Category: Fulton Sheen

Everyone else who was ever born into the world came into it to live; our Lord came into it to die.

Do this experiment whether you believe in God or not. At your first opportunity, stop in a Catholic Church for a visit. You need not believe, as we Catholics do, that Our Lord is really and truly present in the tabernacle. But just sit there for an hour, and with that hour, you will experience a surpassing peace that you never before enjoyed in your life. You will ask yourself, as a sensationalist once asked me when we made an all-night vigil of adoration in the Basilica of Sacre Coeur in Paris: “What is it that is in that church?” Without a voice, argument, or thundering demands, you will be aware of something before which your spirit trembles- a sense of the Divine.

Sensationalists miss divinity for that reason: true religion is always unspectacular. The foolish virgins buy oil for their lamps, and when they come back, they find the Bridegroom has already returned. And the door closed. It was so undramatic. A beautiful maiden knocks at the door of an inn, and an innkeeper tells her there is no room; she enters a stable, and there, a child is born. It was God’s entrance into the world. But it was so undramatic.

It meant nothing to teach men to be good unless He also gave them the power to be good.

Like train announcers, they know all the stations but never travel. Head knowledge is worthless unless accompanied by submission of the will and right action.

One can well believe that a crown of thorns and steel nails was less terrible to the flesh of our Savior than our modern indifference, which neither scorns nor prays to the Heart of Christ.

We suffer from the hunger of the spirit, while much of the world is suffering from the hunger of the body.

As education, when it loses its philosophy of life, breaks up into departments without any integration or unity except the accidental one of proximity and time, and as a body, when it loses its soul, breaks up into its chemical components, so a fairly, when it loses the unifying bond of love, breaks up int he divorce court.

One would not generally put garbage into the stomach, but too often, one will put garbage into the mind.

Animals never have recourse to law courts because they have no will to love, but man, having reason, feels the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.