Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen, Part 2

Part 1 of my posts on Treasure in Clay can be found here.  

Let's start with an episode from his television show, titled "How to Improve Your Mind."

Summary, Chapters 5 thru 8

Chapter 5, “Teaching and Lecturing”:

Bishop Sheen provides some of his 25 year history as a teacher, passes on some of his experience he gained, and some of his teaching methods. 

Chapter 6, “The Electric Gospel”:

Bishop Sheen describes his transition to radio and television, his preparation techniques, and how his American audience embraced him.

Chapter 7, “Communism”:

Bishop Sheen describes the rise of communism in the middle decades of the 20^th century and some of his encounters with communists. 

Chapter 8, “Desiring the Episcopacy”:
Sheen provides details on how he became a bishop from being director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith and he provides some insight to into the life and workings of bishops in general.

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I really loved Chapter five on his teaching and methods. I was surprised by a number of things: that it took 25 years of his life, that he taught in England for a while, that he was friends with Fr. Ronald Knox, who has published many a book and is one of the important Catholics of the 20th century. I particularly liked how he extensively researched and read beyond the necessary to be fully informed. I had never heard of a theandric action.

A theandric action is one in which both the divine and human nature of our Lord is involved.

Fascinating. I thought that advice he got from Cardinal Mercier was excellent:

“I will give you two: always keep current: know what the modern world is thinking about; read its poetry, its history, its literature; observe its architecture and its art; hear its music and its theater; and then plunge deeply into St. Thomas and the wisdom of the ancients and you will be able to refute its errors. The second suggestion: tear up your notes at the end of each year. There is nothing that so much destroys the intellectual growth of a teacher as the keeping of notes and the repetition of the same course the following year.”

On the first piece of advice, again that modernist/traditionalist split that keeps popping up. Clearly Sheen is in the traditionalist camp. As to the second piece of advice, I’m not a teacher, but I don’t think I could ever do that. It’s probably a good idea, but too much work goes into a year’s worth of notes.

I was surprised when Nikita last week mentioned that Bishop Sheen was a Lay Dominican. Perhaps this had something to do with it:

For many years our dean in the School of Philosophy was Father Ignatius Smith, a Dominican, who was not only a brilliant teacher, but also a renowned preacher. My class every afternoon was at four o’clock. Before going into the classroom which immediately adjoined Dr. Smiths, I would go in and visit with him for ten minutes. He would walk out of the office with me and tell me a funny story as I was on my way to the classroom, so that I would enter the classroom laughing. My association with Dr. Smith which lasted for years, was one of the happiest of my life.

Does he mention in the autobiography that he is a Lay Dominican? I don’t recall seeing it but this moment would have been an ideal spot to mention it.

I thought this was a particularly insightful note on education:

I felt a deep moral obligation to students; that is why I spent so many hours in preparation for each class. In an age of social justice one phase that seems neglected is the moral duty of professors to give their students a just return for their tuition. This applies not only to the method of teaching but to the content as well. A teacher who himself does not learn is no teacher. Teaching is one of the noblest vocations on earth, for, in the last analysis, the purpose of all education is the knowledge and love of truth.

Yes, a teacher does have a moral obligation toward their students.

Here is one of his observations that I don’t believe is true any longer.

I have been invited to secular universities several hundred times, many more than I have been invited to talk in Catholic universities. I have found that too often some in religion want to be secular; but on the other hand, I found the secular want to be religious. In talking in universities, I realized that the more divine the subject, the greater the response.

Secular universities have about eliminated any reference to religion, and frankly Catholic universities, except the few that are strongly traditionalist, have also tampered down religious thought. That unfortunately is the state of religion in this day and age. I don’t think Bishop Sheen would recognize today’s universities if he were alive. Of course that anecdote about the talk on chastity he mentions toward the end of the chapter to ten thousand college students runs counter him not recognizing today’s universities. But I still believe that. Maybe it’s because I’m more cynical since I live in NYC, one of the Liberal capitals of the country, but I do think conditions have gotten exponentially worse since his day.

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Summary, Chapters 9 thru 10

Chapter 9, “Missions and Missionaries”:

Bishop Sheen describes how he became National Director for the Society for the propagation of the Faith, the philosophical conflicts he encountered there, and goes on to delineate a fair number of evangelical trips he made across the world.

Chapter 10, “In Journeyings Often”:

Bishop Sheen further describes his evangelizing techniques as he traveled across the world.  The key advice he provides to evangelize as St. Paul did at Ephesus, where you use the culture of the host country to enlighten the nature of Christianity.  Sheen provides more anecdotes of his experiences in China and Japan.

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Excuse me from being absent the last few days.  I’ve been under the weather. 

You guys have hit on many of the points I would have made.  I think there is a lot packed into this paragraph from Chapter 9.

I came into this office of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith at just the moment when the Church was beginning to sense a conflict between divine salvation and human liberation, between working for personal salvation of those in a parish or in a community and having a concern about their social welfare. God never intended that individual and social justice should be separated, though they very often were divorced.  In the sixties, in particular, youth developed a passionate interest for social justice in restricted areas, but they showed very little concern for individual justice, that is to say, their own relationship to their parents and to God.

I think he is highlighting a change in the culture, a change in the Church, and a change in the way religious approached their sense of obligation.

As to the culture we know of the sexual revolution of the sixties, the counter culture, and an intellectual deconstruction of tradition.  As to the Church, Vatican II, rightly or wrongly radically changed the nature of the liturgy.  Changing from a Latin Mass where the priest faced the apse but now faced the congregation and spoke in the vernacular must have been hugely disconcerting.  As to religious obligation, it’s a little more complicated to articulate.  There were always two sides to religious duty: contemplation and activism, prayer and works.  They were always in a balance, but somewhere in the sixties the contemplative side was minimized and an emphasis was placed on works.  Not that works are bad, quite the contrary, but the unbalance creates a distortion.  It tells people that the God in the sky is less important than your neighbor.  Everything became societal and little spiritual.  And so we get this quote from Bishop Sheen:

There it was that I saw the balance between the personal and the societal, between the vertical and the horizontal, between the human and the divine.

Is it any wonder then that there has been a loss of faith?  If we only look to the horizontal, then we lose our sense of the vertical.  So all three, the culture at large, the changes in the Church, and the culture within the Church, all has brought this decline we have seen since the sixties.

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There wasn’t much else in these two chapters that could be a point of discussion, but I did think there were some good quotes.  Here’s a few.

Because of the many sufferings of our missionaries under Communist rule, there should be in the catalog of sanctity a new type of saint. “Wet” martyrs are those who shed their blood for the faith. But since the Communists did not always kill, though they tortured, a new kind of martyr arose: the “dry” martyr. What they agonized through a period of years far exceeds in pain what other martyrs suffered in a brief interval.  Each day, hour, and minute was a profession of Faith.

In Tokyo, a dinner was given to the Cardinal and his party by General Douglas MacArthur. He always looked you straight in the eye when he talked and gave the impression of authority and power. I personally believe that he was one of the greatest characters that America has ever produced. Among the reflections he offered at dinner were these: he wished he had eight hundred Catholic missionaries for every one now working in Japan to bring that country to Christianity. The world struggle, he said, is not economic or political but religious and theological; it is either God or atheism.

The more I familiarized myself with the Far East, the more I saw that the Western mind knows the world better than it knows man, but the Eastern world knows man better than it knows the world. Our Western world can tame nature, the Eastern world learned to tame itself. The former is an extrovert and produces a technological civilization; the latter is an introvert and seeks to develop wisdom through contemplation. The Western world regards the head the localization of wisdom, but the Eastern world often makes it the navel.

I have always contended in talking to missionaries that we are not so much to bring Christ to peoples as we are to bring Christ out of them.

Sometimes, the only way one can understand the poor is not by writing a check but by direct contact. I was reminded of the meaning of the Incarnation. God did not remain aloof to the agonies, pains and injustices of this world, but took a human nature like ours, in all things save sin, to prove that true love is identification—not just in the flesh, as in marriage, but in hunger and need.

Thirty years of His life He spent obeying, three years teaching and three hours redeeming.

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.

Great quotes all.  Let me give you a thought on this quote: “Sometimes, the only way one can understand the poor is not by writing a check but by direct contact.”  I have proposed in other places that the government instituted welfare system is a sure fire way to eliminate the faith.  Government institutions and administrative practices lack a divine element.  They are sterile.  There is no God in the transaction.  True charity requires human contact.  True charity requires people helping each other, not administrative paperwork.  “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." (Mat 18:20).  Notice throughout the Gospels how many times Christ actually touches a person to cure them.  The sterility of the welfare system, necessary as it may be, does not promote faith, it extinguishes it.  I’ve been posting that for a number of years now.  It’s good to see that Bishop Sheen had a similar insight.