Fulton Sheen (Cluny, US$20, 233 pages)
In 1940, Bishop Fulton Sheen, wrote Freedom Under God, a meditation on the extremisms of liberalism and totalitarianism that idolized the individual and society respectively with no appreciation of the interdependency of the individual and society. Both extremes were guilty of making “redemption and brotherly love” irrelevant, although in different ways. Christianity, Bishop Sheen, the popular radio host with 30 million regular listeners, said, offered the correct middle path of acknowledging the importance of individual persons embedded within a larger, nurturing society. There were two falsehoods that led to communism and liberalism or totally laissez-faire capitalism: the contradictory ideas that Christianity is either irrelevant to public affairs and is inimical to public affairs. Bishop Sheen argued that there was room for Christ and His example in both political affairs and private business. He writes, “What shall it profit a man if he gets his closed shop but loses his soul? Surrender ownership of productive property to a few capitalists or a few dictators and you will get your mess of porridge with a ticket to a theater thrown in free, but it will only keep you quiet.” Bishop Sheen writes that love and liberty were the “two most abused words in the modern world” with love being equated with sex and liberty with the freedom to say, think or do whatever one wants. True freedom, he writes “is the right to do what I ought.” Equality is another abused word, with equality in the “political sense” and “economic sense” overriding any understanding of equality in the “spiritual sense.” In 13 elegant chapters, Bishop Sheen describes the false promises of capitalism and dictatorship (whether communist or fascist) and why the only true root of healthy liberty and equality is through Christ. In his concluding chapter, Bishop Sheen said “the greatest obstacle to the attainment of freedom in our civilization is a want of the sense of guilt.” The highly readable Freedom Under God is as relevant today as it was eight decades ago.
