Every now and then someone boasts "I have an absolutely new idea." Three answers may be given. One is "Treat it kindly, it is in a strange place." The other is "Beginner's luck." And the third and best answer is "Go back and see how the ancients put it."

-Fulton Sheen, Life is Worth Living (1953)

 A fashion is something that goes in one year and out another.

-Fulton Sheen, Life is Worth Living, Fourth Series (1956)

...I sat and meditated on the words that John the Baptist said about the One Whom he baptized; "As He grows greater, I must grow less." Therein was the secret of the Christian messsage. As the ego deflates, divinity takes up the abode. Nothing can be occupied by two objects at one and the same time. To decrease is to be less and less occupied with self. That was the day perhaps more than any other that I learned that humility is not something that is directly cultivated; otherwise one becomes proud of his humility. It is a by-product; the more Christ is in the soul, the less the "I" weighs it down. 

-Fulton Sheen, "Treasure in Clay"

 [P]ilate evidently caught the idea that moral conduct had something to do with the discovery of truth, so he  resorted to pragmatism and utilitarianism, and sneered the question:

What is truth? 

John 18:38

Then he turned his back on truth- better not on it, but on Him Who is Truth. It remained to be seen that tolerance of truth and error in a stroke of broadmindedness leads to intolerance and persecution; "What is truth?" when sneered, is followed up with the second sneer, "What is justice?" Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right. He who was so tolerant of error as to deny an Absolute Truth was the one who would crucify Truth.

-Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ (1958)

“When a politician boasts that he loves the poor, find out how much of his capital he has given to the poor.”

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen (On Being Human)

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.

-Fulton Sheen (On Being Human)

(H/T to commenter on this Facebook post.)

"The average American is physically, biologically, psychologically and neurologically unable to do anything worthwhile before he has a cup of coffee!"

"If at all possible, the priest should make his daily Holy Hour before celebrating his Mass. Now that the Church's regulations on the pre-Eucharistic fast have been modified, he will be well advised to take a cup of coffee before he starts. The average American is physically, biologically, psychologically and neurologically unable to do anything worthwhile before he has a cup of coffee! And that goes for prayer too. Even sisters in convents whose rules were written before electric percolators were developed would do well to update their procedures. Let them have coffee before meditation."

-Venerable Fulton Sheen, The Priest Is Not His Own

A lady once carried a crying child from a church where Fulton J. Sheen was preaching. The archbishop declared, “Madame, there’s no reason to remove that child. He’s not bothering me.” The lady called back, “You’re bothering him!”

http://www.ccwatershed.org/blog/2015/apr/16/greatest-cry-room-in-the-world/

“What is the extra ingredient in suffering, which when absent prompts a curse, and when present becomes a joy? You must unite your sufferings and sorrows with Christ and see your Calvary as coming from the Hand of God. Our Lord saw the cup of His Passion as given to Him, not by Judas or Pilate or Caiphas or the people, but by His Father: ‘Shall I not drink the Cup My Father Himself has appointed for Me?’ Pain without Christ is suffering; pain with Christ is sacrifice.”

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen

“When the vast majority of men no longer live the way they think, then they begin to think the way they live. The average man does the average thing: the Christian is bidden to transcend the mediocre. Society settles down to the level of the ordinary but society is saved by those who push on to the second mile when compelled to walk the first. No character is developed in the first mile: the difference between the good and the barely good is not a difference in talent, but a difference in service.”

~ Fulton J. Sheen, ‘Love Walks the Extra Mile‘ 1958.

“A weak man can never be meek, because he is never self-possessed; meekness is that virtue which controls the combative, violent and pugnacious powers of our nature, and is therefore the best and noblest road to self-realization. The meek man is not a man who refuses to fight, nor is he a man who will never become angry. A meek man is a man who will never do one thing: he will never fight when his conceit is attacked, but only when a principle is at stake." 

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Cross and the Beatitudes)

The Church has not been tried for three hundred years; it has not even been considered; it has only been ignored. The world knows less about her than about the man in the moon. It has never studied her claims, never searched out her secrets; and it dispenses itself from doing so for the same reason the first hearers of Christ dispensed themselves from hearing His message: 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Ignorance can be accumulated just as well as wisdom, and during the last three hundred years the world has accumulated a tremendous amount of ignorance concerning her."

~ Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 'The Prodigal World' January 1936, p 19. [GCStevenson 03.02.2013 - Gospel reading Lk 15:1-3, 11-32]

Found in a comment on a post on the official Facebook page for the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation

Religion is not the opium of the people. Opium is the drug of deserters who are afraid to face the Cross-the opiate that gives momentary escape from the Hound of Heaven in pursuit of the human soul.

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Rainbow of Sorrow

The over-emphasis on politics today is an indication that people are governed, rather than governing. The complexities of our civilization force us to organize into larger and larger units: we have become so intent on governing what is outside of us that we neglect to govern our own selves. Yet the key to social betterment is always to be found in personal betterment. Remake man and you remake his world. We gravely need to restore to man his self-respect and to give him his appropriate honor: this will keep him from bowing cravenly before those who threaten to enslave him, and it will give him the courage to defend the right, alone if need be, when the world is wrong.

-Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, Way to Happiness (1949)

"As Catholics, we do not subscribe to a system of dogmas. We begin with a person, the person of our Lord continued in his mystical body the church."

As Catholics, we do not subscribe to a system of dogmas. We begin with a person, the person of our Lord continued in his mystical body the church. What is faith? Faith is the meeting of two personalities. You and the Lord. There is no adhesion to an abstract dogma, but rather a communion with a person who can neither deceive nor be deceived. The authoritarians start with a party line. We start with our Lord, the Son of the living God, who said, 'I am the truth.' In other words, truth was identified with his personality. Remember when you were a child. What did you consider your home? just a sum of commands given by either your mother or your father? It was more than that, was it not? It was the love of their personalities. Our faith, then, is first and foremost in Christ, who lives in his mystical body the church. It is only secondarily in the explicit beliefs. If our Lord did not reveal them, we would not believe them. If we lost him, we would lose our beliefs. He comes first.

-Fulton Sheen

From our "Be careful what you say" department. :-)

A passage found in Archbishop Fulton Sheen's autobiography:

One day on a New York subway when the door opened at Forty-second Street a drunk got in and threw himself alongside of me and began reading a paper which I doubted very much he could see in his condition. Then he said to me: "How does a man get diabetes?" I said: "Oh, by getting drunk and paying no attention to his wife and children." A moment later I was sorry for having made that quick diagnosis. I asked him: "Why did you want to know how a man got diabetes?" He said: "I was just reading that the Pope had diabetes."

-Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen (1980)

"...but Satan never has and never will appear with scars"

Satan may appear in many disguises like Christ, and at the end of the world will appear as a benefactor and philanthropist- but Satan never has and never will appear with scars. Only Heaven's Love can show the mark of love's greatest gift in a night forever past.

-Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ