New Zealand Conservative

The other day I found a Fulton Sheen app of nearly 300 of his wonderful talks on my iPhone for $12.99.  Here's a great quote from him on Christ the Eternal Priest: When I speak of Christ as being priest and victim, I do not mean that we need to go and get hair shirts. Today we don't need hair shirts. Our neighbours are hair shirts. We live with hair shirts. We had to have hair shirts centuries ago when we were so far apart from everyone else, we had to find some penance. Today, they are immediately near." There are quite a few hair shirts here on the internet too! * * * Whale Oil has been launching attacks on Andrei and today Redbaiter , on his blog, while as with me he's gone from semi-attack to mocking interest . As we are all bloggers, I for one think it's nice that he keeps us in the forefront of his mind as he comes across various news items and ways of thinking.  This is like a collaborative thought process, even though it's still very...

Part II (9:56), Part III (3:21) Temptations are a part of life The stronger you are, the stronger the temptations you will face. Defeating temptations makes us stronger.

This is so cool. The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen has taken another step towards sainthood - he's now been declared Venerable! Fulton Sheen is my favourite Catholic author. His book Life of Christ is amazing and is the type of book that could only be written by someone who spent years in Our Lord's presence.  See The Red Coins of Redemption for the story of how Fulton Sheen was inspired to do a daily Holy Hour. Anyway, here he is on Confession and sin and guilt and what it does to a person who does not confess. The first three minutes are jokes for the children in the audience and then he gets serious. Each video is less than 10 minutes. They're just brilliant. Part II goes into how a person can cover up their own moral shortcomings by an intense interest in social justice. He links spiritual nudity of the soul in confession where everything is stripped back and we see ourselves as we really are, with a loss of Confession and physical nudity increasing. ...

Msgr. Charles Pope has written a post on The President, Gay unions, and the problem of selective Christianity where he looks at what Obama said to use Our Lord to justify his endorsement of "gay marriage". In this post however lets consider the problematic appeal of the President to Jesus to affirm Gay “marriage.” Specifically Mr Obama said to ABC News: …In the end the values that I care most deeply about and she [Michele] cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me….[ 1 ] It is a commo...

Fulton Sheen on the Divine Sense of Humour. He defines humour as the ability to see through things; those who have it see the world like a window, it's transparent and they look out onto another world. He talks about how Jesus never took anything seriously except the salvation of souls.  Here's  Part II and Part III , with a total listening time (including the first part above) of just over 20 minutes.   This episode was first screened on American television in 1959. A related thought The Breiviks of this world treat what is wrong with the world far too seriously.  The world is full of evil and injustice - it always has been.  Killing just contributes to that, it never solves anything, and those that might want to follow in Breivik's footsteps aren't ever going to solve anything with more evil.  What they really need is a divine sense of humour to help them see more than just this world.

The above clip is from Archbishop Fulton Sheen's TV programme Life is Worth Living, and first screened in 1955. He was America's first TV evangelist and had a huge following of devoted viewers at the time. Here, he talks about education and it's purpose. My partial transcript starts mostly after the 3:40 mark. There are a number of jokes as part of the lead in - I won't spoil them by transcribing them. He starts with a general philosophy of eduction in college (university)... Aim of eduction is to train the whole man, intellect and will, not just the mind. If we went into a store to buy a suit of clothes, we would not take a suit that had only one sleeve, and if you bought shoes, you'd want toes - unless you wanted to be in style. And so with education. Tonight we'll only talk about the intellect. Now the intellect, if it is to be properly trained, should be developed along these three lines.

The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen on the requirement for Confession/Sacrament of Penance: In order that there might be a Sacrament of Penance, two things are required, both of which are, from a human point of view, almost impossible to find. First, one must create the penitent and, secondly, one must create a confessor. To create a penitent, one must take a man in his pride, enveloped in a glacial silence, which refuses to unburden its guilt, and say to him: "Thou shalt come to a man and kneel before him—a man who is perhaps no better than you are—and you shall tell him what you hide from yourself and your children. You shall tell him that which makes you blush; and you shall do all of this on your knees." However difficult it may be to create a penitent who will confess everything with a firm purpose of amendment, it is even more difficult to create the confessor. Where find one empowered by God with authority to forgive sins? How train the human heart to heal the wounds ...

The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen on the Mother of God - Mary. In part one, after a few jokes, he first talks about Mary being a dream in God's mind before He created her. Part two is heavily theological, on the Wedding at Cana and the Cross. Part three explains why women cannot be priests, and alot more. For the atheists amoung us, if you watch nothing else, watch Part 4 , which has a couple of amazing stories of the conversion of atheists - their souls won with suffering of others on their behalf.

Another awesome talk by Archbishop Fulton Sheen. I could spend hours watching these.