Quote of the Week: Fulton Sheen

“Why is sin possible? Because we are free. You can tell a man he ought to do something, but in his will he can resist. Sin lies in the abuse of freedom. It has something to do with a wrong or an evil choice. We never sin without the will. We can take two attitudes toward freedom, both of which are wrong. We can exaggerate human freedom; we can minimize it.”

– Fulton Sheen, Your Life is Worth Living, New York: Crown Publishing Group (2019) pgs. 260-261

Nobody, in their right mind, can dispute the reality of evil. It’s ugly, cruel, distasteful and what all of us root against in movies. The suffering caused by hideous events in history like slavery, genocide, discrimination by things outside our control, mass shootings, etc., is obvious. What is not so obvious, and the point that Sheen argued against throughout his life, is the evil that we relativize in the name of freedom, or the lack thereof.

Today, freedom is misunderstood to mean that we can do whatever it is that we want. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his short lecture made into a book, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” argued that since we are free to choose our destiny, we cannot choose evil. In other words, everything we do is correct because it is our choice.

On the other hand, we also have people who deny the ability to choose at all. Determinists, for example, maintain the view that mankind is determined to act a certain way based on their genes (Irish are drinkers, Puerto Ricans are loud), or on the circumstances (poor people are criminals, police officers are racists). The point is that our choices are effects of causes outside of our control.

In both extremes, we find a coming together, kind of like a horseshoe, in the denial of sin. Because to sin is to miss the mark set by God; it rejects the self invention of morality praised by Sartrians, while defending the freedom of will rejected by Determinists. To have a standard set by someone wiser does not refute the freedom to reject such calling, just like my son can ignore my advice on anything. To reject freedom is to say that we are just like animals, reacting to stimuli by instinct. But sacrifice of self refutes this claim whenever we witness people refusing a meal when they are hungry because they are fasting, or when firefighters run into fires against survival instincts to save others.

To deny sin is, basically, to deny objective morality. By denying objective morality, we destroy responsibility and accountability. Sartre cannot hold dictators accountable because they are doing their own thing, according to Sartre himself. Determinists cannot fight against terrorists, because they are determined to terrorize by either their genes, situation, or culture.

Sheen, finally, stands for one morality, an objective morality. If we are at sea, morality’s virtues are the Lighthouses that show the way to land. We do not have the freedom to choose what our genes are or what social class we are born into, but we are free to choose how to respond to that stimuli. But, even though we are free to draw a straight line, we are not free to decide what a straight line looks like. This reality and the acceptance of that reality, frees us to fight against evil, just like the heroes we root for in movies.