One year ago this week CESJ published the Just Third Way
Edition of Fulton
J. Sheen’s Freedom Under God. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, be sure
to do so. Quantities are not limited — we encourage you to
purchase as many as meet your needs — but Sheen’s message has an increasing
importance and immediacy for today, and the sooner word gets out, the better.
CESJ is not affiliated with the Catholic Church or any other
religious body, so the temporary suspension of Sheen’s “cause” (below) has
nothing to do with us, and we are not affected in any way. We continue to support and promote champions
of justice wherever we find them. In the
meantime:
• Two days ago we received notice that the “cause” for
canonization for Fulton J. Sheen, author of the Just Third Way Edition of Freedom Under God, has been
suspended. While CESJ is not a Catholic
or even a religious organization, this is a matter of some concern to us. Sheen’s writings are, understood from an
Aristotelian-Thomist natural law perspective, very strong in their support of
Just Third Way principles. After careful
consideration, we — speaking as non-Catholics with no other interest in the
matter than Sheen’s economic and political thought and expressing merely an
opinion — tend to think that the suspension, startling as it seems, appears to
be a prudential move that will be reconsidered once certain administrative and
other issues inside the Catholic Church are addressed and straightened
out. We will look into this a little
more deeply in a week or two.
• Down in
Houston, Reverend Virgil Wood is spreading Father Ferree’s pamphlet, Introduction to Social Justice (1948)
around in key quarters. Using the
Biblical imagery of not pouring new wine into old wineskins, Rev. Wood is
helping to explain why new ideas and movements can only be sustained by acts of
social justice directed at renewing our institutional environment, the common
good, within which people as moral beings acquire and develop virtue, becoming
more fully human in the process. Social
justice is not a substitute for individual justice or charity, but enables
individual justice and charity once again to function within a just social
order.
• Reverend Wood, who
worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., is also working on introducing key
concepts of the Just Third Way to some Black church leaders who are scheduled
to meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican in November of this year.
• Reverend Wood is
also working on putting together an event at St. Thomas University, a Catholic
institution in Houston. This is still in
the discussion stage, however, and more details will follow as the concept gels.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 45 different countries and 46 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Ecuador. The most
popular postings this past week were “The
State is God, God is the State, Part VI,” “Happy Capital Day!, II: The Capital
Question,” “A Legal Amateur’s Look at Roe v. Wade,” “Midsummer Tutorial on
Social Justice, I: Introduction,” and “Happy Capital Day!, I: The Theories of
Labor.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that
we know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next “issue.” If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on
a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them
to us to post for you. All comments are
moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
