Venerable Fulton Sheen: "If our will is determined by forces outside of ourselves, we no longer will make amendment for our misdeeds."

In 1953, during an episode of his nationally broadcast television program, Life is Worth Living entitled: "Character Building," Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said the following:

"The real seat of character is in the will and we must not surrender that responsibility either to the masses as Marx would have it, or to any kind of biological determinism. Because if our will is determined by forces outside of ourselves, we no longer will make amendment for our misdeeds."

Did you get that? To repeat, if you accept "biological determinism" then you will no longer feel contrition for your sins. Here again, nearly 70 years after he uttered these words, Sheen has been shown to be a prophet.

What is "biological determinism" you ask? Simply put, it is the belief that human behavior is controlled by an individual's genetic code or some component of his physiological make-up. While such theories date back to the dawn of genetics in the 19th century, they really came into their own in the 20th century along with destructive philosophies such as eugenics and social Darwinism.

However, while the two latter theories have largely gone underground in our own times, biological determinism and its child, sociobiology, continue to flourish into the 21st century. As it applies to human morality, those who embrace biological determinism will claim that certain behaviors are biologically pre-programmed into an individual, largely on the subconscious level, and are therefore predominant over the human will. An extension of this argument into the metaphysical realm asks questions like: "If our actions are pre-determined by our genetics, how can human beings be said to possess free will?" and "Can certain acts truly be sinful if they are part of our genetic make-up?"

Here in the early 21st century, these types of arguments are so prevalent that we don't even realize it anymore. All kinds of bad behaviors are excused or explained away as irresistible because they are part of our genetic or psychological make-up. A child who treats his mother disrespectfully in public is excused because he has "oppositional defiant disorder." A lighter sentence is requested for a man who commits murder because he's got a "warrior gene." A scientific study suggests that that marital infidelity may be caused by the same gene that causes people to become addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling. I was once in a conversation with a man who began speaking to an older woman in horribly sexual terms that made her deeply uncomfortable. When I called him on it, he responded by saying, "Sorry, that's just my Asperger's syndrome" — as if he had zero control over his behavior.  Indeed, we hear claims with increasing prevalence that an individual has no free will at all when it comes to the commission of certain acts of grave depravity that would have been condemned in Sheen's day as "sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance."

Archbishop Sheen was savvy enough to foresee the ramifications of such a gross error even sixty plus years ago. Men of today are not making amends for their misdeeds. What's worse, they are attempting to transform their misdeeds into good deeds, going beyond mere biological determinism to divine determinism. One American politician, citing the influence of a certain celebrity priest, had the audacity to explain away his deeply depraved relationship with another man by saying, "God made me this way."

The implication here is staggering in its satanic audacity. If Almighty God created an individual genetically pre-programmed to commit acts that the Church has considered sinful from the very beginning then, the argument goes, those acts must be divinely approved. The Apostles, the Church Fathers, and every moral theologian for the past 2,000 years was therefore wrong about Jesus's intentions with regard to morality. Rather than condemning such activities and behaviors, the argument concludes, the Church should be celebrating them.

Such an argument is outrageous on its face and, in a saner time, would have been immediately rejected by all people as fallacious and heretical. In our own time, the argument is accepted by many because, in large part, they've used biological determinism to rationalize their own sins away. They are more than happy to dispense with free will, so long as they may practice their vices without shame or consequence.

So to sum up: Is it possible that genetics and physiology influence behavior? Certainly. Does such influence exculpate men when they commit certain acts that the Church defines as sinful? No. It may lessen the severity of that sin somewhat for the individual so affected. It also may make the resistance of the individual's will to the besetting sin more heroic. But the influence of biological factors does not nullify the sin.

And the existence of such biological factors can certainly never make a sinful act into a virtuous one.

As Venerable Pope Pius XII said in 1952 when condemning so-called "situation ethics" and enumerating a list of moral absolutes that apply to all men and women: "No matter what the situation of the individual may be, there is no other course open to him but to obey."

Watch Archbishop Sheen's talk on Character Building here: