“Redeem the time” is St. Paul’s counsel of urgency, to leap at it, seize it, turn it into goodness. The stream is ever passing before us. No sighs or tears will bring back one moment. Failing to redeem seconds means that they remain captives forever.
Eternity is not to be measured in terms of mechanical time which is better measured by sundials, clocks, and chronometers. Eternity is better represented as something experienced, as in the legend of a magician who asked a caliph to dip his face in a basin of water. The caliph did as he was bidden and lived a full life’s experience, followed by a succession of other lives-as a man, woman, sage, etc. During that last existence something startled him, and he noticed that he was just lifting himself from the basin of water. In a brief time, he lived a long life.
Eternity is without succession, a simultaneous possession of all joys. To those who lived toward Eternity, it really is not something at the end; it is that which influences every moment of the “now.” The reason for the Sabbath or the rest on the Seventh Day was to make man stand off from the flux of a workaday world to contemplate his origin and destiny.
-Venerable Fulton Sheen, “Footprints in a Darkened Forest” p. 18
“The advance of technology, space travel, and atomic energy is apt to blind us to the other side of the picture, in which the same man who boasts of his future shrinks in terror from what it may bring. The team of scientists who worked in Chicago during World War II were thrilled at the fact that they had produced a new energy like to that with which the sun lights the world. While their work imposed upon them the greatest secrecy, they nevertheless were stricken with terror at the monstrous evil that might result from their discovery. They wrote to President Truman urging that the bomb should be used only in some desert place, but their letter was never answered. And yet, they lived to see the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Could the production of nuclear reaction, which was capable of bringing so much benefit to man, be also the demon which might destroy him?
Is there not also a parallel in the fact that, as medicine has succeeded in conquering many organic and functional diseases, there has been an increase in mental diseases? Never before has there been so much power and never before have men so prepared to use it for the destruction of life. Never before has there been so much education and never before so little coming to the knowledge of the truth. The new technological inventions in growing secularism must be viewed from two sides: that of giving great freedom to man and also that of possibly increasing his slavery and destruction. What makes the problem all the more poignant is that technology has no place for the word “I.”
None of the new secularist philosophies, whatever they be, have any place for the personal man. They propose to make him absolutely responsible for his own history and for everything that happens in the world. But at the very moment that they are glorifying him, the individual man, the existing human personality is being swallowed up by collectivism, the omnipotent state, the Organization Man. A classic description of this is to be found in George Orwell’s 1984.
Once the reality of God has been eliminated from society, what safeguard have we for the human person? What is to prevent planners in a technologically advanced civilization from treating human beings as functions rather than as persons? During World War II, Hitler sent men to the famous Bethel Hospital to inform Pastor Bodelschwing, its director, that the state could no longer afford to keep hundreds of epileptics who were useless to society and who constituted a drain on its resources, and that they had better be destroyed. Bodelschqing finally won the battle with no other weapon than the simple affirmation that they were men and women, made to the image and likeness of God, and to destroy them would be to sin against God.
When the Communists swept from northern to southern China, one of our large leper colonies in charge of sisters was seized by the Communists. The Communists called them all together, told them that they had been poorly cared for by the sisters and not well fed. From now on, under the Communist regime, they would have a banquet every day. They were all told to go into the common dining room. They went in, the doors were locked, the Communists set fire to the building, and all were burned. If there is no authority beyond public authority, then there is no one to whom I can appeal against its pressure. The authority then becomes the one who is strongest. This idea has been developed by Arthur Koestler in his book, Darkness at Noon. This is one of the reasons why a purely secular society produces martyrdom, which witnesses to the existence of authority. Once this authority is denied, nothing can prevent the secular state from affirming with Pilate, “Dost thou not know that I have power to crucify thee?”
-Venerable Fulton Sheen, “Footprints in a Darkened Forest” pp. 233-234
“Modern saints are nonconformist, in the sense that none of them followed the crowd or the masses. Despite the emphasis on individual liberty, there is increasing tendency on the part of the masses to be “other-directed.” For example, youths conform to the mores of the crowd to which they belong; leaders of labor unions determine to a great extent the decisions of the members; homes are other directed when they are the passive recipients of a TV program made in Hollywood or in New York; women become slaves of anonymous directors of fashion, bowing down in veneration saying, “They are wearing green this year,” without ever inquiring who are the “they.” The result is an apathy and a passivity which makes it difficult to participate in the reconstruction of society. Citizens then ask, “What can I do about it?”
-Venerable Fulton Sheen, “Footprints in a Darkened Forest” p. 241
Pope John XXIII
The mystique of Pope John XXIII was the love of God and the love of neighbor. There are some who love neighbor without loving God, but such love reaches limits beyond which it refuses to humble itself for another. One soldier, during the last war, boasted, “I am glad I am an atheist. If I were a Christian, I would have to help those dysentery patients.” Those who love God without loving neighbor have a heart which keeps all the blood for itself, refusing to send it to the extremities. Pope John’s deep and all-encompassing love of mankind came from his love of God: “I am like every other man in the world. I have been blessed with a disposition to love mankind, which keeps me faithful to the teachings of the Gospel, makes me respectful of my rights and the rights of others, and which prevents me from doing evil to anyone. In fact, it encourages me to do good to everyone.”
This accounted for his perpetual good humor. When he was Patriarch of Venice, a high tide flooded the Piazza di San Marco; to escape the rising waters he went into a small wineshop. The man behind the counter recognized him and stammered out, “Dry throat, Eminence?” He shook his head and said, “No, wet feet.” I visited with him in company with Karsh, the famous photographer. Pope John said, “God knew from all eternity that I was destined to be Pope. He also knew that I would live for over eighty years. Having all eternity to work on, and also eighty years, wouldn’t you think He would have made me better looking?”
This love of humanity also begot in him a profound humility and a resistance to ever considering himself above others. Though he was a Cardinal before he was named Pope, he refused to be a Cardinal in the sense of being an Eminence, for “eminence” is taken from the Latin word eminens which means “far off.” The origin of this elevation began in 1244, when Margaret, Countess of Flanders, visited Pope Innocent IV in Rome who had just been elected the previous year. She was the daughter of Baldwin II, the Latin emperor of Constantinople. She was gently chided in the course of the visit to the Pontiff, because she seemed to address everyone alike, justifying herself, “How is it possible to tell and abbot from a cardinal? They all dress in black.” The Pontiff asked her, “Well what would you suggest?” She said, “I would suggest giving them red hats.”
The red hat John never took very seriously, for immediately after his elevation he made a retreat in which he wrote in his notebooks: “It cost me nothing to acknowledge and repeat that I am nothing and worth precisely nothing.”
That love of humanity also came out in his famous encyclical, Mater et Magistra, in which he pleaded for a socialization of mankind but not socialism. Socialism, he said, destroys the work of personality by absorption into the mass, but socialization “is at one and the same time an effect and a cause of growing intervention of public authorities in even the most crucial matters, such as those concerning the care of health, the instruction and edification of the younger generation, and the controlling of professional careers and the methods of care and rehabilitation of those variously handicapped. But it is also the fruit and expression of the natural tendency, almost irrepressible in human beings – the tendency to join together to attain objectives which are beyond the capacity and the means of single individuals.”
This love of humanity had its even greater expression in the opening of the doors of the Church to let in the world and also to let the Church out. The purpose was to end the division in Christendom that has lasted in one instance over four hundred years and in another instance over seven hundred. On the day of his coronation, when he stood outside the doors of St. Peter’s and bade the whole world to come to him, his great arms were like fleshy columns of Bernini, embracing all humanity and forever reminding the children of the heavenly Father that all men are brothers.
-Venerable Fulton Sheen, “Footprints in a Darkened Forest,” pp.249-250
These quotes were used under The Copyright Act’s Fair Use disclaimer found in section 107.
Interplanetary Dust 