One of the more unusual things (one might almost say “odd”)
about the veneration accorded to Fulton Sheen is the fact that his tremendous
intellectual achievements and social insights are almost always marginalized
or ignored. John A. Hardon’s entry on
Sheen in The Catholic Lifetime Reading
Plan (1989) makes no mention of that aspect of Sheen’s work — something
that is also missing from the entries on G.K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox. Adherents of all three seem to focus primarily
on the admittedly great faith, spirituality, and mysticism of the three — those things that, with a few
twists and adjustments, can easily be fitted into New Age thought.
 |
| Fulton J. Sheen |
Another unusual thing about Sheen’s legacy is, while his
literary output was by any standard enormous, very little of what deals with
intellectual or political (in the Aristotelian sense) subjects — what makes up the bulk of his work — is
readily available today. It’s almost as
if adherents are ashamed, frightened, or confused by anything intellectual or
political, or that does not fit their preconceptions about the respective roles
of faith and reason.
The only thing worse than Sheen’s intellectual work and political
thought to such people was his embarrassing obsession with socialism,
especially in its most extreme form, communism.
A cursory review of Sheen’s books available from used bookstores
revealed at least fifteen books and pamphlets on communism. Searching a newspaper database uncovered a
significant number of talks and columns discussing the same subject. Sheen’s autobiography, Treasure in Clay, goes into some detail about his run-ins with
communism and communists.
 |
| "Officially Discarded" |
Yet little if any of this is mentioned today. As a case in point, take the neglect into
which Sheen’s bestselling book, Communism
and the Conscience of the West (1948), has fallen. A recent informal survey on Amazon revealed
that there are 559 of Sheen’s books listed, both in and out of print (and thus
not necessarily available), counting all the different editions. Of these God
and Intelligence was, in order of sales, listed 148, and Communism and the Conscience of the West
was listed 453.
Some of the embarrassment over Sheen’s concern with
socialism may be due to the legacy of “McCarthyism.” Sheen’s efforts, however, preceded those of Tail
Gunner Joe by decades, continued long after the Red Scare to Sheen’s death in
1979, and could hardly be considered in the same class as McCarthy’s “red
baiting.”
The very thing that baffles Sheen’s modern adherents — why he was so concerned with socialism —
becomes immediately apparent once we understand the focus of his intellectual
work. This was the abandonment of reason
and common sense, and the shift from the intellect to the will as the basis of
the natural law. As Sheen explained in God and Intelligence and its
continuation, Religion Without God, this
shift reverses the respective roles of God and man.
 |
| Aristotle: "Man is by nature a political animal." |
Thus, Sheen’s focus on socialism was not political in the
usual sense (he detested what most people mean by “politics” and did not seem
entirely comfortable as one of Aristotle’s “political animals”), nor
economic. It was, rather,
philosophical. Sheen saw socialism as
the natural and inevitable end of what far too many people today think
of as a trivial or unimportant omission: the necessity of having a sound philosophy based
on reason, as well as the shift from God to man in religion.
Reason and a God-centered religion, for G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and Sheen (and,
eventually, Mortimer Adler), meant the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy of the
Catholic Church. As Sheen explained in
his Preface to Communism and the
Conscience of the West,
“The one idea in this book is
that the philosophy of communism and to some extent the Revolution of Communism
are on the conscience of the Western world. . . . Closely allied to this is the
other idea that the so-called Russian problem is not primarily economic or
political but philosophical; it revolves around the nature of man. . . . the
Western world generally has lost the concept of man as a creature made to the
image and likeness of God, and reduced him either to a component part of the
universe, to an economic animal or to a ‘physiological bag filled with
psychological libido.’ Once man became
materialized and atomized in Western thinking, it was only natural for a totalitarianism
to arise to gather up the fragments into a new totality and substitute the
collective man for the individual man who was isolated from all social
responsibilities. . . .
“The basic struggle today is not
between individualism and collectivism, free enterprise and socialism,
democracy and dictatorship. These are
only the superficial manifestations of a deeper struggle which is moral and
spiritual and involves above all else whether man shall exist for the state, or
the state for man, and whether freedom is of the spirit or a concession of a
materialized society. It has not been
given to every age in history to see the issue as clearly as it has been given
to our own, for we have a double incentive to work for the peace and prosperity
of the world: the first is the Gospel in its fullness, the second is the
communism of Soviet Russia. The first
teaches us that happiness comes from living rightly; the second, that misery
comes from acting wrongly.” (Fulton J.
Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the
West. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1948, 7-9.)
 |
| Pius IX: People drawn to socialism by "perverted teachings." |
Socialism — as almost every pope since Pius IX has pointed
out — thereby comes into direct conflict with the Aristotelian-Thomist
philosophy that has provided the foundation of western civilization.
Fabian
socialism — beloved of many in the Catholic Church today — is (if possible)
even worse than many other forms of socialism, as it hides behind a screen of
“social justice” and an enthusiastic (in Knox’s sense) spirituality. It combines an unhealthy grab-bag of
socialist, modernist, and New Age doctrines into a superficially attractive
package that, as Brownson noted, has the capacity to “deceive the very elect.”
Capitalism corrupts Aristotelian-Thomism with an individualism
that glorifies human beings and denies humanity. Socialism, however, utterly rejects and
annihilates the philosophia perennis. It substitutes a collectivist framework that
deifies humanity at the same time it degrades human beings.
Both capitalism and socialism are therefore wrong, but
socialism is worse than capitalism could ever be. This is because capitalism tends toward
individualism, which accepts the reality of the human person but rejects the
generalization — the idea — of humanity created by human beings, while
socialism accepts the reality of the idea of the collective (humanity), while
rejecting the dignity of the individual human person. That is (broadly speaking), capitalism respects
the creator but not the creation, where socialism respects the creation, but
not the creator.
#30#
#30#
