This is the best we can do, folks.  Garbage in; garbage out.  Where did it begin, though?

Of course, it began before 1945.  It began when we set course to have a written constitution that subdued our obeisance to the eternal law of Almighty God as our primary law.  That should be any Christian civilization’s law, to come from ancient and magisterial teaching under which Almighty God has given us a very clear set of rules to live by.  You can have a secular government under that.  It could be a monarchy, could be a democracy, a constitutional republic.  We can have republicanism; I’m all for it.  We can have a system of judges.  You could have no government at all, just tribunals that meet to resolve disputes.  Fine.

It doesn’t matter, as long as that government is in conformity, as long as their minds are conformed to the idea and to the practice that they may make no law that is abhorrent to the eternal, natural law.  They may make no law that will cause anyone to have to carry out or be placed in jeopardy of carrying out a mortal sin.  You make laws for abortion and homosexuality and promiscuity and pornography.  The government is then placing people in direct line of fire when it comes to committing mortal sin.  Instead of defending and saying no, society does not do that.  We’re going to uphold the law.  They go in the exact opposite direction.  How does that happen?  How does that get unleashed?  Bishop Sheen will tell you.

[start audio file]

Bishop Fulton Sheen: . . . to the hotel manager: Did you ever tell that girl it was wrong to steal? The hotel said: No, we never told her it was wrong to steal. Then how would she know?

See how much the world has changed? What made it change? I think maybe we can pinpoint a date. 8:15 in the morning, the 6^th of August 1945. Can any of you recall what happened on that date? It’s history, before you were born, many of you. What was it? It was the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. When we flew an American plane over this Japanese city and dropped the atomic bomb on it, we blotted out boundaries. There was no longer a boundary between the civilian and the military, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead, for even the living who escaped the bomb were already half dead.

We broke down boundaries and limits. From that time on, the world has said: We want no one limiting me. You people heard the song, you’ve sung at church, “I’ve got to be me, I’ve got to be free.” You want no restraint, no boundaries, no limits. I have to do what I want to do. Let’s analyze that for a moment. Is that happiness, “I gotta be me”? “I’ve got to have my own identity”?

Are any of you on a basketball or football team? You can’t be yourself. You’ve got to live for the team. The coach of the Oakland Raiders, Coach Madden, told me, he said: What’s happening to our Catholic schools? He said: I have boys from Catholic colleges coming to my football team and they say, “I gotta do my thing.” How am I ever going to have a football team if everybody has to do his thing? A team means doing the other person’s thing. We want no limits, no boundaries.

There was a French play that was written in your lifetime by Sartre in which there are three men in hell. Each of them talks about his pains, his aches, his protests, his worries, his ego, his identity. The others are not listening. When the curtain goes down, the last line of the play is, “My neighbor is hell.” Why is the neighbor hell? Because he stands in my way. I can’t do what I want to do. God is hell. Parents are hell. Church is hell. Why? Because they limit me.

Now we’re living in a world of just doing your thing without regard for law. Just suppose now, to get very practical, just suppose your parents never gave you pot training. Think it out. You’ve got to do your thing.

[end audio file]

Mike:  I suggest you watch the entire video.  It’s posted in today’s Pile of Prep at MikeChurch.com.  Let’s get to what Jack Hunter actually wrote about this as we flesh this story out a little bit deeper here.

[reading]

President Obama was roundly slammed by conservatives last week for acknowledging the victims of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Japan that helped end World War II.

For well over a half century, Weaver’s landmark 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences has been an indispensable part of the conservative canon. President Reagan quoted from Ideas Have Consequences in a speech at The Heritage Foundation. Weaver wrote in the foreword that his book was “a reaction to that war (World War II)—to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in place of the peace and order that were professedly sought.”

[end reading]

Mike:  Remember, no just war can possibly take place unless there is a preconceived path to peace.  In other words, even if you have a just war and you decide that you have to fight it, you have to know before the fighting begins that there is a peace resolution.  There is some way to end it.  There used to be, ladies and gentlemen, this thing called chivalry.  Chivalry used to reign among the knights of orders, the knights that would go off and fight wars on behalf of kings and queens and princes and dukes back in the days of Christendom.  Chivalrous men would not go around killing women and children unless they were possessed.  Yes, some of them were possessed from time to time.  That’s what made the possession all that more diabolical.  It was out of the realm of the norm.

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As a matter of fact, those of you that fancy bashing Catholics and Catholicism, you’ll be happy to note and know that such an instance occurred in, I believe, the Fourth Crusade, the one against the [unintelligible].  The castle had to be overrun – I got that wrong.  I’ll finish the story.  Some of the men were so possessed with the moment and the fever of war that there were women and children that were taken out.  Of course, the pope at the time denounced all this.  Excommunications began, denunciations.  It was made to be horrid.  No one said those women and children got what they deserved, no one.

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In other words, chivalrous men knew that wars had to be fought from time to time.  I am not a pacifist.  I acknowledge that.  David Simpson hosted a True Money show, a 16-year Army vet.  David knows this.  He’s not a pacifist.  He acknowledges it.  Mark Kreslins acknowledges it on his program.  All of us here acknowledge this.  Yes, there will come times when there will have to be warlike actions.  That’s why we must proceed into them with just war intentions.  This is why just war theory is so important.  To prevent the mindset from what Fulton Sheen was just talking about on that video delivered to school children in the 1960s.  Once you cross certain boundaries, things become permissible.  A horrific boundary was crossed at Hiroshima.  Another one was crossed at Nagasaki.

End Mike Church Show Transcript