Weekly Books Pick

GOD's WORLD AND OUR PLACE IN IT

by Fulton J. Sheen

Sophia Institute, 2003

176 pages, $12.95

To order: (800) 888-9344

www.sophiainstitute.com

He was a bright light of the New Evangelization, using modern means of communication to bring the Gospel to millions here and abroad. He spoke with drama and flair, yet he made Christ's message accessible to all through everyday examples and easy-to-grasp concepts. He was perhaps the most popular priest of his day, starring on radio and television, and was known for bringing the rich and famous to the Catholic faith.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was a man for many seasons, and his prolific and often prophetic writings continue to inspire. With his cause for canonization under way, publishers will be mining his works to produce new volumes for years to come. Sophia Institute's God's World and Our Place in It is a reprint of a book published in 1936 as The Moral Universe. Since the author deals largely in timeless truths, the message is fresh in perspective and message. Nearly 70 years after the book was first released, the genius of Sheen still shines through its pages.

The reader should not be put off by Chapter 1, “God dwells in humility in His world,” which uses some awkward analogies and poetry to make its point. It may be best, even, to start at Chapter 2, which begins a brilliant meditation on and explication of life's most perplexing problems: evil, death, God's omnipotence and our free will. If you know of anybody who has rejected formal religion because he has not found credible answers to these pressing questions, give him this book.

The archbishop, who was head of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith in his day, is still setting out the evangelist's net. Although modern science has explored the mysteries of the physical world, he writes, modern man “has done little to explore that region which is nearest to him, and yet most unknown — namely, the depths of his own conscience.” Knowing his audience, he compares conscience to the U.S. form of government. “It has its Congress, its President, and its Supreme Court: it makes its laws, it witnesses our actions in relation to the laws, and finally it judges us.”

Archbishop Sheen's meditation on conscience leads to a consideration of free will in the next chapter. Why is there evil if God is all good? Why hatred if God is all loving? Why does not God set things right if he is all-powerful? Getting right to the heart of these age-old questions, he writes, “This is the best possible kind [of world] that God could have made for the purpose He has in mind.”

God created the universe from an ecstatic overflow of love, and he desires to be loved by the one creature capable of returning his love, the one created in God's own image: man. Yet love must be free to be whole and godlike, Arch bishop Sheen explains; so man must be free to choose God or reject him, with ultimate consequences following from so serious a choice. Many people think of love simply in romantic or emotional terms, as something that comes and passes with the seasons, Arch bishop Sheen writes. But real love is a free act of the will, a choice, regarding the ultimate good who is God.

His look at love leads to a consideration of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. The modern age, he writes, does not want to speak of these things because it thinks of death as an insult, judgment as unfair, heaven as an illusion and hell as the fantasy of preachers. Yet each is a necessary result of the love of God, Archbishop Sheen explains. In the chapter “Hell is for those who willfully reject God,” he writes. “Those who cannot reconcile God's love with Hell do not know the meaning of love. … Love demands reciprocity … Love forgives everything except one thing, and that is the refusal to love.”

There's lots more. Indeed, to read this book is to understand why Pope John Paul II once said to Archbishop Sheen: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus.”

Stephen Vincent writes from Wallingford, Connecticut.