Friday, June 29, 2012

VENERABLE SHEEN

J.M.J.


June 28, 2012

Friends,

Good news travels fast! At least, I am certainly hoping that the GREAT news about the Cause for Archbishop Fulton Sheen has reached you and your friends by now. On June 28, the Holy Father Pope Benedict promulgated the decree recognizing the heroic virtue of Archbishop Fulton Sheen – and therefore, Fulton Sheen is now rightly called “VENERABLE” – the last major “title” before “blessed.”

This announcement marks the culmination of ten years of hard work, generous donations, and mostly lots of prayers. And you have been a part of this team-effort all along. I think this calls for a celebration!

On Sunday, September 9, 2012 at 10:30am in the Cathedral of Saint Mary, Peoria, Illinois, Bishop Daniel Jenky, CSC, will offer a Mass of Thanksgiving to celebrate Venerable Fulton Sheen. This is the same Cathedral where Sheen received his vocation, was ordained a priest, and offered his first solemn Mass. There could be no better place to give glory to God and to honor Venerable Fulton.

As you have been part of this work, I invite you to share in this party!

Come! Our enclosed newsletter includes information about the September 9 celebration. Our website --- CelebrateSheen.com – includes all the help you need in planning your pilgrimage to Peoria and provides exclusive invitations to our “friends of Sheen.”

Pray! From the beginning, this cause has been and remains a spiritual work. Especially if you aren’t able to physically come to Peoria, you can be truly spiritually present. Use the enclosed envelope to send us your intentions. These intentions will be presented during the Offertory of our Mass of Thanksgiving and placed on the altar of the Cathedral. At the end of Mass, these petitions will be entrusted to the Lady’s Altar, just as Father Fulton Sheen entrusted his priesthood to our Lady on the day he was ordained a priest.

Give! Your generous financial support has brought the Cause to this point and has helped to lead others to Christ through Fulton Sheen’s spiritual legacy. You have helped to bring over 200,000 Wartime Prayer Books to our military. You provided over 5000 books to our seminarians. And the work continues. Even as we celebrate Venerable Sheen, there is much work to do here and in Rome. Please consider a gift in honor of Venerable Sheen.

It has been my profound experience that Fulton Sheen brings people together – and I am very grateful that he has brought you into this work. Together let us celebrate – and be rededicated in prayer and effort. As God wills and the Church approves, there are even greater celebrations just ahead!

Commending you to the care of the Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue, I am,

Sincerely in the Lord,

Msgr. Stanley Deptula
Executive Director

Fulton Sheen named "VENERABLE"



Friday, June 22, 2012

The Soul Became an unimportant suburb of the city called Business

If politics and economics did not interfere with religion, they argued, why should religion interfere with politics and economics? Religious liberty was thus purchased on the understanding that it would refrain from the secular order. Religion became a circumscribed area of life, insulated from all contact with the secular, and any attempt on the part of religion to inject ethical and moral consideration into business was looked upon as meddling, as if the virtue of justice were something to be preached in a pulpit on Sunday, but not to be practiced in a factory on Monday. The world was willing to admit that religion could tell man about his final end, but it refused to allow religion to tell him the right means to attain that end.


Religion came to stand in the same relation to world affairs as God did to Newton’s astronomy. As Newton brought the universe under law, Newtonians assumed that God was no longer necessary to account for the order and harmony of the spheres, as if the discovery of a law did away with the necessity of the Lawgiver. Newton dragged God into his universe to account for two irregularities which he could not fit into his law; namely, why certain fixed stars did not fall and why certain orbs revolving in different orbits did not collide. God thus became a handy explanation to account for irregularities which science could not yet describe, a dignified cosmic plumber going about mending the leaks in a Newtonian universe. In like manner God was permitted to take care of the irregularities of the political and economic universe, i.e., He and His believers could do ambulance work for the poor, the dependents, and defectives which the political and economic order could not yet absorb. Later on with progress and science even these social irregularities would disappear and religion would no more be needed. In this way religion was relegated to a place of retreat from the world; a catacomb into which men might go for a rest but only after they had washed their hands of business. One would almost think that the man who went to church was different than the man who went to work, or that man as a political and economic creature had escaped in some miraculous way the fall of man. The result of this separation of religion and public affairs was to drive religion into a position of increasing irrelevance to public affairs. “I don’t bother the Church, why should the Church bother me” became the fallacious catchword to justify the divorce of two things which were meant to be as inseparable as head and body.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen – Freedom Under God (Copyright, 1940)