The Mystery of Love According to Fulton Sheen

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, DD

Fulton John Sheen (born Peter John Sheen, May 8, 1895 – December 9, 1979) was an American bishop of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria in 1919. Sheen quickly became a renowned theologian, earning the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy in 1923. He went on to teach theology and philosophy at the Catholic University of America as well as acting as a parish priest before being appointed auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York in 1951. He held this position until 1966 when he was made the Bishop of Rochester. He resigned in 1969[2] as his 75th birthday approached, and was made archbishop of the titular see of Newport, Wales. For 20 years as "Father Sheen", later monsignor, he hosted the night-time radio program The Catholic Hour on NBC (1930–1950) before moving to television and presenting Life Is Worth Living (1952–1957). Sheen's final presenting role was on the syndicated The Fulton Sheen Program (1961–1968) with a format very similar to that of the earlier Life is Worth Living show. For this work, Sheen twice won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Starting in 2009, his shows were being re-broadcast on the EWTN and the Trinity Broadcasting Network's Church Channel cable networks. Due to his contribution to televised preaching, Sheen is often referred to as one of the first televangelists.

Venerable Fulton Sheen was famous for his evangelization. He spoke and wrote on a variety of pertinent topics of our age. Here, he discusses the mystery of love.

When the Mystery of Love “Has Gone”

There comes a moment in even the noblest of human loves when the mystery has gone. One has now grown “used to” the best, and has come to take it for granted, as jewelers may casually handle the most precious stones without troubling to admire them. What we completely possess, we can no longer desire. What we have already attained, we cannot hope for. Yet hope and desire and, above all, mystery, are needed to keep our interest in life alive.

When wonder has vanished from our days, then they become banal. Our minds were made to function at the stretch and to reach out, forever, towards the solution of some lofty problem that forever eludes us. It is possible that the popularity of mystery novels in our day is occasioned by the fact that so many people have ceased to dwell on the mysteries of faith and are looking, in any cheap substitute that comes to hand, for something to replace what they have lost. Readers of mystery stories spend all their wonder on the method by which someone was killed; they do not, as the contemporaries of Dante and of Michaelangelo would have done, wonder about the eternal fate of those who die.

Man’s Happiness Comes from Mystery

Man cannot be happy if he is satiated; our zest comes from the fact that there are doors not yet opened, veils not yet lifted, notes that have not been struck. If a “love” is only physical, marriage will bring the romance to an end: the chase is ended, and the mystery is solved. Whenever any person is thus taken for granted, there is a loss of the sensitivity and delicacy which are the essential condition of friendship, joy and love in human relations. Marriage is no exception; one of its most tragic outcomes is mere possession without desire.

There is no love left when one hits bottom, or imagines that he has; the personality we have exhausted of its mystery is a bore. There must be always something unrevealed, some mystery we have not probed, some passion that we cannot glut . . . and this is true even in the arts. We do not want to hear a singer constantly reiterate her highest note, nor have an orator tear a passion to tatters.

True Marriage as an Ever-deepening Mystery

In a true marriage there is an ever-deepening mystery and, therefore, an ever-enchanting romance. At least four of the mysteries of marriage can be tabulated. First comes the mystery of the other partner’s physical being, the mystery of sex. When that mystery has been solved, and the first baby is born, a new mystery begins: the husband sees in his wife a thing he never saw before—the beautiful mystery of motherhood. She sees in him the sweet mystery of fatherhood. As other children come to revive their strength and beauty, the husband never seems older to his wife than on the day they met, and the wife appears to him as freshly beautiful as when they first became engaged.

When the children reach the age of reason, a third mystery unfolds: that of mother-craft and father-craft—the disciplining of young minds and hearts in the ways of God. As the children grow to maturity this mystery continues to deepen; each child’s personality is something for the parents to explore and then to form closer to the likeness of the God of love.

The fourth mystery of the happily married involve their social living, the contribution that they jointly make to the well-being of the world. Here lies the root of democracy, for in the family the individual is not valued for what he is worth, nor for what he can do, but for what he is. His status, his position in the home, is granted him by virtue of merely being alive. If a child is dumb or blind, if a son has been maimed at the war, he is still loved for himself and for his intrinsic worth as a child of God. No parent mitigates his love because of changes in a child’s earning power or worldly wisdom, or troubles about the class to which his off-spring may belong. This reverence for personality for its own sake in the family is the social principle on which the wider life of the community depends and is a potent reminder of the most important of all political principles: the state exists for the person, and not the person for the state.

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This article is taken from a chapter in Way to Happiness by Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen which is available from TAN Books.