On September 24, the Catholic Church will officially recognize Archbishop Fulton Sheen as “blessed,” which means only one step away from receiving the official title of “saint.” I am in St. Louis for the beatification Mass and reflecting on Sheen’s wise warnings against the existential threat of Communism.
Sheen was an archbishop, a theologian, a historian, and an award-winning TV personality who famously accepted his Emmy Award for “Most Outstanding Personality” in 1953 by joking, “I’d like to thank my writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” In the mid-20th century, he led a religious revival in America, inspiring not only his fellow Catholics but many people of other religious affiliations, as evidenced by his Emmy. But he also lived to see the crisis of faith that followed Vatican II, the Sexual Revolution, and the Vietnam War, and to witness the terrifying creep of socialist poison into both political and religious institutions in America and across the West.
But Sheen argued that Communism was a new version of a very old evil. And he saw quite clearly that it was not just a political ideology, but an alternative to Judeo-Christian religion, falsely offering a utopia on earth that man can only truly find in heaven, while actually creating a dystopia like an earthly hell. And while Communists blame religion for so many evils in the world, Sheen knew that they would bring evils much worse than any they criticized. Communism “is a groan of despair, not the revolution, that starts a new age. It is the logical development of civilization which for the last 400 years has been forgetting God,” he wrote in 1936, at the dawn of the socialist dictatorships that would massacre hundreds of millions.
Sheen once described the Soviet slaughters in Russia by telling a Carnegie Hall crowd, “Those who cannot pull God down from heaven are driving his creatures from the face of the earth.”
One of his most memorable observations was: “In a democracy man has rights which are God-given; under communism the rights are state-given, and therefore they can be state-taken-away.” Decades later, we are discovering that he was all too prophetic. The politicians who had begun to mock God in his day now openly set themselves up as little gods, autocrats without restriction or conscience.
In his Life of Christ, a wonderful introduction to scriptural study, Sheen wrote, "Communism comes along and picks up the meaningless Cross; Western post-Christian civilization chooses the unscarred Christ." He explained that Communism enforces hard work, self-sacrifice (among the common people), and restrictive discipline, but without any of the love, justice, and compassion that characterize the sacrifice and hard work of true Christians. On the other hand, the West, instead of staying true to a Christ Who both suffered and triumphed, Who both condemned sin and offered mercy, looked to make Christ "a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher" interested only in so-called social justice. Sadly, that made diluted Christianity the perfect candidate for socialist co-opting. A Christ without the cross can become a figurehead for Communism.
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Sheen warned that love of God and love of country are connected. “We are independent of dictators because we are dependent on God,” he said. Communists try to be independent of God, and only end up creating dictatorships.
In conclusion, I want to include Sheen's advice to all those Jews and Christians who wish to remain free and fight the scourge of Communism: “Since Communists infiltrate their philosophy through lies and myths, it is imperative that people in a democracy be properly informed concerning not only the errors of its ideology, but also the great truths of human nature, history and religion.”
