PODCAzT 143: Fulton J. Sheen – “In the face of this false broadmindedness, what the world needs is intolerance.”

Summary: Click With a biretta tip to my friend Fr. Heilman at Roman Catholic Man, this PODCAzT welcomes today’s guest Ven. Fulton J. Sheen.  We will hear his Plea for Intolerance … yes, you read that right. It seems appropriate to read this in the wake of Amoris laetitia. Sheen’s text is in a book given its imprimatur in 1931!  They had a lot of the same problems we have, because the Devil is always at work, but that was a different time, I’ll tell ya’.  Pius XI was gloriously reigning…. You can immediately tell that what Sheen is addressing was already a problem in 1931, at least 85 years ago.  I would submit that, though Sheen concerns himself with “America”, his comments reach far beyond America now. In the PODCAzT I have bits and pieces of popular hits from 1931 as well as a clip from Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto which came to us in … guess which year.  Also, to get you into the mood and the era, salted through are clips of voices and moments from 1931 (except for the brief intro to Sheen’s radio show The Catholic Hour which is actually from 1943). (There is a super bit – among many – starting about 15:00!) Below is a taste of a deeply edited version of Sheen’s original piece with my emphases and comments.  I, on the other hand, read the whole thing in the PODCAzT unedited, so it has some references that folks in 1931 would have found current but which some of you might not grasp.  Here’s the edited version… America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad-minded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; [Sound familiar?  Watch the nightly news!] but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broad-minded. [Indeed… “nuanced… thoughtful…”.] A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broad-minded man is one who will accept anything for a reason—providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this natural broad-mindedness is mental, not moral.  [That’s 1931.  Today, I think it’s both mental and moral.  We are in serious trouble now, after decades of the dumbed-down education at least two generations have received. On top of that habitual sin, especially of the carnal variety, makes you stupid.  Add dumb to stupid and we wind up with a real problem.] The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and lastly the love of novelty. [Fulton J. Sheen… prophet.] The science of religion has a right to be heard scientifically through its qualified spokesmen, [God, save us.] just as the science of physics or astronomy has a right to be heard through its qualified spokesmen. Religion is a science despite the fact the some would make it only a sentiment. Religion has its principles, natural and revealed, which are more exacting in their logic than mathematics. [!] But the false notion of tolerance has obscured this fact from the eyes of many who are as intolerant about the smallest details of life as they are tolerant about their relations to God.  [Sound familiar?] Another evidence of the breakdown of reason that has produced this weird fungus of broad-mindedness is the passion of novelty, as opposed to the love of truth. Truth is sacrificed for an epigram, the Divinity of Christ for a headline in the Monday morning newspaper. Man[...]