Bottom-Line Theology

The Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen is the author of sixty-two books. In the early days of television he was a prime-time celebrity with his own network show, and he preached for twenty-two years during the heyday of radio on “The Catholic Hour.” He also edited a pair of magazines and wrote newspaper columns. At eighty-two, he is still vigorous and active and wins easily the distinction of being the most eloquent and effective spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church in the world today. Earlier this year he was a guest of honor at the annual convention of evangelical broadcasters in Washington. He was interviewed in his Manhattan apartment by Senior Editor David Kucharsky.

Question. How do you feel about the spiritual climate in America today?

Answer. From the standpoint of the Catholic Church, there has been a betterment liturgically. Theologically, too, because we have deepened some aspects of doctrine that we had neglected. Spiritually, however, I do not think we are as good as we were twenty or thirty years ago.

Q. How do you mean that?

A. In the sixties there was a considerable decline. Now in the seventies I would say there are fewer weeds but the grass is not much greener.

Q. You are speaking from a moral perspective?

A. Yes. We have gone from one extreme to another, from a concern for the individual soul to an extreme of social concern. None of us who were in the confessional twenty or thirty years ago will recall many social sins being confessed. Imagine an employer repenting of his failure to pay a living wage! Today, salvation has become almost social. Many feel that if they carry a banner for social justice they need not be concerned about their personal morality. They become like David, who waxed angry when Nathan presented him with a social problem but whose conscience was not troubled about his adultery. Both these extremes are wrong. They were represented on the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter wanted to keep things as they were, and to stay out of the valley below, with its disease and social problems. Then the Lord said, You have to go from the ecstasy down to the valley. There was another part of the Church down there: nine apostles who could not drive out the devil, the reason being a want of prayer and fasting. In like manner, some in the Church may want to be on the mountain, isolated from the problems of the world such as the distraught father and his demonic son, while others struggle unsuccessfully with the latter because they have ceased to be prayerful. The two have to go together. The task of the Church in the years to come will be to unite the ecstasy and the valley. Without the mountain we have no vision, and without the valley our work is a heavy and leaden duty.

Q. And what do you say about conditions outside the Catholic Church?

A. I would mention two currents. I have given addresses at forty-two universities in the last four years. There is a potential for sacrifice among the young that has not been tapped. The reason is a lack of leaders who make sacrifices and who meditate in the shadow of the cross. As for the students, the more one spoke of the cross the more they listened.

Q. What do you think of evangelical impact?

A. The evangelicals are always concerned with essentials, and they do much to keep Christ and the Gospel before the American people.

Q. What spiritual burdens now weigh most heavily on the Pope?

A. I would think that it would be the same burden that also weighed heavily on Paul when he wrote to Timothy: correct doctrine. He wants a firm and absolute adherence to the divinity of Christ, the communication of the Word through preaching and through the sacraments, and the absoluteness of the moral law.

Q. What effect have modern philosophies such as existentialism had on the Catholic Church?

A. The flight from reason and the exaltation of the ego have done much to diminish the apologetic approach to Christianity. Apologetics is a very essential part of our theological system, for it considers the motives of credibility. Now we have dropped it. Has it been under the influence of existentialism? To a slight degree. Existentialism was a little too abstract to be of concern even for many teachers. But in a popular way it produced subjectivism, not exactly as a philosophy but rather the primacy of the ego, the viewing of the world through the eyes of Narcissus: “I see my image”; “I gotta do my thing”; “I gotta be free”; “I gotta be me.”

Q. Some evangelicals are also concerned with a more rational approach.

A. Francis Schaeffer is taking that approach and doing it extremely well. His summary of philosophical doctrines is one of the best that I have ever read, and I taught philosophy in graduate school for twenty-five years. The world gravely needs philosophy to set up norms outside the self as a watch needs a norm outside itself. Philosophy has become history of philosophy. If we taught architecture today the way we teach philosophy, no one would ever be able to construct a building.

Q. Don’t you see this as part of a phase?

A. Yes! Looking back over the centuries, the Western world once lived in an age of faith. Then we became rationalist. Even spirituality became rationalistic to some extent. The spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius are rationalistic inasmuch as they begin with what is the final end of man. The Declaration of Independence is rationalistic: “It is a self-evident principle that the Creator has endowed man,” etc. Then we left the rationalistic age and entered into the sensate. That is the age we live in today. We have become preoccupied with feelings. Never before was truth left so much to the vacillation of an ulcer!

Q. How is this evident?

A. Well, for one thing, we have it in our seminaries. We used to have two or three years of solid philosophy in our seminaries. Now you would hardly ever hear of a single course in epistemology or metaphysics. Very few seminaries present a philosophical system; most offer only eclectic droppings of diverse thinkers who enjoy popularity for a moment. No metaphysics can surpass the philosophy of being. It is the only term under which everything can be subscribed—even the possible. Aristotle started his metaphysics there, and French philosophers today are returning to being as the ground for all thinking.

Q. Could this aphilosophical state of mind represent a return to Augustine and the more subjective and ideal world of neo-Platonism?

A. Yes. That is very possible. In the Middle Ages Aquinas was exalted because he followed Aristotle. But there was also Bonaventure, who as a contemporary of Aquinas was a disciple of Augustine. Today there is no reason why one should follow Aquinas more than Augustine. It is really a matter of philosophical taste. They are both viable and valuable.

Q. Where is Catholic theology going with Hans Küng?

A. A professor at Yale doubts that Hans Küng is Catholic. For one thing, he denies that Christ is a mediator. If we overthrow the Epistle to the Hebrews to deny that Christ is a mediator, then there is no theology. I read Küng’s last book and it seems to me like nothing but twentieth-century Arianism.

Q. How did all the talk about being “born again” in the last year or so strike you?

A. I feel it smacks too much of journalism and politics. Being born again implies that our weak human nature can be regenerated and supernaturalized through the merits of Christ. A person in the state of grace differs from a modern pagan as life differs from marble. Ultimately, this rebirth implies sin. The modern world does not believe in sin. Karl Menninger’s recent book, Whatever Became of Sin?, makes that point. The ministers and priests stopped talking about sin. The lawyers picked it up and it became a “crime.” The psychiatrists reached for it and it became a “complex.” It used to be that we Catholics were the only ones in the world who believed in the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. Today every American believes he is immaculately conceived. He is not a sinner; he is sick. If people will not accept sin, maybe we will have to talk of judgment in terms of nuclear destruction. When people are put in the mood of desperation, they begin to do their ultimate thinking.

Q. This sounds as if you want to scare people into the kingdom.

A. No! Judgment is not a scare; it is like a reminder that we have to pay our income tax. On February 11, 1943, two years before the explosion of the first atomic bomb, Pius XII told the Pontifical Academy of Science about the explosive power of one ounce of uranium. This was at a time when American journalists were forbidden to talk about the subject. He said: “I trust that this energy will always be used peacefully. If it is not, it will bring great harm in those places where it is used, and eventually to the planet itself.” It was a remark he repeated a few years later in a Christmas address. Inasmuch as it was delivered with proper scientific preparation, I am sure he had a genuine fear as to what might happen to this planet. I can remember listening to scientists ten years ago who said we had an overkill of 1200 per cent. We have denied hell on the outside with the result that hell moved to the inside—it became the province of the psychiatrist to care for that inner hell. And now we are projecting hell on the outside, in our nuclear arms. And we are fearful. It would have been far better to be fearful of God’s hell than of man’s hell.

Q. To go on to another subject: where are we in the ecumenical picture? I sometimes get the impression that there are now more differences within the Protestant and Catholic communities than between them.

A. Sometimes that happens. The ecumenical movement has made tremendous strides. I told one non-Catholic group that ten years ago they would not have invited me, and if they had I would not have come. I think the closer we get to Christ the closer we get to one another. That is why one feels very much at home with a real Christian. Our differences as Protestants and Catholics are lovers’ quarrels. Husbands and wives do not fight about their love for each other; it’s about a damaged fender or a high meat bill. Their love for one another is never in question. And what is not in question in ecumenism is our love of Christ.

Q. How would you define the cross? What is your concept of the term?

A. I would define it in many ways. One, I would describe it as the supreme example of sacrificial love, Christ having died for our sins. I would also define it as the necessity of introducing self-discipline into our lives. There are only two philosophies of life, first the fast and then the feast, or first the feast and then the hangover. Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. I have taken a resolution all the rest of my life to preach nothing but Christ and him crucified. St. Paul made one great mistake when he went to Athens!

Q. Mistake?

A. Just let me say this. He spoke about providence. He spoke about creation. He spoke about the government of the universe. He spoke about resurrection. He never mentioned the name of Christ. He never mentioned the cross. And I think that’s why, when he wrote the letter to Corinth, he resolved, “From now on, nothing but Christ and him crucified.” He was a failure at Athens. He never went back to Athens. He never wrote a letter to the Athenians.

Q. Has the charismatic movement been instrumental in bringing Catholics and Protestants closer together?

A. To some extent. It is one of the “enthusiasms.”

Q. Let me interject here that the term “enthusiasm” has undergone some major connotational change, and there is a somewhat technical sense in which it is used pejoratively by Catholics.

A. Yes! There is a difference between a gift and gifts. The gift makes us children of God. The gifts or charisms are directed to others. They do not necessarily sanctify. I am a preacher, but I am not holy because I received that gift. If I am holy it is due to my life before and after I mount the pulpit.

The pejorative sense of charismatic is that it implies it belongs only to an elite or special group. Searching for an immediate experience of the emotional can only short-circuit Calvary, Scriptures, and asceticism. It is not always true that everything that happens is due to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, too, the supra-confessional character of some charismatic movements can so water down other essential Christian truths as to make little contribution to true ecumenism.

Q. Archbishop Sheen, you are a scholar, and you have the distinction of having also been one of the very first prime-time television “stars.” This from a critical viewpoint would seem to be an antithesis, inasmuch as television is accused so often of appealing little to the mind and repudiating intelligent talent. How did a scholar succeed in creating such a vast appeal as you did? I ask this because it is a major problem in the whole communication of Christian truth. There is constant pressure for putting the cookies as low as possible, for interpreting profound principles simplistically.

A. The reconciliation is through the distinction between the intelligentsia and the intellectuals. The intelligentsia are those who are educated beyond their intelligence. The intelligentsia are always separated from the masses, but a true intellectual is never separated from the masses. The Word became flesh and talked in parables. If we are truly intellectual, we have to be able to give examples of what we know. We never understand anything until we can give an example. I have not been among the intelligentsia, but I have been an intellectual.

Q. And so, practically speaking, what is the answer to communicating effectively?

A. Start with people as they are. Talk to their problems. Here we could make a mistake and become psychologists and sociologists and exchange the Word of God for Erickson. The Gospel today has been reduced in some quarters to psychological approaches, sociological counting, and healing. Theology is not psychology. Psychology is good when used as an approach to theology, but the great theological truths are not psychological. For example, in theology we do not seek the identity of self. Our identity is with Christ. Only after we know Christ do we really know self. “I live,” said St. Paul. Then he quickly checked himself. “No! Not I. Christ lives in me.” I am not my own. I am his.

Q. And sociology?

A. As regards the counting side of sociology: suppose in 1895 we had put into a computer the number of horses that would be needed for transportation in the United States in 1977. The computer would have come back with the answer that in 1977 every American citizen would be buried in eleven feet of manure.

Q. And healing?

A. Christianity has a place for healing, but not when healing is popularized because we no longer preach forgiveness of sin. When our blessed Lord cured the paralytic who was let down through the roof, He first healed his sins. There was no gratitude expressed by the man because his sins were forgiven. But I am sure that when the Lord healed him, he really thought he had received a favor. He could go to the picnic in Galilee that afternoon. We must never reach a point where instead of Christ’s using us, we are using him.

Q. What do you say to the charge that the world is rejecting Christ because it is repelled by the behavior of at least some of those who claim to be his followers?

A. This is true now and in every age of the Church. Few of the boys who wanted to be Joe Namath five years ago want to be Joe Namath today. When touchdowns stop, imitation stops. As we cease to reflect Christ, the desire to be Christ declines. But, on the other hand, the spread of Christ works on souls even in hours of spiritual decline. The Church never grew so fast in the Roman Empire as when it was persecuted and following Christ meant death. Nor are even his followers alone to be blamed. The want of faith in the world today is due not so much to a decline of faith as to a decline in obedience. “You will not come to me because your lives are evil.” While the bad get attention, there are millions of saints in the world today. The real Christians are happy on the inside, and this alone makes others envious enough to want to know the secret of joy.

Paul D. Steeves is assistant professor of history and director of Russian studies at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and specializes in modern Russian history.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.