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...Fulton J.
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
natural broad-mindedness 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.
The science of religion has a right to be
heard scientifically through its qualified spokesmen,
just as the science of physics or astronomy has a right
to be heard through its qualified spokesmen. Religion
is a science despite the fact the some would make it
only a sentiment. Religion 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.
Another evidence of the breakdown of
reason that has produced this weird fungus of
broad-mindedness is the passion of novelty, as
opposed to the love of truth. Truth is
sacrificed for an epigram, the Divinity of Christ for a
headline in the Monday morning newspaper. 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, paying
compliments to Catholics because of “their great
organization” and to sexologists because of “their
honest challenge to the youth of this generation.”
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. No accusing
finger would be leveled at a divorce or one living in
adultery; no voice would be thundered in the ears of the
rich, saying with something of the intolerance of
Divinity: “It is not lawful for thee to live with thy
brother’s wife.” Rather would we hear: “Friends, times
are changing!” The acids of
modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.
Belief in the existence of God, in the
Divinity of Christ, in the moral law, is considered
passing fashions. The latest thing in this new
tolerance is considered the true thing, as if truth were
a fashion, like a hat, instead of an institution like a
head.
The final argument for modern
broad-mindedness is that truth is novelty and hence
“truth” changes with the passing fancies of the moment.
Like the chameleon that changes his colors to suit the
vesture on which he is placed, so truth is supposed to
change to fit the foibles and obliquities of the age.
The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so
than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a
thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong
enough to survive a thousand assaults. But for any one
to say, “Some say this, some say that, therefore, there
is no truth,” is about as logical as it would have been
for Columbus who heard some say, “The earth is round”,
and others say “The earth is flat” to conclude:
“Therefore, there is no earth.” Like a carpenter who
might throw away his rule and use each beam as a
measuring rod, so, too, those who have thrown away the
standard of objective truth have nothing left with which
to measure but the mental fashion of the moment.
The giggling giddiness of novelty, the
sentimental restlessness of a mind unhinged, and the
unnatural fear of a good dose of hard thinking, all
conjoin to produce a group of sophomoric latitudinarians
who think there is no difference between God as Cause
and God as a “mental projection”; who equate Christ and
Buddha, and then enlarge their broad-mindedness into a
sweeping synthesis that says not only that one
Christian sect is as good as another, but even
that one world-religion is just as good as another. The
great god “Progress” is then enthroned on the altars of
fashion, and as the hectic worshippers are asked,
“Progress toward what?” the tolerant comes back with
“More progress.” All the while sane men are wondering
how there can be progress without direction and how
there can be direction without a fixed point. And
because they speak of a “fixed point”, they are said to
be behind the times, when really they are beyond
the times mentally and spiritually.
In the face of this false
broadmindedness, what the world needs is
intolerance. The world seems to have lost
entirely the faculty of distinguishing between good and
bad, the right and the wrong. There are some minds that
believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they
make “intolerance” mean hate, narrow-mindedness, and
bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is
always right because, for them, it means charity,
broadmindedness, and American good nature.
What is tolerance? Tolerance is an
attitude of reasoned patience toward evil and a
forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or
inflicting punishment. But what is more important than
the definition is the field of its application. The
important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to
persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only
to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to
the erring; intolerance to the error.
America is suffering not so much from
intolerance, which is bigotry, as it is from tolerance,
which is indifference to truth and error,
and a philosophical nonchalance that has been
interpreted as broad-mindedness. Greater tolerance, of
course, is desirable, for there can never be too much
charity shown to persons who differ with us. Our
Blessed Lord Himself asked that we “love those who
calumniate us, for they are always persons,” but He
never told us to love the calumny.
In keeping with the Spirit of Christ, the
Church encourages prayers for all those who are outside
the pale of the Church and asks that the greatest
charity be shown towards them. Charity, then, must be
shown to persons and particularly those outside the
fold, who by charity must be led back, that there
may be one fold and one Shepherd. Shall God,
Who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on all
religions, be denied the name of “Wisdom” and be called
an “Intolerant” God?
The Church is identified with Christ in
both time and principle; She began thinking on His first
principles and the harder She thought, the more dogmas
She developed. She never forgot those dogmas; She
remembered them and Her memory is Tradition.
The dogmas of the Church are like bricks, solid things
with which a man can build, not like straw, which is
“religious experience” fit only for burning. The Church
has been and will always be intolerant so far as the
rights of God are concerned, for heresy, error, and
untruth affect not personal matters on which She may
yield, but a Divine Right in which there is no
yielding. The truth is divine; the heretic is
human. Due reparation made, the Church will admit the
heretic back into the treasury of Her souls, but never
the heresy into the treasure of Her Wisdom.
Right is right even if nobody is
right; and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong.
The attitude of the Church in relation to
the modern world on this important question may be
brought home by the story of the two women in the
courtroom of Solomon. Both of them claimed a child.
The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or
nothing, for a child is like truth—it cannot be
divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on
the contrary, agreed to compromise. She was willing to
divide the babe, and the
babe would have died of broad-mindedness.
BISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN
VENERABLE SERVANT OF GOD
PRAY FOR US
PRAY FOR OUR CHURCH
Edited by Connie Bagnoli for The Remnant from Old
Errors and New Labels (1931) |