Editor’s Note: This article is part one of a two-part series on Fulton Sheen’s reflections on freedom.
Freedom of choice is the quintessential characteristic of a human person. The human intellect and will work in tandem so that a person becomes an agent of action. In other words, what a person knows and desires work together and bring a person to choose any one thing at a given moment instead of another thing. Freedom is the greatest gift of a human person’s nature, but it is also the gift most easily abused for evil.
Throughout his ministerial priesthood and, more specifically, through his media apostolate, Fulton Sheen worked to help individuals access and employ their God-given freedom in the best possible way. Through preaching over radio and television, and through writing, Sheen returned to this very topic again and again. One book from the 1940s, Freedom Under God, was devoted completely to the subject, and applied the idea both to individuals and the nation as a whole. Yet, it was in his syndicated newspaper columns where the preacher dealt with the subject most concisely. Examining these columns during just a small window of time, 1949 and the early-1950s, allows us to grasp this rich truth with greatest clarity.
At the very foundation of Sheen’s thought and presentation was the idea that the human person can choose toward or away from his destiny and enduring fulfillment. In one column, he wrote:
“We are more freeable than free,” he wrote. “Freedom is not just something with which we are born; it is something we achieve…Freedom is not an heirloom or an antique; it is a life that must fight against the corrosive powers of death and nourish itself on the daily bread of goodness and virtue.”
Sheen meant to echo the constant teaching of the Church that freedom is “a burden and a responsibility,” which cannot be cast off for the sake of assuaging our consciences about wrong choices.1
While this may have been a hard truth for readers, Sheen saw that it was necessary in western culture after World War II, particularly in America.
In the same column, he identified the negative potential of human freedom. Our human choices and behaviors, he taught, lead to an “enslavement of the human will through giving way to evil passions, such as lust, alcoholism, avarice, pride, to the extent that personality becomes other-possessed rather than self-possessed.” Quite simply, when a person is controlled by someone else, or by some vice, that person is not free, despite the perception that “I can do whatever I want and choose.”
In another column from the same summer, entitled “The Mass-Man,” Sheen addressed the ways that he saw human persons becoming less human, misusing and abusing their freedom. He began by identifying a problem: “A new type of man is multiplying in the modern world…the mass-man, who no longer prizes his individual personality, but who seeks to be submerged in the collectivity or crowd.” While these persons were acting out of the freedom they had been afforded, and while they might be convinced that they were totally free, the choices they made would point them in a direction opposite their full and final flourishing.2
The largest portion of the column was the list of ten traits by which this Mass-Man might be identified. Among these ten traits, categories and patterns were easy to trace. First, the Mass-Man was intellectually shallow. He would be easily influenced by the “excitations of publicity” and propaganda. His marked tendency was to regurgitate the en vogue opinions of the moment, instead of holding onto and defending solid beliefs.
Because of his shallow intellectual habits, his focus was placed on satisfying his baser passions. “He believes that every instinct should be satisfied, regardless of whether or not its exercise is in accord with right reason; he cannot understand self-denial, or self-discipline; he regards self-expression as identical with freedom.” The same Mass-Man “identifies money and pleasure, and hence seeks to have much of the first in order to have much of the second.” When these tendencies develop in a person, Sheen remarked, “at no vital points is he master of himself.” He has been mastered by something else.
Another indicative tendency tended to rear its head. “The ego is the center of everything and everything is to be related to it,” Sheen wrote. This centrality of the ego would cause one to hate any superiority in others, “either real or imagined;” and it would cause him to watch the scandals of others “to prove that others are no better than he.” The centrality of the ego would also be revealed when a person had “no sense of gratitude toward the past and no sense of responsibility to the future.”
Because of his ego, this same Mass-Man could not abide in true community or communion with others. “Anonymity,” Sheen identified, “becomes a protection against the assuming of responsibilities.” Frequently, he would break solitude by “an ersatz communion with others, through night clubs, parties and collective distractions.” But, in the end, “he returns more lonely than before, finally believing with Sartre that ‘hell is others.’”
Finally, the Mass-Man exhibited a disdain for self-examination and personal integrity. “Evasion or escape from self is a necessity.” The Mass-Man “hates tranquility, meditation, silence or anything which gives him leisure to penetrate into the depths of his soul.” Quite simply, a person very likely would not like what he or she saw if they spent the time examining their lives on deeper levels.
As ever, Sheen’s primary purpose was not to chide or belittle. Instead, his objective was to assist readers in reflecting on whether they might exhibit these qualities in their own lives. “It takes a brave man to look into the mirror of his own soul to see written there the disfigurements cause by his own misbehavior,” the pastor wrote. If such tendencies were present, they could see the unhealthy trajectory toward a dehumanized slavery and, hopefully, correct the trend.
He concluded with hope. “But he is not hopeless if he would but enter into himself…Once man sees his self-inflicted wounds, the next step is to take them to the Divine Physician to be cured.” That is precisely why, the pastor of souls offered the antidote to the negative effects of abused freedom in these same newspaper columns. To those realities we’ll turn in a separate article next week.
In the meantime, Venerable Fulton Sheen, pray for us!
Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash
1Fulton J. Sheen, “How To Be Free,” in The Cincinnati Enquirer (Sunday, August 24, 1952), p. 54.
2Fulton J. Sheen, “The Mass-Man,” in The Cincinnati Enquirer (Sunday, June 22, 1952), p. 88.
