Latest / The Catholic Current / Confronting Evil with Fulton Sheen (Fr. Dave Tomaszycki) 9/17/26

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Confronting Evil with Fulton Sheen (Fr. Dave Tomaszycki) 9/17/26 · The Catholic Current

• 0:00
  This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague.
• 0:05
  We're all subject to the same weaknesses because we're all equally human.
• 0:08
  Is it the case, Father, can we say that the principal battleground spiritually is our
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  imagination? Sometimes the devil likes to use fear to get you into a depression,
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  so he'll just start off with a little bit of fear action, then a little
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  bit of resentment and anger action, right? It always tastes better with a little self-pity
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  thrown in, right? Incipient despair, why not, you know?
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  And then when he's got your will kind of broken a little bit, then zooms
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  right into the imagination.
• 0:35
  Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
• 0:39
  your daily host for the Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
• 0:42
  the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios,
• 0:44
  your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app,
• 0:48
  and we proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity. As always,
• 0:52
  let's start with prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• 0:55
  Almighty God, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius Loyola, we ask that you pour forth
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  your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment, that we might hear your voice
• 1:02
  and obey your command. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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  Amen. Hey friends, if you look at the calendar, very soon Fulton Sheen
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  is going to be beatified. You know, I've been talking about some of his
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  earlier works, uh, in the months leading up to his beatification,
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  and I've enjoyed reading his books from the, from the '20s and '30s and '40s.
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  But there is a topic where he wrote a lot but never put it in
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  one place. And somebody said, you know what, someone should
• 1:29
  go through the archives of Fulton Sheen and take all that he has to say
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  about the demonic and put it together in one place. And he asked with innocence,
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  how hard can that be? And then he found out.
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  He is a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit. He's the
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  pastor of St. Peter's Catholic Parish in Mount Clemens, Michigan,
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  and he's a former student of mine from back in the day. Father Dave,
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  welcome to The Catholic Current. Father Matej, great to be with you.
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  Father, I know that Fulton Sheen,
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  he was in the business for a very long time.
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  People like that generate archives. He was generating
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  archives well before there were hashtags and, and databases
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  and so on. He's trained as, as a serious scholar.
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  I'm sure he kept good notes and footnotes, etc.
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  But as I read through your book, it turns out he didn't have a
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  big box labeled diabolical stuff goes here.
• 2:24
  So tell us what inspired your desire to put the book together,
• 2:27
  and what was that process like? Yeah, so in 2016, I was
• 2:31
  finishing up seminary, and I was, I was writing my, my thesis for
• 2:35
  my master's. And of course, I wanted to write on someone who I knew.
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  Like, I know Sheen's thought very well. I'm most familiar with him. So I'm
• 2:41
  rereading a lot of his stuff, and I stumble upon a line again
• 2:45
  in Those Mysterious Priests, which is from 1974,
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  way at the end of his life, where he writes a few paragraphs about the
• 2:52
  demonic and says, the demonic I shall treat in another book. And by
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  this time, I knew enough to know, like, hey, that book is not out there.
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  Where is it? You know, so, so my hope was to go to archives
• 3:03
  and find this bin, like, hey, boom, there it is, you know, labeled, you know,
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  The Diabolic. But it was not there. Did not find
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  a manuscript just sitting there. But I started looking through all this stuff and like,
• 3:14
  wow, he actually says a lot about the demonic or writes a lot about the
• 3:18
  demonic. And it's actually more relevant today than it was back
• 3:21
  then. So I'm like, wow, this needs to come out. So that's when I really
• 3:25
  started going through and trying to find everything he said. And what kind of
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  a challenge was that? I went through my mentor's archives once at the University
• 3:34
  of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, and he just kept everything,
• 3:38
  including receipts for the dry cleaners and people who mowed
• 3:42
  the lawn and so on. What was the status of
• 3:47
  his archives when you were there? Yeah, so I remember years ago someone
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  saying, if anyone ever claims to have read all of St. Augustine, you can
• 3:55
  laugh in his face because no one has, you know. Okay, fair.
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  So going through Sheen's stuff, I mean, there's just so much.
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  And, you know, he's from more or less our day when there's actual audio
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  recordings, visual recordings, then all the paper writings also.
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  So his main archives are in Rochester, New York, where he was the bishop for
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  a few years. And that's got probably about 98% of his
• 4:18
  intellectual material. But then there's archives in Peoria, There's archives in El Paso,
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  Illinois, archives in Washington, D.C. with the Catholic
• 4:25
  University, archives in New York where he was the auxiliary bishop.
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  There's archives in Australia because why not? You know?
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  So you really had to make sure you're checking all the boxes and seeing all
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  these things. But the vast majority of his stuff is in Rochester, New York.
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  And it's organized now. He was
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  not the most organized person, but it's organized now because the
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  Diocese of Rochester has had those archives since the '70s,
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  since actually Sheen was alive. When they're open, and, uh, that they're run quite
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  well and they're organized now. But, but still, it's— there's so much to
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  go through. And then, then sometimes there's the question of how do you organize it?
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  So his personal libraries, the books he
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  read, are there, and they're not organized. So you just had to like go through
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  and try to find what you're looking for. Uh, well, you know, I, um,
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  I, I— if anyone ever has any interest in going through my archives,
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  God, God save them. And I think it's unlikely they're, they're going
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  to have a They're going to have a job on their hands because,
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  you know, if you're busy as a cleric and, you know, if you're
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  living your vocation, you're certainly busy as a cleric and then you're trying to do
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  writing and speaking. And Fulton Sheen was on the world stage.
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  You were always generating something
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  new. And then every now and again, you'd put something down and say,
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  I should do something with that someday. And then piles began to
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  grow. So, how many of the sites did you visit,
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  the archival sites? So I checked them all out in
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  one form or another. Like for in Washington, D.C.,
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  everything's online. Oh, that's easy. Okay. You know, other places I contacted
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  people, I looked online and did what I could. So I made some
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  contact with every single site, but the big one is Rochester. And even though
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  I got the idea in 2016 to do this project, I didn't really dive into
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  it till 2020 during COVID So at first I couldn't
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  physically get in there, but the nun who works there,
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  she would make copies and send them to me. And we started, We started by
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  her sending me a list of unpublished materials,
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  and the list was double-spaced, 43 pages long.
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  Oh, so yeah. And honestly,
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  a lot of that material was published at some— in some way, shape, or form,
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  but it's kind of just what they had in the archives. And a lot was
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  not published. So you start just by going through titles and seeing,
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  oh, this might have something, this might have something. So I'd send her a list
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  of what I wanted. She'd make all these copies and send them to me electronically,
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  and sometimes she'd physically mail me things. And then, then most
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  of what I requested wasn't helpful, but some things were. You get a nugget every
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  now and then, right? And it took a while to like know what I was
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  looking for, you know. So, so in the, in the book now,
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  there's the 3 weapons against the demonic, there's the 3 signs of the demonic,
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  which gets into kind of like other parts of his brain, but it does tie
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  in. But I didn't know that at first. You had to keep going back and
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  going back. And then eventually, when COVID was lifted, I was able to get in
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  there myself into the archives. And that was really something. I imagine
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  there was a sense of zooming in and zooming out, like trying to study
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  a mosaic. You want to look at the big picture, and then there are also
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  little pieces you have to look to see how they fit. So, there was that
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  back and forth. So, when you finally got into the archives and
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  realized, you know, he wrote this by hand, or he typed
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  this himself, or he signed that, did it take your breath away? Did it make
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  you say, gosh, I'm near Fulton Sheen? What was that like
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  for you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, it was, it was intimidating in many
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  ways. So, so, so one, I read his autobiography. Well, I read it just
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  recently, but I also read it years ago. And he talks about how
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  in the early days, he would write things out. And then he'd condense it into
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  bullet points and condense into a few words, and then he'd go on stage with
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  no notes. So there's a lot of writings for his talks where, you know,
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  he didn't use notes, but there's notes behind them. So when you go through archives,
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  and you find these handwritten notes, you see, oh, this is written out more extensively.
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  Oh, here are the bullet points and the way condenses it. And it's interesting,
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  when he condenses it, sometimes it's like, ooh, like, like he's,
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  he's, he's hitting on something. He's just, he's just capturing it more efficiently
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  than he was before. So when you go through the book I put together,
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  sometimes there'll be 2 words and then a footnote of where I got those
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  2 words. That's usually off of some handwritten thing, some handwritten
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  bullet points somewhere. But, uh, it was intimidating because
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  again, like he said he would write this book, then he didn't. Like,
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  Why am I going where Fulton Sheen didn't actually do the job?
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  You know what I mean? Right. No, no, I, I can understand that. That can
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  be, uh, that can be daunting. I mean, I've gone through my own mentor's archives
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  and so on, and, and it can be, it can be humbling that way.
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  Uh, we got about 2 minutes left in this segment. When did you know when
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  you were done, or did you just say, I'll never be done, but I have
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  to stop? Um, it was October of 2023.
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  3, I think. So it was about 3 and a half years into it.
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  A lot of my work I did when I was on vacation, I'd go to
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  my buddy's rectory in Tell City, Indiana, a little gem on the Ohio
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  River. And I would just work on the book for a week or two
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  in a row. So I was the Archbishop's secretary, the Archbishop was out of town
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  for a couple of weeks. I think he was in Rome meeting with the Pope
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  when he was the Vice President of the USCCB. So I got away and it
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  was October, I, I, uh, yeah, I knew like, okay, I got it
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  all together. Still needs editing, but I got it all together. And I went
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  for about a mile and a half walk to McDonald's to celebrate. Okay,
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  congratulations. No, I, I know what that's like. You know, I,
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  I think, uh, my father watched many years ago a documentary about the
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  building of a cathedral. There was a guy who was polishing the brass front doors
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  of the cathedral, and he said, how do you know when you're done? And he
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  goes, no, no, I'm never really done. I just work until they take it away
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  from me. And I too have brought books to completion and
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  I've wrestled with, you know, the chapter that wouldn't die, and so
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  on. And eventually you say, either I resign myself to having to
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  work on this forever, or I really do have to
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  let it go, because there's a certain urgency in getting that into people's
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  hands. And I know there's a renewed interest in Fulton Sheen now that his beatification
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  is coming up. And I also think that his, his written work
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  doesn't get the attention that it deserves. Especially his earlier
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  written work. And that's why I was so very interested in it.
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  And I was a college student in, in the '70s, God bless
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  us, and I used to listen to Fulton Sheen on cassette tapes.
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  That's how old I am. Friends, we come back, want to continue with Father Dave.
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  We were talking about Fulton Sheen and Confronting
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  Evil with Fulton Sheen, a collection of his writings on the demonic.
• 11:09
  After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list,
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• 12:55
  We're talking about Fulton Sheen and his writings on the demonic,
• 12:59
  and there's a book compiled and edited by my guest, uh, Father Dave.
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  So Father, you, you did the work, you went through the
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  archives, you sifted, you arranged, eventually you
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  categorize and patterns begin to emerge.
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  And Fulton Sheen had a rigorous disciplined mind,
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  carefully trained in philosophy, taught at my
• 13:21
  alma mater, the Catholic University of America. And he started to have what
• 13:26
  he called categories of the nature of the
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  demonic. Now, Hollywood didn't do us any favors.
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  And when we hear demonic, we think of people spitting pea soup and talking
• 13:36
  Latin backwards. But what did Fulton Sheen mean by the demonic?
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  Yeah, so the big thing is that, you know, diabolon means
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  to tear apart. So he's the great divider.
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  And it gets tricky. So in his essence, God unites.
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  In his essence, the devil divides. But sometimes
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  things got to be played out, you know, so Jesus comes to bring
• 14:01
  the sword. So he does come to divide us from bad things.
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  And the devil does unite us against good things, you know. So it's,
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  it's not as simple as it seems, but in his essence, God unites,
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  the devil divides. Um, another big definition—
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  so, so God says, you know, I am who am. It's as if the
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  devil says, I am who am not. It's this drive toward
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  nothingness, right? Um, also, the devil
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  is a mimic. Uh, Fulton Sheen calls him an ape of God. He's a mimic.
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  So, so Anything God gives you or anything God promises
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  you, the devil will promise you too, but it's the demonic version
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  of that thing. Right. Yeah,
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  there's always a hook. There's always a catch, and inevitably there's
• 14:46
  a disappointment as well. Yeah. Oh, I just, I recently
• 14:50
  preached about this stuff. So I had a wedding a few weeks
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  ago, and before the wedding, I'm just, you know, talking with the children
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  who have come, and it's always a joy. It's one of my favorite things about
• 15:01
  being a priest is interacting with the kids. So there's this one little girl,
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  she's 9 years old. Like, how old are you? She goes, 9 going on 10.
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  I'm like, well, that makes a lot of sense. That makes more sense than like
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  9 going on 8. And, and she goes, she goes,
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  yeah, I can't make time go backwards. I don't know witchcraft,
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  but my mother does. Oh yeah. And honestly,
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  there's a lot of that stuff going on at the parish. It's just,
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  I think it's more than we realize, but it's people playing with the devil.
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  They're trying to get those things the devil promises. But one,
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  what the devil will deliver is always a demonic version of something
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  good, right? And then 2, it's at the cost of your soul.
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  Don't, don't play with this stuff, you know? Yes, yes. No, no, that,
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  that's tremendously important. The idea that you can
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  invite the devil into your life and have him agree to behave
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  and remain only a junior partner— I,
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  I mean, there's pride and then there's just sheer stupidity, and that is just
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  sheer, uh, stupidity. You know, when I was a little boy and
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  I, you know, I wanted an extra cookie or something that I shouldn't have,
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  I'd crawl up into my mother's lap and ask for the cookie and bat my
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  eyes, and she'd wag her finger at me and say to me in Italian,
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  quando il diavolo la accarezza, vuole l'anima. When the
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  devil caresses you, he wants your soul. So we're
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  playing with fire. We're trying to, to ride the
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  tiger. The devil can't make anything new. He can't make anything good.
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  He can only corrupt, and he can only pretend. So he is a
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  Now, Sheen talks about 3 categories
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  or instances of the diabolic,
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  and he starts with what he calls love of
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  nudity, but that's not really it. Isn't it
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  more along the lines of sex without love?
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  It's sex that's neither human nor godly?
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  Yeah, it's the perverse. So again, he's a mimic
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  of God. So the human body is good, you know, and John Paul II
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  wrote so beautifully beautifully of that. And in Genesis, they were naked and unashamed.
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  Okay, so there's that. There's the good godly side, but then
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  the devil perverts it. And it's interesting, Sheen talks
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  about like, to get back to the Garden of Eden, what do we have to
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  do? Well, we have to let go of our sins, let go of our vices.
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  Guess what? That's going to be tough. There's going to be a cross
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  involved. Whenever, whenever we grow, there's a cross involved.
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  To have our sins forgiven, there's a cross involved. Well, the devil is anti-cross.
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  So he's like, hey, hey, I'll give you these things, but no cross. And what
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  he gives us is the perversion of these things, the eroticism,
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  all the things that are eating away our culture today. Yes, yes.
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  And gosh, I can go on for hours about that, and I
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  have. And then, so you've got a distortion of the human body
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  and all its various perversions that we see today.
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  And then there's also, he talks about violence.
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  There is, there is a rage and an inclination
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  to, to destroy. Evil doesn't
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  build. Evil doesn't create.
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  You know, Tolkien, see, you know, makes that clear in The Silmarillion.
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  Talk about the connection between rage and violence and
• 18:20
  The Demonic According to Sheen. Yeah, so, so early
• 18:23
  when I was working on this book and going through these 3 signs,
• 18:27
  I said Mass at a Catholic high school Now, I mean,
• 18:31
  on the name it said Catholic, you know, and I was
• 18:37
  preaching about these signs. And I gave,
• 18:41
  I think I gave 4 examples of those who are divided.
• 18:45
  I said, what were they? They were Protestantism, the LGBT++,
• 18:50
  there's another one in there. And then the 4th example
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  was me, like, hey, I'm a priest, I love God, I'm also a sinner,
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  like, I'm divided myself, like, I need someone who can unite me. And that's God.
• 19:01
  Of it, but they blew up. I mean,
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  the administration threw me under the bus for the LGBT++ comment.
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  Sure. And of course, it's like, you know what? Your blowup
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  is violence. You're actually proving my point by your
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  blowup, you know? Right. But, but even
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  with this, there's a good form of violence and there's a bad form. And the
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  good form is— Sheen calls it the sword pointed inward,
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  crucifying our hearts to make them Christlike. Okay, lovely.
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  Right. The bad form is we take the sword out and we point it outward
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  and we spill our brother's blood. It's the
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  lack of humility when we can never admit that we're wrong and we got to
• 19:42
  change the world to fit us. Right. And, you know, I think, for example,
• 19:46
  of, you know, Charlie Kirk as a political figure, as far as I
• 19:49
  didn't follow him, but apparently he was relatively moderate.
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  But, you know, he was a human being made in the image and likeness of
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  God, and he was married and had 2 young kids. And people danced
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  on social media when he was murdered in the presence of his family.
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  Wouldn't Sheen describe that as diabolical? Oh,
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  definitely. Definitely. Yeah. It's, I mean,
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  you know, the cancel culture is, it's a form
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  of diabolical. It's that mimic again.
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  So, Jesus is a canceler. He cancels out sin to save the person.
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  And, you know, the twist is the person is canceled, the sin is fine.
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  Right, right. And there is also, you know,
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  for all this talk about freedom and welcome and inclusiveness,
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  if you don't follow whatever is
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  the latest thing, then you are vilified.
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  I mean, I remember there was a notorious play—
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  I won't even say the title on the air— and there were Catholic schools,
• 20:49
  self-identified Catholic schools, as I call them, who prided themselves
• 20:53
  on this notorious feminist play,
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  and then they prided themselves for not having the play anymore because
• 21:00
  it suggested that only women have girl parts, and that
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  is a form of hate. So what once was, you know, something to be celebrated
• 21:08
  now becomes a form of hate. So there's a lot of inversion going on.
• 21:11
  And that brings me to the last category. He talked about what
• 21:16
  he described as a schizophrenic mentality, and not
• 21:20
  so much a clinical diagnosis, but a kind
• 21:24
  of a fracture. Things don't cohere Things
• 21:28
  don't make sense. Everybody's got their own opinion.
• 21:31
  Everyone's running around yelling, I have to tell my truth.
• 21:36
  Isn't that kind of disorder, according to Sheen,
• 21:39
  indicative of the diabolical? Oh, definitely. So,
• 21:43
  it is a little funny. So, this 3rd sign, the schizophrenic mentality,
• 21:46
  Sheen actually calls it something different every time he mentions it. So, he's kind of
• 21:50
  schizophrenic in his labeling about it. Okay. But it's the loss of identity
• 21:54
  and identity of ourselves, but identity of the truth too,
• 21:58
  where there is no truth. Well, who's the truth? It's Jesus, you know? So,
• 22:01
  you get rid of him and you're gonna lose your identity.
• 22:05
  And yeah, we're seeing that all over, like, my truth, my truth. What about
• 22:08
  the truth? And without the truth, we have relativism.
• 22:12
  Well, with relativism, it automatically leads to tyranny that
• 22:16
  gets us back into violence again, too. Right, right. And so,
• 22:19
  this is part of what concerns me is,
• 22:23
  you know, there are non-rational elements to
• 22:27
  the human person. You know, we have emotions, we have bodies and so on.
• 22:30
  Uh, and then there's— and that's different from irrational. Irrational is contrary
• 22:34
  to reason. God Almighty spoke his logos,
• 22:38
  his word. So is it fair to say that something that is contrary
• 22:42
  to reason, contrary to order,
• 22:45
  illogical, isn't that not only anti-human but
• 22:50
  Antichrist? Yeah, well, if it steps away from the truth, the truth is
• 22:53
  Jesus, you know. Right. And, uh, it's amazing how many,
• 22:57
  how many of our students or Catholics believe, oh, there's such a
• 23:01
  thing as a good lie, or a white lie helps someone, doesn't hurt anyone.
• 23:04
  It's like, no, if we were stepping away from the truth, and the truth is
• 23:08
  Jesus, that's a bad thing. Let's stick with him. But it's that split,
• 23:12
  that split away from identity. Right. And I think that Catholics
• 23:16
  can be embarrassingly coy about the truth. On the one hand, our Lord himself
• 23:20
  said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes
• 23:24
  to the Father except by me. And yet we have what
• 23:28
  I call senior Catholic cadres, or the people who should really know better club,
• 23:32
  are running around saying, uh, nobody has a monopoly
• 23:36
  on truth. And then we've got— I know people of religious
• 23:40
  communities who say, well, I have to share my truth. We got
• 23:44
  about a minute left, Father Dave. How would Fulton Sheen take Catholic
• 23:48
  reticence towards truth? Truth. Uh, what do you mean reticence? I'm sorry.
• 23:52
  Uh, in other words, I mean, I, I was yelled at at a
• 23:55
  committee meeting. I'll run out the clock here. I was, uh, I was a new
• 23:58
  priest, a new professor, and I was on the committee to redesign the,
• 24:03
  uh, the mission statement of the university. And I noticed
• 24:06
  that the word diversity was mentioned 3 times,
• 24:10
  but the word truth not at all. And it was like the air had left
• 24:13
  the room when I had said truth. And then someone talked to me very slowly
• 24:18
  as if I were mentally challenged and said,
• 24:20
  Father, truth is
• 24:24
  divisive. You know, owie, hot, no, don't turn, don't touch
• 24:28
  the hot stove of Truth with a capital T.
• 24:31
  And I just thought it surpassing strange that a self-identified Catholic university
• 24:36
  sees truth as divisive. Certainly Fulton
• 24:40
  Sheen would insist that Christ, who is the way, the truth, truth and the
• 24:43
  life is, is the focal point and the means
• 24:47
  and the measure of what unity is. And so
• 24:51
  if we're slow to embrace truth, I think
• 24:55
  that it's going to open the doors to the diabolical. Friends, we come back,
• 24:58
  want to continue our conversation regarding Fulton Sheen on the
• 25:01
  demonic. You do want to stay with us for the whole hour. It's a fascinating
• 25:05
  topic. After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com
• 25:09
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• 25:12
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• 25:36
  This.
• 26:00
  This is the Catholic Current from the Station of the Cross Catholic
• 26:04
  Media Network. Catch up on an episode you've missed or share them with
• 26:08
  your family and friends. The Catholic Current is podcasted wherever
• 26:12
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• 26:15
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• 26:19
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• 26:23
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• 26:26
  the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios,
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• 26:50
  We're talking about confronting evil with Fulton Sheen. A book on his writings on
• 26:55
  the demonic has been compiled and edited by Father Dave, my guest here
• 26:58
  today. So Father, we, with Sheen, we have laid
• 27:02
  out the diagnosis. You know, here are the symptoms, here are the warning
• 27:06
  signs. If left untreated, things end very badly.
• 27:11
  But once you're aware of that, what do you need to do to clean house
• 27:15
  and what do you need to do to maintain good spiritual hygiene? Yeah. So he
• 27:18
  lays out like 3 main weapons against the demonic. Then he gets into other
• 27:22
  things too. There's not just 3 weapons, but, but there's 3 main ones.
• 27:25
  The first is the name of Jesus. And then the second
• 27:29
  is the blood of Jesus. And then the third is Mary, the Mother of God,
• 27:32
  the Mother of Jesus. Uh, and then he gets into the cross of
• 27:36
  Jesus and doing a holy hour in the presence of Jesus. So you, you notice
• 27:40
  a pattern here, you know? Right, right. Sure. Yeah. Because in the end,
• 27:43
  like, we by ourselves are not stronger than the devil, but Jesus is,
• 27:47
  you know? So it's all about being with him. And a lot of people have
• 27:51
  this in mind, like, oh, just, just don't be a bad person. Just don't kill
• 27:54
  anyone and you're good to go. And, and that's not how it goes. Like,
• 27:58
  like, like Jesus goes to heaven. If we're with him, we go to heaven too.
• 28:02
  If we're not, we don't. So, so the devil doesn't have to have you do
• 28:06
  horrendous things. He's just got to distract you from Jesus.
• 28:10
  And there's a lot of that going on right now. Oh my goodness, yes.
• 28:13
  And you know, I, uh, I love reading C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.
• 28:17
  And, and friends, if you can, there is an audio version that
• 28:21
  you can find on YouTube, uh, by John Cleese from Monty Python
• 28:25
  fame, and it is brilliant. John Cleese can wring
• 28:28
  meaning out of, out of a semicolon. And he
• 28:32
  says, yes, you know, uh, the devil would like it if we ended up with
• 28:36
  really spectacular sins and we ended up on the evening news,
• 28:39
  our top story tonight. But if he can just
• 28:43
  get us to drift along— case in point,
• 28:47
  Father, when I was a young priest, I was preaching at a parish mission and
• 28:50
  it came time for confessions, and this woman came to me and said,
• 28:54
  well, you know, Father, I haven't been to confession in 17 years,
• 28:58
  but it's okay because I'm basically a good person.
• 29:02
  And I said, all right, let me think about that. Father,
• 29:05
  you spent a lot of time with the writings of Fulton Sheen. How do you
• 29:08
  think he would have responded to that woman? Yeah, so he gets into
• 29:11
  that in the chapter on the blood. So the second sign, the second weapon
• 29:15
  against the demonic is the blood of Christ. And he says, yeah, you know,
• 29:18
  a sin is not just the breaking of rules. It's the damaging of a relationship.
• 29:23
  So, I think we got to point people to like, Jesus wants a relationship
• 29:28
  with you, you know? But yeah, so personally, one of my pet peeves is,
• 29:31
  oh, Father, I'm a good person. Well, in the Gospel of Mark,
• 29:34
  Jesus says there's only one who's good, God in heaven. Are you saying you're God?
• 29:39
  Oh, no, Father. Then don't say you're a good person, you know? And then I've
• 29:44
  given this recently in a couple of homilies, like, it's amazing how our
• 29:48
  second graders, they go to confession before First Communion. They go to confession and no
• 29:52
  one objects. Oh yeah, second grade, gotta go to confession. But adults,
• 29:56
  I say, adults, you got to go to confession too. Oh, who, me? Oh no,
• 30:00
  not me. I'm a good person. And I'll say, oh yeah, that's right. You don't
• 30:03
  need confession because you're a good person, but those horrible second graders, they sure do.
• 30:08
  You know, they see the ridiculousness of it.
• 30:12
  You know, I mean, you and I have heard every excuse in the world about
• 30:16
  not needing confession. Well, Father, I don't go to confession because I I don't
• 30:20
  know what to say. I can't think of any sins. And I said, well,
• 30:22
  ask your spouse. Yep. Oh yeah,
• 30:26
  so, so this illusion that somehow, you know,
• 30:30
  as long as you don't— as long as you didn't kill anybody.
• 30:33
  And then there's also an illusion— this is something I've said on the air,
• 30:37
  wittingly or not— we've given people this illusion
• 30:41
  that, look, here's the deal: the church sells anti-hell insurance.
• 30:45
  Unfortunately, it's got to be renewed in person every
• 30:49
  week. But here's the deal. We promise that
• 30:53
  we won't take much more than an hour on your Saturday or Sunday,
• 30:56
  and I know that's the weekend, and you got to put a couple of bucks
• 31:00
  in God's tip jar, but if you get hit by a bus during that week,
• 31:03
  God owes you heaven. That's the deal. And a lot of people,
• 31:06
  I think that really is how they see life in the church,
• 31:10
  that it's primarily transactional, and it's a minimalist anti-hell
• 31:15
  insurance. I'm not seeing any love. I'm not seeing
• 31:19
  any loyalty. I'm not seeing any passion.
• 31:22
  Where can Fulton Sheen help us to wake up and get the
• 31:26
  fire started again? Yeah, yeah. No, it's,
• 31:30
  it's, uh, I see that, I see that a lot too. I mean, uh,
• 31:33
  at the parish when people want to have their kids baptized and they said,
• 31:36
  okay, you need 2 godparents who are, who are, you know, living the life.
• 31:40
  And so many, maybe half, I don't know, so many have been married outside
• 31:44
  the church. And boy, do they get mad when I say, no, it's not going
• 31:47
  to work. And they get all in my face about, don't you want people in
• 31:51
  your church? Don't you need people in your church? And it's like,
• 31:54
  you're coming to Mass to— like, it sounds like you think you're doing
• 31:57
  God a favor when you come to Mass. It doesn't work that way, you know?
• 32:01
  God is God, and we owe this to him. Even if you
• 32:05
  got nothing out of it, you would still owe your worship to God.
• 32:10
  So Fulton Sheen would get into the pride versus the humility, and how
• 32:14
  you cannot find God God with the pride. You know, when you're
• 32:17
  too proud, you're not going to find him. Only the humble find God.
• 32:21
  So, we have to humble ourselves and know that, no, there's someone above us,
• 32:24
  and that's God, and we owe this to him, whether we get anything out of
• 32:27
  it or not. Right. You know, you and I spend a lot of time with
• 32:30
  religious people, and it's a very common thing now for religious people to rhapsodize
• 32:35
  about justice. There's social justice, there's ecological justice,
• 32:39
  there's reproductive justice and pronoun justice.
• 32:43
  But the most basic form of justice is acknowledging
• 32:48
  God as God and giving him thanks and praise and worship
• 32:52
  simply for being our Creator. That is the
• 32:56
  most fundamental form of justice, and if we don't get that
• 33:00
  right, then nothing else falls into place. The problem
• 33:04
  with that is that if you take the first commandment seriously, eventually you
• 33:08
  have to get around to the the 6th Commandment. And most people don't like to
• 33:12
  talk about the 6th Commandment. So, the deal with the devil is,
• 33:15
  look, we can do all sorts of justice-y things.
• 33:19
  And we don't have to talk about God. And we don't have to talk about
• 33:23
  the 6th Commandment. Just lean into all the other justice-y things.
• 33:27
  And you get to claim to be religious without any
• 33:30
  self-examination. And Sheen talks about
• 33:34
  how so often all these other justices, you know, it's like,
• 33:38
  in themselves, they might be good, depending on if it's really Right.
• 33:41
  But so often, what's going on is there's a lack
• 33:45
  of individual justice. Like, one, you're not right with God. So now you're trying
• 33:49
  to just attack this one area over here and then thrive in this one area.
• 33:52
  It's like, no, let's get your soul right with God. Let's make sure
• 33:55
  everything is on the up and up with all the commandments in your soul.
• 33:58
  Right. And I think that we also have this sense of,
• 34:02
  you know, when we go to confession, it's like going to court
• 34:06
  to get our record expunged. And questions of, well, how did this
• 34:10
  sin enter your life? And I'd say to people, say, if you get a— if
• 34:13
  you see a rat in the kitchen and you drive the rat out, the work
• 34:17
  isn't done. You got to say, well, how did the rat get into the kitchen?
• 34:20
  And you don't rest until you get this. So likewise, when there's a
• 34:24
  pattern of sin in your life, how did it get there? And it
• 34:28
  seems to me that we've got kind of a transactional
• 34:31
  view of dealing with God, that we want to keep God at a safe distance.
• 34:35
  We want him to be our insurance agents. We want him to be our ultimate
• 34:39
  complaint desk. But then we want God
• 34:44
  to leave us alone because my
• 34:49
  will be done. Isn't it the case
• 34:53
  that if we put ourselves in that mood of my will be
• 34:57
  done, that the devil says, let me help you with that?
• 35:00
  Oh, definitely, definitely. And, and, and first of all, the whole my will
• 35:05
  be done, like Like, in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve fall,
• 35:08
  like, they didn't do what they wanted to do. They did what the devil wanted
• 35:11
  them to do. There's none of this, my will, I did it my way.
• 35:14
  Either we do it God's way or the devil's way. When we think we're doing
• 35:17
  it our way, it's the devil's way. We're just duped. Right,
• 35:21
  right. And, you know, I can't help but think of,
• 35:24
  like I said, I listened to a lot of Fulton Sheen on cassette tapes
• 35:27
  when I was in college. And I mean, I can't do a Fulton
• 35:31
  Sheen Sheen voice, and only Fulton Sheen had that voice, but he said, at the
• 35:33
  end of our days, we will be met at
• 35:37
  the entrance to eternity, and someone will point
• 35:41
  to us and say, mine. And it
• 35:45
  will be either God or it will be the devil.
• 35:48
  And apparently, people have this idea that all you have
• 35:52
  to do to go to heaven and become a saint is
• 35:55
  die. But that's not the Catholic message at
• 35:59
  all, is it? Well, in a sense it is. We have to die to all
• 36:02
  those things that aren't Christ, you know. Yes, yes.
• 36:05
  Yeah, then in the deeper sense, but no, just,
• 36:08
  just, you know, don't be Adolf Hitler and you go to heaven. That's, that's what
• 36:12
  a lot of people think. And, and there's so many things wrong with that.
• 36:15
  And, and I think deep, you know, deep down, there's a certain pride of,
• 36:19
  I can earn heaven if I am good enough,
• 36:22
  if I am more good than bad, if I'm 51% good,
• 36:25
  49% bad, then I've earned heaven. It's like,
• 36:29
  no. Oh, do you know what sin is? Sin offends God.
• 36:33
  There's an infinite offense. Only Jesus can make that up. We can't
• 36:36
  make that up. Jesus can. If we're with him, we go to heaven with him.
• 36:39
  If we're not with him, we don't. Right. Well, you know, I think of Peter
• 36:42
  Kreeft, who's talking about our impoverished view of
• 36:46
  purgatory and said, you know, we overestimate our
• 36:50
  own sanctity and underestimate the sanctity of God,
• 36:54
  and we underestimate the infinite gulf between them. So if,
• 36:58
  you know, God being infinite, holy, and good and just would
• 37:02
  find the presence of our sin to be— in our attachment to sin— to
• 37:07
  be unbearable for him. But isn't it true, Father, and this doesn't get stated
• 37:11
  enough in preaching, that if we are clinging to sin,
• 37:15
  the presence of the all-holy God would be unbearably
• 37:19
  painful to us, wouldn't Oh yeah. Oh, definitely.
• 37:21
  Definitely. Yeah. And I tell people, like, I think,
• 37:25
  you know, on Judgment Day, you know, even if you're 99%
• 37:29
  good, okay, 99% handed over to Jesus, but there's
• 37:33
  1% left. Like, the reason why you've not let go of that 1% is because
• 37:37
  it's the hardest to let go of. But there are many people who will cast
• 37:41
  themselves into hell over that 1% or half percent or whatever
• 37:44
  it is. But no, sin cannot be with God. Either one would be
• 37:48
  unbearable. Right, and that's why I think
• 37:51
  part of the danger of the diabolical in the
• 37:55
  non-dramatic, non-Hollywood sense is that there is no
• 37:59
  urgency and good intentions suffice,
• 38:03
  and that good enough is, is good enough. That's not only illusion,
• 38:07
  but that's, that's not the stuff that love is made of, isn't it? There— I
• 38:11
  don't see any passion in this. It seems cold and calculated. Oh, a lot like
• 38:16
  the devil— cold and calculating. Exactly. Yeah, right, right. And, and what frustrates
• 38:20
  me is, again, I've been a sinner as long as I can remember.
• 38:25
  I know that I need to go to confession frequently,
• 38:28
  and I want to give a shout out to our brother priests,
• 38:31
  Father. You know, I would tell— when I was teaching seminarians, I said,
• 38:34
  if you want to be a good confessor— and by the way, if you don't
• 38:37
  want to be a good confessor, let me know so I can help you pack—
• 38:40
  But if you want to be a good confessor, you have to start by being
• 38:44
  a good penitent. You have to know
• 38:48
  yourself repeatedly in your guts,
• 38:51
  in, in at the visceral level, your desperate
• 38:56
  need for God's grace and the exhilaration,
• 39:00
  the liberation, the healing, the freedom, the consolation
• 39:05
  that comes from a sound sacramental confession.
• 39:08
  Because a man who has that as a matter of habit and experience,
• 39:13
  or lived experience as the cool kids say, when they
• 39:16
  are ordained, they're going to be generous in making
• 39:20
  time available for hearing confessions. They're going to be generous when they're asked
• 39:25
  to hear confession at an inconvenient moment, but they're also going to be zealous for
• 39:28
  preaching and teaching about confession
• 39:32
  And in places where a father seems to be not very enthusiastic
• 39:38
  about promoting confession or hearing confessions, I have
• 39:41
  to wonder what kind of penitent he is.
• 39:44
  So fathers, please, I know it's hard sometimes. You might
• 39:48
  be living in a remote area, but you've got to get to confession
• 39:52
  regularly for the sake of your soul and the sake
• 39:55
  of your priesthood. Friends, when we come back, Father Dave and I are going to
• 39:58
  continue talking about Fulton Sheen and his writings on
• 40:02
  the demonic. His beatification is coming up very soon.
• 40:06
  Um, I think that it's a, it's a timely book,
• 40:09
  and we're going to put that in our show notes today. Be part of the
• 40:12
  conversation. Follow what we're following by following us on Gab.
• 40:15
  That's gab.com. The channel is The Catholic Current.
• 40:19
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• 40:21
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• 40:25
  Comments, questions, suggestions, recommendations, questions. We want to hear
• 40:29
  from you. stationofthecross.com/askfather. Back in
• 40:33
  just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
• 41:01
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• 41:04
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• 41:08
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• 41:13
  help influence the conversation.
• 41:20
  Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
• 41:23
  your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
• 41:27
  and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
• 41:29
  Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim
• 41:33
  the fullness of truth with clarity and charity. We have been reviewing a
• 41:37
  book that brings together Fulton Sheen's teachings on the demonic, compiled and edited
• 41:42
  by Father Dave, who is our, our guest today. Uh, Father,
• 41:45
  there are a lot of people who listen to the show, they've— they're really
• 41:49
  trying to live the life. They're not like
• 41:53
  so many of my students when I first started teaching who describe themselves
• 41:56
  as Catholic. I guess they're earnest, uh, they,
• 42:00
  they pray, they perform the works of mercy, spiritual and corporal, uh,
• 42:04
  they want to do the right thing, and they get frustrated,
• 42:08
  uh, they get discouraged. They've been battling the same sins
• 42:12
  for, for years. They begin to lose heart because
• 42:15
  children and grandchildren are drifting away from the faith.
• 42:20
  I think that discouragement, that loss of heart,
• 42:25
  can open doors to darkness that should remain closed.
• 42:29
  How can Bishop Sheen be an occasion of encouragement
• 42:33
  for people who are struggling? Yeah, so Sheen has nothing but
• 42:37
  hope. I mean, he points out what's going wrong in the world,
• 42:41
  and he even says how the Church doesn't have a whole lot of hope
• 42:46
  hope for the world and the way that it goes down. But in the end,
• 42:48
  Christ does win. So, so the introduction to
• 42:52
  my book, which is all in the words of Sheen, he talks about like,
• 42:55
  you know, we don't know this, we don't know how this is going to go,
• 42:57
  we don't know that. But there's one thing we do know: if Christ wins,
• 43:01
  we win. And if Christ— ah, but Christ can't
• 43:06
  lose, you know. So Jesus wins. Jesus wins.
• 43:09
  And no, it's, it's, it's really tough with, with, you know, people whose kids have
• 43:13
  drifted away, whose grandkids have drifted away,
• 43:17
  Sheen tells a story. It's not in this book, but Sheen tells a story of
• 43:20
  a— no, it's not Sheen, pardon me. It's his friend Richard Wurmbrand,
• 43:24
  the Lutheran minister Richard Wurmbrand. They were evangelizing
• 43:29
  in a communist country. And this young lady comes up and sees a picture of
• 43:33
  Jesus and says, oh, I love him.
• 43:36
  And they said, oh, you love Jesus? And she goes, oh, is that his name?
• 43:40
  And as they were talking to her, she knew nothing about him, knew nothing
• 43:44
  about him, but she loved Jesus. And then as they got
• 43:48
  her story. So in communist Russia, the people couldn't spread
• 43:52
  their faith. So her grandmother had a picture of Jesus,
• 43:55
  and she used to pray in front of him. And the granddaughter would see that
• 43:59
  and say, oh, that's a good person. My grandma loves this person. I love
• 44:03
  this person too. Later, she found out that's the Son of God. It's Jesus.
• 44:07
  So the grandparents, like, you're making more of an
• 44:11
  impact than you realize. I actually just had someone come in,
• 44:15
  He signed up his kids to go to our school, our Catholic school
• 44:18
  here. And he has like nothing. He was baptized and
• 44:22
  nothing else. And he was telling me his story. Like he never knew his father.
• 44:25
  His mother died when he was young, but his mother loved
• 44:29
  Jesus, loved the Catholic faith, loved the Pope. So he does too. So now
• 44:33
  we're getting him signed up. He's going to make his First Communion, going to go
• 44:36
  to confession. Thanks be to God. But yeah, like you make more of an
• 44:40
  impact than you realize. And you might not even realize it in this lifetime,
• 44:42
  but you're making an impact. Right. I mean, we, we have to
• 44:46
  generously plant seeds, and in God's
• 44:50
  providence, it may be for someone else to bring in the harvest.
• 44:54
  And I've said to people, I said, you know, if you're at a point where
• 44:57
  anything you say or do will only make things worse— and sometimes
• 45:01
  family members do get to that point— so that's where you've
• 45:05
  got to be really militant and stubborn in your intercession.
• 45:09
  And this is where you pray rosaries and you have masses offered
• 45:13
  etc., to help bring people around. Towards the
• 45:17
  end of his life, Fulton Sheen said that he measured the quality of a retreat
• 45:21
  by how many people would commit to a daily Holy Hour. Could you talk about
• 45:25
  that, please? Yeah, so, so in the book, there's— he
• 45:28
  gives the weapons against the demonic, but the most concrete thing is the Holy
• 45:32
  Hour. And yeah, the later Sheen got
• 45:36
  in life, the more emphatic he was about the Holy Hour. Like, like early in
• 45:39
  his life, like, hey, you know, there are good priests who don't pray the Holy
• 45:42
  Hour, good priests who do, blah, blah, blah. But toward the end of his life,
• 45:45
  you know, he talked about the devil's Pentecost, the devil being given a long rope,
• 45:49
  the devil being unleashed. And one of the most concrete things we can do
• 45:53
  is make a daily Holy Hour. So he was telling priests, priests, you have to
• 45:56
  make a daily Holy Hour. Laity, do what you can, but at
• 46:00
  least 15 minutes a day. And then he was surprised at the generosity of the
• 46:04
  laity and how many people were making a Holy Hour every single day. Wow.
• 46:08
  Oh, well, thanks be to God, uh, for, for that. I, you know,
• 46:11
  we, we live in a world of infinite distraction.
• 46:16
  We live in a world of constant noise.
• 46:19
  And that's why when I was working in parishes, very often I said
• 46:23
  parishes, parish Masses, it's a lot like live
• 46:27
  radio. And live radio, the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is silence.
• 46:30
  They call it dead air. So people are manic
• 46:34
  that there must always be noise. Someone must be talking into a microphone,
• 46:38
  someone must be playing the piano, somebody must be singing, somebody must
• 46:42
  be singing, strumming the guitar. There must not be
• 46:47
  silence. And I think one of the reasons for that is that
• 46:51
  if you've got silence, which people perceive as unnecessary, then the
• 46:56
  Mass, which is on a weekend, I hasten to add, might take longer,
• 47:01
  and nobody wants that.
• 47:04
  Father, you spend more time in parishes nowadays than I do.
• 47:08
  Have you seen that kind of attitude yourself, or was I just looking in the
• 47:12
  wrong direction? Definitely. So a priest,
• 47:15
  when I was an associate pastor, a priest I was with, he used to take
• 47:18
  30 seconds between the second reading and standing up for the Gospel.
• 47:22
  So 30 seconds, it's not forever. The people thought it was
• 47:26
  forever. Holy mackerel, Father, did something go wrong? Are you okay?
• 47:30
  It was just 30 seconds. It's just 30 seconds of silence with the Lord.
• 47:34
  Is that so bad? But yeah, in silence, you'll meet the Lord
• 47:38
  and you'll meet yourself. And both can be really scary. But we got
• 47:42
  to get on good terms with both the Lord and ourselves before the next life.
• 47:46
  Well, no, no, that is, that is, that is certainly true. And I mean,
• 47:50
  I mean, I wrote an article about this in Homiletic and Pastoral Review. And there
• 47:54
  was a case where, you know, Father wanted to sit for a minute, a whole
• 47:57
  minute after purifying the vessels and before the dismissal.
• 48:02
  And people, the usher started opening the doors
• 48:05
  and let the traffic noise in to let Father
• 48:09
  know it's really over. Let's get on with it. And,
• 48:14
  you know, I pity the poor priest who has to win people
• 48:17
  back to that. So I think Sheen would say that we're
• 48:21
  really not gonna be happy unless we offer our
• 48:26
  truest selves to God. And that includes making the best
• 48:30
  effort in terms of worship. And it also means making the
• 48:34
  humble effort as we, we turn to our
• 48:37
  Lord as sinners in need of a Savior. Could you comment
• 48:41
  on that, please? We got about a minute and a half left. Yeah. So,
• 48:43
  so in his chapter on the Holy Hour, he talks about the continuity of prayer.
• 48:46
  And then this, and this, you know, gets back to the schizophrenic mind, the loss
• 48:49
  of identity. He says, like, nowadays it takes 20 minutes
• 48:55
  And it's just to collect ourselves and then we can offer ourselves to God.
• 48:57
  I remember another priest saying the Christian life is a 2-step process.
• 49:01
  The second step is we give ourselves to God. The first step is,
• 49:05
  well, we got to have ourselves, you know, so that's the first part
• 49:08
  of the Holy Hour. And then he gets into intercession and he's got this beautiful
• 49:12
  section of intercession and just handing. Then we're not just handing ourselves
• 49:16
  to God, we're handing our loved ones to God and just everyone and everything.
• 49:19
  Thing. And then the main thing, making the Holy Hour
• 49:23
  to combat evil, taking the hour back from the devil.
• 49:26
  Right. And I, friends, I think this, this is so very important.
• 49:30
  Make no mistake, we are being contested
• 49:35
  for, and the default value is not
• 49:39
  God. We have to consciously choose God. We have to constantly
• 49:44
  cling to God, and we constantly have to ask
• 49:47
  to be saved. By a Savior. Father Dave, thank you for taking the
• 49:51
  trouble to put this valuable book together, and thank you for being with us today.
• 49:54
  God bless your good work. Thank you. God bless you. Great to talk with you.
• 49:58
  I'm Jesuit Father Robert McKeiger, host every day of The Catholic Current. You want to
• 50:01
  join us tomorrow? It's a Friday on The Catholic Current. You know what that means?
• 50:06
  Let's talk about this. We walk through a complex issue together, and I'm going
• 50:09
  to ask, are we running out of time? The short answer
• 50:14
  answer is yes. There is a longer answer that you don't want to miss.
• 50:16
  After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources
• 50:20
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• 50:24
  us. Follow us on your favorite platform, write a 5-star review. We need to attract
• 50:28
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• 50:32
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• 50:35
  world. Through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may Almighty God bless you,
• 50:39
  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Go in peace, and please do pray for me,
• 50:42
  for I am a sinner.