Thanks in large measure (read “due completely to his
efforts”) to Guy Stevenson, the Project Manager of “The Fulton Sheen Project,”
Economic Justice Media’s “Just Third Way Edition” of Freedom Under God, Fulton J. Sheen’s “long lost” work on the
importance of private property in capital was published on Labor Day, September
2, 2013. [UPDATE: NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON] [FURTHER UPDATE: NOW AVAILABLE ON BARNES AND NOBLE]
We were somewhat skeptical a few years ago when Guy first
raised the possibility of republishing some of the late Fulton J. Sheen’s
works. After all, most of us in the CESJ
core group were familiar with Sheen as one of the first, perhaps the first of the “televangelists.” We knew that Sheen had done great things for
the Catholic Church, but CESJ is an interfaith group. Plus, Sheen had a lot to say about matters of
faith, while CESJ is focused on reason.
Then there was the small matter that, in his will, Sheen
bequeathed all of his copyrights to the Society for the Propagation of the
Faith, of which he served as National Director for many years. The idea seemed to be that by keeping his
books in print, the Society could not only continue to spread the word, but
make a little money in the process.
It turned out, however, that Sheen only bequeathed those
copyrights that he himself owned. It’s a
legal principle that you can’t give anyone greater rights than you have in the
first place.
As Guy discovered, Sheen never owned the copyright to Freedom Under God. The Bruce Publishing Company of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, a now-defunct Catholic book publisher, owned the copyright, not Fulton J. Sheen!
To top it off, the Bruce Publishing Company went out of
business at about the time they needed to renew the copyright, and never got
around to doing so. The book Freedom Under God entered the public
domain on January 1, 1968. It was
clearly well on its way to oblivion.
. . . until rescued by Guy Stevenson. Long before Pope Benedict XVI declared Fulton
Sheen “Venerable” (“worthy of veneration,” which means respect, not worship), Guy had been studying
Sheen’s works, and was convinced that television’s “Uncle Fulty” of Life Is Worth Living is an important
writer — and for more reasons than are apparent to most people.
It turns out that Sheen’s writings on political science and
philosophy are (to put it mildly) revolutionary, especially to a generation of
Americans (not just Catholics or other Christians) familiar only with the
“tastes-great/less-filling” socialism v. capitalism argument. So many social reformers start with the
assumption that capitalism (with its many forms under one name) and socialism
(with its one form under many names) are the only two possibilities.
Consequently, those who consider themselves capitalists
label everything else socialism, while those who are socialists (few socialists
actually call themselves socialists, evidently believing that if you don’t
admit it, you ain’t it) attack everyone else as capitalists. Neither group can really deal with someone
like Fulton Sheen, who clearly was for neither capitalism nor socialism, and so
both sides carefully sweep that aspect of his thought under the rug.
It didn’t make it any better that Sheen managed to get on
the bad side of two people, both of whom were as powerful as they were
vindictive. The first was Monsignor John
A. Ryan, whose distortions of natural law theory that underpins Catholic social
teaching have become “social justice orthodoxy” in spite of Ryan’s obvious
errors and drift into the “corporate” form of socialism. The second was Francis Cardinal Spellman,
whose anti-communism and support for U.S. involvement in Vietnam (to say
nothing of his friendships with J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy)
made him a virtual poster boy for capitalism.
Sheen downplayed his troubles with both men in his
autobiography, Treasure in Clay
(1979). Guy, however, has found
newspaper articles inspired by one or the other from the 1930s on attacking
Sheen on some rather specious grounds — such as Sheen quoting directly from Quadragesimo Anno when Ryan wanted to
bury a particular papal teaching. A 1937
article in the Pittsburgh Gazette in
which the “Radical Catholic Alliance” (a Ryan front group) condemned Sheen for alleged
anti-Catholic activities is one surreal example, while most people are aware of
the “Milk Fund Scandal” when Spellman was caught lying to Pope Pius XII about a
false accusation Spellman made against Sheen.
What Guy discovered was that Sheen’s political science and
philosophy are strikingly parallel to CESJ’s Just Third Way. The only things lacking are an understanding
of finance that is not based on past savings, and a better appreciation of Pope
Pius XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy as analyzed by CESJ co-founder
Father William Ferree — and grasping either, given the erudition and
scholarship displayed in Sheen’s first book, God and Intelligence (1925), would have been child’s play for
Sheen.
Mentioning God and
Intelligence, which won for Sheen the “Agrégé en Philosophie de l’Université
de Louvain” (which, according to one source, has been awarded at the level
Sheen received it by only about forty people since the university was founded
in 1425), brings in another possibility why Sheen’s contributions to philosophy
may have been glossed over.
Yes, God and
Intelligence is a very tough book to get through, especially in our day
when more people would benefit from reading Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (the first edition of
which, by coincidence, was published in 1940, the same year as Freedom Under God). It’s the point
of the book, however, that makes its author’s philosophy obnoxious to the
modern age. Sheen went after the modern
tendency to redefine the basic principles of just about everything, shifting
the natural law from its basis in the intellect (meaning it can be discerned by
reason alone), to the will (meaning that faith, not reason, becomes the basis
of the natural law).
The modern age constantly violates the principle of
contradiction and the principle of identity. (These are actually the “negative”
and “positive” ways of saying the same thing.) This may be either the cause or the symptom of
the totalitarian movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. You’ll have to answer that question yourself.
One thing that’s certain, however, is that the moral
relativists who have built their careers on shifting sand are not anxious to
correct their philosophy to something built on the solid rock of common
sense. Why? Sheen answered that question himself in his
autobiography: money and fame, combined with a colossal egotism. Far too many academics, politicians, and
others owe everything to moral relativism, and they’re not about to change.
#30#