Sheen’s Plea for Intolerance

Blessed Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979), an American Catholic bishop, was a staple on prime-time television in the 1960s. My much smaller self appreciated the patter and very occasionally even got one of the jokes. But, not being Catholic, not enough of them that it became a part of my routine. I recently came across an excerpt from one of his essays on the Catholic Thing and posted it in the Ricochet Catholics group. It was suggested that a post might be created from the material, and, in researching the original essay, "A Plea for Intolerance," published in 1931, I found a much more substantial range of points.

The enthusiastically impatient are welcome to click through to Old Errors and New Labels, where it was originally collected, and soak it all in at once. I won't be offended, I promise. I can only do so much with it under copyright laws, anyway. Its timeliness is a constant reminder that the progressive modernist fallacy that human nature is drawn toward perfection is as old as Greece and Rome and still a source of constant amusement to us wiseacres.

The Sheen:

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; 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. 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 unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. 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. Voltaire boasted that if he could find but ten wicked words a day he could crush the “infamy” of Christianity. He found the ten words daily, and even a daily dozen, but he never found an argument, and so the words went the way of all words and the thing, Christianity, survived. Today, no one advances even a poor argument to prove that there is no God, but they are legion who think they have sealed up the heavens when they have used the word “anthropomorphism.” This word is just a sample of that whole catalogue of names which serve as the excuse for those who are too lazy to think. One moment’s reflection would tell them that one can no more get rid of God by calling Him “anthropomorphic” than he can get rid of a sore throat by calling it “streptococci.” As regards the use of the term “anthropomorphism,” I cannot see that its use in theology is less justified than the use in physics of the term “organism,” which the new physicists are so fond of employing. ... ... Not only does the substitution of words for argument betray the existence of this false tolerance, but also the readiness on the part of many minds to accept as an authority in any field an individual who becomes a famous authority in one particular field. The assumption behind journalistic religion is that because a man is clever in inventing automobiles he is thereby clever in treating the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity; that a professor who is an authority on the mathematical interpretation of atomic phenomena is thereby an authority on the interpretation of marriage; and that a man who knows something about illumination can throw light on the subject of immortality, or perhaps even put out the lights on immortality. There is a limit to the transfer of training, and no man who paints beautiful pictures with his right hand can, in a day and at the suggestion of a reporter, paint an equally good one with his left hand. The science of religion has a right to be heard scientifically through its qualified spokesmen, just as the science of physics or of astronomy has a right to be heard through its qualified spokesmen. Religion is a science despite the fact that some would make it only a sentiment. Religion is not an open question, like the League of Nations, while science is a closed question, like the addition table. It 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.

It is an easy segue from Sheen's "words" to the "words" of the Word of Faith/"Say it and claim it" movement or the "feelz" validation method of all manner of "reform" religions, declared or stealthy. It is treacherous to make easy, broad comparisons between centuries, but from Moses to Homer to Chaucer to Fitzgerald and Goldman, I have always found people I knew and from whom I could still learn today.

As Bishop Sheen steers toward the end:

The truth is divine; the heretic is human. Due reparation made, she will admit the heretic back into the treasury of her souls, but never the heresy into the treasury of her wisdom. Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need, as Mr. Chesterton tells us, “not a Church that is right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is wrong.”

I have pried loose a few obvious gems. I recommend the book. Nobody pains and annoys Voltaireans better than Sheen.

Happy Lord's Day.