A Book Review… Archbishop Sheen On The Evils Of The Age

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN

Justice & Charity, by Fulton J. Sheen (TAN Books: Charlotte, NC 28241, 2006), 183 pp. Available at www.TANBooks.com or 1-800-437-5876.

Divided into two parts identified as “The Social Problem” and “The Individual Problem,” Bishop Sheen’s book consists of 18 addresses given from January to April of 1938 that identify the two great evils of his age called “the accidental evil of Capitalism” and “the essential evil of Communism.”
The virtues of justice and charity, he argues, combat and cure both of these social maladies. Even though the historical context of these essays examines American society and the Western world prior to World War II, Sheen’s luminous, penetrating, and eloquent exposition of Catholic social teaching makes these essays timely for the twenty-first century by virtue of their priceless wisdom.
In the first essay “The Spirit of Charity,” Sheen explains the ways that the excesses of capitalism ignore the virtue of justice — what is rightfully due to the worker by way of a living wage. However, the Church does not regard the laborer’s formal agreement to the wage as the sole condition that determines a fair salary, nor does the Church define a just wage as one an employer contracts to pay.
Citing Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, Sheen emphasizes that Catholic social teaching regards a wage as just “when it takes into account ‘the condition of the business,’ the ‘necessities of the workingman and his family,’ and the ‘economic welfare of all the people’.” There is no simple formulaic answer.
Christ, according to Sheen, taught all men to “to be capitalists without being exploiters” and “to be laborers without being Communists” because Christ was poor and rich, a carpenter and a king: “He was a Rich Person who became a Poor Man.”
Sheen recalls all the familiar facts from the Gospels. The affluent magi and the humble shepherds both worshipped the Messiah. Christ inspired the wealthy to distribute their wealth and taught the poor to conquer their envy. Christ as Lord came as the Prince of Peace to prevent all class conflicts that divide the rich and poor and to eliminate destructive political revolutions: “To neither class does He belong exclusively, for He was neither rich nor poor; He was The Rich Poor Man, and The Poor Rich Man.” Justice and charity rather than greed and jealousy must govern the social, political, and economic order.
In the chapter “Liberty,” Sheen distinguishes between three approaches to social problems: Liberalism, Communism, and Christianity. Modern liberalism, he explains, does not mean the freedom to choose between good and evil but “the right to do, to think, or to say whatever one pleases without regard for society, tradition, objective standards, or authority.” Liberalism, believing in laissez-faire economics with no state regulations to control the forces of the market, also frowns upon unions and collective bargaining.
Citing both Quadragesimo Anno and Rerum Novarum, Sheen defends the Church’s teaching that justifies workers’ unions demanding just wages for families to live according to a standard of human dignity. As Pope Leo XIII writes, “for no one ought to live unbecomingly.” Sheen invokes always the Church’s standard of the common good that unbridled capitalism violates as the monarchical inequalities between kings and subjects in the past yield to the economic inequalities of industrialized society. If they subvert the common good, “neither a capitalist’s right to profits, nor a laborer’s right to organize are absolute.”
In the chapter “Capitalism,” Sheen acknowledges that the Church favors the rightful practice of ownership of private property for honest profit as in the example of a farmer who shares in the management and investment of his land — a form of ownership and independence called “Distributism” that creates a more widespread sharing of wealth outside of a small class of the most affluent. However, a second brand of capitalism that breeds monopolies — vast stores of wealth controlled by a few inevitably leads to what Pope Pius XI called “immense power and despotic economic domination.” The Church’s social teaching does not subscribe to any narrow political ideology.
In the chapter “Charity,” Sheen argues that a just social order and Christian society do not instigate class conflict or invidious competition. The selfishness of the wealthy and the hatred of the envious both pose social problems that offend against love of neighbor. No humane, civilized society flourishes when hostility and antagonism determine the relationships between different social and economic classes:
“If the rich hate the poor and the poor hate the rich it is because both have offended against charity, the rich by being too selfish and the poor by being too envious.” A Christian society opposes economic warfare.
Sheen observes that too few are generous in almsgiving to the poor and many who are poor — not destitute — fail to be “poor in spirit” to find contentment in a simple life without luxuries. He recalls a familiar fact of history that marks political upheavals like the French Revolution: “The envious poor who crushed the rich never did anything for the poor man with all their confiscated wealth.” No stable political order endures under perpetual class conflict.
These essays, then, based on the encyclicals of Pius XI and Leo XIII, offer medicine for all ailing societies whether in the year 1938 or the year 2017. Whether they are banks, oil companies, loan industries, or global free trade practices, all economic practices have an ethical dimension that obligates them to conform to the unchanging moral standards of justice, charity, the common good, and the dignity of human beings.
Bishop Sheen’s exposition of Catholic social teachings offers an objective norm for all governments and lawmakers to incorporate as the touchstone for wise policies that serve all men and the future good of all generations.

The Seven Last Words

The portion of the book called “The Individual Problem” consists of seven addresses on Christ’s seven last words on the cross and short reflections on “The Stations of the Cross for Communists.”
The First Word (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”) ponders the mystery of unjust suffering, a meditation in which Sheen observes that Christ “lets fall from His lips for the first time in the history of the world a prayer for enemies.”
Christ’s innocence testifies for the whole world that man does not judge God and that human courts and judicial authorities — Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas — are not the final arbiters of justice: “Our eternal salvation does not depend on how the world judges us, but on how God judges us.” Only God knows the heart and the soul of each person, and therefore “God is a more merciful judge than man.”
The ultimate test of Christian love, Sheen states, rests upon a person’s love for his enemies, for, in Christ’s words, “For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? Do not even publicans do the same?”
The Second Word (“let this cup pass from me”) examines the meaning of pain, contrasting the “unspiritualized suffering of the world” that produces embittered cynics to the redemptive suffering of Christ that carries infinite merit. Unspiritualized suffering views pain as a “sacrifice without love,” whereas salvific suffering becomes “pain with love.”
Sheen offers a number of simple analogies: The noble soul endures suffering just as the bird rebuffs the wind and as the fish swims upstream. Just as the seed goes into the ground to bear fruit and grapes are crushed to produce wine, suffering produces a spiritual harvest. With the knowledge that “love makes pain bearable,” crucified love, whether divine or human, does not crush the human spirit or have no value but purchases souls.
The Third Word (“Woman, behold thy son”), on the suffering of the innocent, contemplates the infinite, unimaginable nature of love without limit — the mark of God that all fathers and mothers recognize in the intimate bonds of parental love that suffers and sacrifices for children because “love means identification and sympathy with the one loved.” Love’s spiritual nature inspires bountiful, unconditional love without end.
Just like human parents, “Why should not Jesus and Mary suffer in the humanity they love and of which they are the head?”
The Fourth Word concerns “moral suffering” — Sheen explains this in terms of both man’s abandonment of God and God’s abandonment of man. As Christ in His agony cries to the Father “why hast thou forsaken me,” He also suffers man’s abandonment of God in the betrayal of Judas, for the nature of sin is “the taking of Divine Life” — the defiance of the atheist who denies the existence of God and cries “crucify him.”
Even though Christ’s enemies could find in Him no fault, they resented absolute goodness because purity is “sin’s reproach,” and sin lacks all sense of repentance even in its destruction of divine life. A world abandoned by God or God abandoned by man is the nature of Hell.
The Fifth Word on “The Need for Zeal” examines Christ’s heartbreaking agony of soul that suffers from the cruelty of ingratitude, for “the greatest thirst of all is the thirst of unrequited love.” Just as Christ utters “I thirst,” the Christian too must also “thirst for the spread of the Divine Love, and if we do not thirst, then we shall not be invited to sit down at the banquet of life.” Christ’s thirst for men’s souls and man’s thirst for God’s peace show the ardor and zeal of love that climax in the union of love as the ultimate form of happiness.
The Sixth Word (“It is finished”) on “A Planned Universe” meditates on the increase of suffering in the later years of life. Although joy reaches its heights at the beginning of life in childhood, marriage, and Ordination, “Later on God seems to withdraw His consoling sweetness.” This divine plan serves the purpose of detaching man from the valley of tears and leading man to think more of his final destiny.
God allows this increase of sorrow in the later years “to supply the defects of our love” and “to jolt us back again into the plan.” This Good Friday of the human journey anticipates Easter, for “unless we die to this world, we shall not live in the next.”
The Seventh Word (“Father, into thy Hands I commend my spirit”) entitled “Eternal Freedom” reflects on the nature of spiritual freedom that Christ maintained to the last, rejecting the temptations in the wilderness and overcoming the darkest night of the soul: “The soul of man is the last and impregnable fortress of character.”
Christ never lost sight of the purpose of His life or wavered in the midst of the agony and crucifixion, for “He kept His soul His own,” never compromising or weakening. Not even a crucifixion broke Christ’s resolve to uphold his spiritual liberty — “the power to give our soul to God.”
These meditations, then, provide spiritual reading of the highest order, examining the nature of both social sin and personal vice. Without justice and charity, ideologies and tyrannies shape the nature of the social order, and without the imitation of Christ — His purity, His forgiveness, His sacrificial suffering, His thirst for souls, His zeal, and His spiritual freedom — man’s social life degenerates into deadly sins like pride, avarice, envy, wrath, and sloth that only produce the anarchy and lawlessness of one political ideology after another.