Justice and Charity

J. Sheen Fulton

Description

"Our country must be built upon a justice and charity in which our individual rights and privileges are conditioned by the service of the common good." The dominating influence of Capitalism and Communism over modern societies has eclipsed the Catholic Church's communication of her social and economic principles. Campaigns to win the affections of the faithful have persuaded many that Capitalism-with its promise of unlimited freedom and praise for the accumulation of wealth-is an authentic expression of Catholic social teaching and that the richness of the social tradition with its preferential option for the poor is driven by class-hatred, envy, and egalitarianism. Grounded in his expertise of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, in Justice and Charity, Fulton J. Sheen explores how Capitalism's failure to submit to justice and Communism's rejection of Christian Charity can be corrected only by a revolution in the heart of men by means of encountering Jesus Christ. Back in print for the first time since its original publication, Justice and Charity is a thought-provoking exploration into the social tradition of the Catholic Church led by one of her finest voices.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Catholic Church

Informations

• Publié par: ACS Books
• Date de parution: 24 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781505108873
• Langue: English

Extrait

JUSTICE & CHARITY
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JUSTICE & CHARITY

FULTON J. SHEEN
INTRODUCTION BY PETER HOWARD, S.T.D.
Copyright © 2016 The American Chesterton Society.
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover Photograph,
Courtesy of the Diocese of Rochester Archives Rochester, New York
ISBN 978-1-50510-886-6
ACS Books is an imprint of TAN Books PO Box 410487 Charlotte, NC 28241 www.TANBooks.com
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Dedicated to MARY IMMACULATE With Filial Homage
Publisher’s Note: Fulton J. Sheen’s Justice and Charity is a series of addresses produced by the National Council of Catholic Men and delivered on “The Catholic Hour” radio program between January and April in 1938.
Period translations of papal documents were used to cite the original text.
This edition is made possible with the permission of The Estate of Fulton J. Sheen/The Society for the Propagation of the Faith. For more information, visit their website at www.onefamilyinmission.org .
C ONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: The Social Problem and the Church
The Spirit of Charity
Liberty
Capitalism
Equality
Fraternity
Distribution
The Trojan Horse
Patriotism
Charity
PART II: The Individual Problem and the Cross
Unjust Suffering
Pain
The Suffering of the Innocent
Moral Suffering
The Need of Zeal
A Planned Universe
Eternal Freedom
Way of the Cross for Communists
The Two Revolutions
Afterword
INTRODUCTION
Peter J. Howard, S.T.D .
I n his book What’s Wrong with the World , G.K. Chesterton made this now famous comment: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” One area of the Christian ideal where these words especially apply is the Catholic Church’s social teaching, which has been left untried largely because it is either unfamiliar or ignored outright.
America, and the West, is at a critical crossroad and must decide whether it will follow the Way laid out by Christ and His Church. The alternative is the way of anti-Christ as Jesus said: “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.” 1 There is no middle road and it was so important to God that we know His road, that He came in the flesh to reveal it to us and then stamped His blueprint into the living memory of His Church, which is His Life mystically prolonged in the world until the end of time.
In this critical moment of history, Providence has placed the following series of conferences by Fulton J. Sheen as a last hope for America and the world to put on Christ , who the West has abandoned, and put humanity back on the path of common sense, peace and prosperity.
The following conferences on justice and charity could very well be appended to Fulton Sheen’s masterwork Philosophies at War , written in the midst of World War II. At the end of his book he wrote:

The world today is choosing its Absolute. The totalitarian systems have chosen their false gods. The only alternative is the true God. There are only two ideas in all the world. If men do not adore the true Absolute, they will adore a false one. Hitler and others have gone before the world with a New Order—and that it is; new, not only it its politics and economics, but new in its foundation, its religion, its cruelty, its pragmatism and its force. We cannot conquer that New Order by seeking to preserve an Old Order from which it came. The one and only effective means is to build a New Order ourselves—one grounded on the true absolute of God and on His principles of justice and morality. 2
If we look at where the world is at 80 years later, we see that all but the West seems to have chosen their Absolute. This is what makes them strong and the West weak. And because the West has yet to choose its Absolute, it is being chosen for them. It is a paradoxical absolute of moral relativism that leads to indifferentism and ultimately to totalitarian dictatorship of intolerance in the name of tolerance.
Sheen’s conferences on justice and charity are a direct response to this frightening reality. In his customary teaching style, he makes his points clear and simple. And that is how it should be, for God is simple. We should therefore look for simple answers, even when we live in a complex world.
Fulton Sheen provides a very simple answer to the social inequalities of our times that can be summarized as follows: There is little justice in the world because there is little charity, and there is little charity in the world because there is little God in the world … because Deus caritas est . 3 And within the mystery of God as charity lies the answer to the question of charity (or love of neighbor). Remove God from the equation and there can be no authentic love of neighbor, because there is no love of God whence love comes. In a certain sense, the answer to today’s socio-economic ills is that simple. Restore true love and worship of God and you will have true love of neighbor, because you see the good of your neighbor and the good due your neighbor in light of their dignity made in the image of God, Who is love—and not just love, charity, which is connected more to Greek agape , which is a divine, sacrificial kind of love.
Sheen’s pedagogy was always the same. Begin first with correcting man’s way of thinking and soon man will correct his way of living. Sheen was a master metaphysician after his spiritual father, St. Thomas Aquinas. He was obsessed with the question of “What is?” In other words, he was obsessed with understanding the most important question of all “What is reality?”, which is another way of asking, “What is the truth?” What is the truth about God, man and creation? How are these three related? Because all reality ultimately points to God as its first cause and final end, all truth is ultimately a theological question: What is God and how do I understand all things in God? In other words, answering the why of every created thing and every philosophy goes hand in hand with answering the what of a particular thing or philosophy.
The greatest tragedy of the modern age is that when it abandoned metaphysics it also abandoned true intellectualism. In other words, it abandoned reason and the common sense that comes with it. The world has unhinged itself from the truth of reality. This was an act of intellectual suicide because it removed reality’s only fixed point of reference, God, Who is Truth. Without a fixed point of reference, morality becomes nothing more than an Hegelian dialectic where compromise becomes the general rule of life, a compromised morality that is in constant flux as the two opposing sides of every argument move the new point of reference further and further from reality and truth. History has clearly demonstrated that this cycle of Hegelian dialectical mode of thinking leads to what Pope Benedict XVI called a “dictatorship of relativism”. This is what happens when the creature loses its sense or divorces its meaning from its Creator. The meaning and harmony of life becomes blurred and ultimately lost. And when economic and political systems are built upon this philosophy, you end up with the intellectual and moral chaos which pervades the world today.
Fulton Sheen summarizes our modern intellectual crisis with the following words: “The hardest thing to find in the world today is an argument. Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these things are born of enthusiasm without the pain of labor. Thinking, on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work a man can do—that is perhaps why so few indulge in it.” 4
And this type of society ultimately allows itself to be governed by cheap slogans and catch phrases which Sheen describes as “express trains carrying the burden of those who are too lazy to think for themselves”.
How did we get to this point?
In order to understand the symptoms of an illness, we must search for its causes. While every disorder can be traced back to Original Sin, our modern philosophical diseases that have led to the greatest injustices ever seen in history have their roots in the French Revolution, which was heralded under the popular slogans of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”. In the words of the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, written in 1908: “What we learn today from the study of the Great Revolution is that it was the source and origin of all the present communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions…. Up till now, modern socialism has added absolutely nothing to the ideas that were circulating among the French people between 1789 and 1794, and which it was tried to put into practice in the year II of the Republic. Modern socialism has only systematized those ideas and found arguments in their favor.” 5 In other words, the great and terrible revolution of 1789, which dealt the deathblow to the remaining vestiges of Christendom, lives on and grows in every atheistic, totalitarian, anti-human economic and political system in the world today. And like the evils of the French Revolution, every evil committed against humanity by means of these systems is always justified under the alluring, yet undefined and often misleading, banners of “liberty, equality and fraternity”.
Under the French Revolution’s false trinity of humanistic liberty, equality and fraternity, the twentieth century