A few years back, I happened upon Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s show from the 1950s – Life Is Worth Living – via Relevant Radio and immediately found his teaching to be terribly practical, even 40 years after his show beat out popular entertainers of the day for an Emmy. Try to imagine that today. There are hundreds of spectacular phrases attributed to him, but this one in particular has a unique application to a culture oftentimes seems to have lost its collective moral compass…
“Right is still right even when everyone believes it to be wrong .. and wrong is still wrong when all believe it to be right”
As I sat in class last evening, this phrase just kept flashing in my head as we discussed the late medieval period of the Church (just before Luther and the Reformation). It was a shaky time in the hierarchy of the clergy, but the family of believers still went about their day to day life, influenced much more by their local pastor and at the time, a rich devotional life both among the laity and in flourishing monastic communities.
We face enormous issues of epic proportion in the modern era. The global economy is in meltdown. Leaders of business now are suspicious as politicians. Violence and indecency plague us on the movie, television, and video game screens, across the internet and over the airwaves. So it makes me wonder what they knew six centuries ago that we can’t seem to grasp.
Or maybe we simply know too much now. Funny, intuitively, that seems like it should make us better, not drag us down.
