Fulton John Sheen Quotes

Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.

Pope John Paul II, who has a mystique without a politique. He has no armies, no publicity directors, no propaganda machine and comes from the smallest state in all the world.

One day a woman went to the saintly Father John Vianney, the Curé of Ars, in France, and said, “My husband has not been to the sacraments or to Mass for years. He has been unfaithful, wicked, and unjust. He has just fallen from a bridge and was drowned —a double death of body and soul.” The Curé answered, “Madam, there is a short distance between the bridge and the water, and it is that distance which forbids you to judge.

Our Blessed Lord used an illustration of this mystery, “You cannot understand the blowing of the wind, but you obey its laws and thus harness its force; so also with the Spirit. Obey the law of the wind, and it will fill your sails and carry you onward. Obey the law of the Spirit and you will know the new birth. Do not postpone relationship with this law simply because you cannot fathom its mystery intellectually.” The wind breathes where it will And thou canst hear the sound of it, But knowest nothing of the way it came Or the way it goes; So it is, when a man is born By the breath of the Spirit. JOHN 3:8 The

This I know. This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being-we can do it! - Eleanor Roosevelt Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall at last unveil.- -John Ruskin Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.

Close to the Cross was the only Apostle present, John, whose face was like a cast moulded out of love; Magdalen was there too, like a broken flower, a wounded thing. But foremost among all-God pity her!-was His own mother. Mary, Magdalen, John; innocence, penitence, and priesthood; the three types of souls forever to be found beneath the Cross of Christ.

reading from St. John Chrysostom that the life of a bishop should be more perfect than the life of a hermit. The reason he gave was that the holiness which the monk preserves in the desert must be preserved by the bishop into the midst of the evil of the world.

two world wars in twenty-one years, and the universal dread of nuclear incineration. This time God has given us John Paul II,

To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

In a television address in 1974, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, then nearly eighty years old, declared, “We are at the end of Christendom.” He defined Christendom as “economic, political, social life, as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending—we have seen it die. Look at the symptoms: the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty. We live in it from day to day, and we do not see the decline.

The son of God chose Peter, who knew sin, rather than the beloved John, as the rock upon which to build His Church, that sinners and the weak might never have excuse to despair.

The founder of no other religion is absolutely essential for that religion in the same way that Christ is essential for Christianity. It is true that the founder was necessary for the founding, but the believer in a particular religion does not enter into the same kind of an encounter that a Christian enters into with Christ. It is the personal relationship to him which is decisive. Christ therefore occupies a different place in Christianity than Buddha does in Buddhism, than Confucius in Confucianism, Mohammed in Islam, and even Moses in Judaism. When you come to Christ, Christianity demands the personal, intimate bond. We have to be one with him, one with him in such a way that we cannot in any way claim to be Christian unless we reflect the person, the mind, the will, the heart, and the humanity of Christ.” - Archbishop Fulton Sheen

The Catholic Church never suits the particular mood of any age, because it was made for all ages. A Catholic knows that if the Church married the mood of any age in which it lived, it would be a widow in the next age. The marks of the true Church is that it will never get on well with the passing moods of the world: "I have chosen you out of the world therefore the world hateth you" (John 15:19).

Given a purity that is the Purity of Our Lord on the Cross, and you have someone so detached from the ego, so strange to selfishness, so thoughtless of the flesh that He looks upon His Mother, not uniquely as His own, but as the Mother of us all. Perfect Purity is perfect selflessness. That is why Christ gives His Mother to us, as represented in the person of John: "Behold thy mother." He would not be selfish about her; he would not keep just for himself the loveliest and most beautiful of all mothers; He would share His own mother with us: and so at the foot of the Cross He gave her who is the Mother of God to us as the mother of men. No human person could do that because the ties of flesh and the selfishness of the flesh are too close. The flesh is too close to us to enable us to share our mother with others. But absolute purity can.

It is to my family, however, that I owe my greatest appreciation: to my parents, John and Patricia, for sacrificing so much for my education; and my siblings (and their families), just for being fellow Riley eccentrics: