"We Forgot about the Salvation of Souls" ~ Archbishop Sheen's heartfelt warning in Philadelphia, December 8, 1977

Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen speaking in Philadelphia on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1977.

On December 8, 1977, Venerable Fulton J. Sheen came to the Philadelphia area to preach to a packed house at the Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Roxborough. This church is about 10 minutes from where I grew up, and I was seven years old at the time of the event. Though I didn't attend, my aunt and uncle did. This was probably the closest I ever came to Archbishop Sheen during my lifetime. It was his first talk after a six-month hiatus recovering from heart surgery.

I was recently reminded of the event by my aunt who gave me a newspaper clipping that she had saved for over 40 years. The article is a disjointed and fairly bland recounting of what must have been a stark and riveting lecture. One almost gets the sense that the reporter was bored by Sheen's presentation, or struggled to comprehend it. The article feels like it was cobbled together from hastily taken notes.

But now, 42 years later, even read through the filter of uninspired reportage, Archbishop Sheen's words radiate a sense of foreboding—a softly spoken clarion call made by an elderly Cassandra who knew well that his days were numbered.

The article appeared under a banner that read: "We Forgot About the Salvation of Souls". Then, beneath that in large type: "Small, Humble Archbishop Speaks."

Following are some excerpts from the article:

Nearly 2,000 persons silently listen to the voice that was once strong and vibrant and now still goes on bringing the word of Christ. But the voice of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is not reaching as many as he once did when millions were waiting and watching him speak on nation-wide television.... 

"The last sermon I preached was last June," he said. "Then followed a gap." He remarked that he had open heart surgery. He is now 82.

"But I am privileged to be with you on the feast of the Immaculate Conception." He was there to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish.  

"Let me tell you about the changes in the Church since this parish began," he said in a soft voice.  

"In the two decades since this church was founded [that is, 1952], we have seen many changes. The Church dies and rises again. Its law is the law of Christ. There is Good Friday, then Easter and the Resurrection. 

"The Church has undergone a great many changes in the past few years. There will be many changes in the years to come. Some sisters thought it would be unbecoming to teach children. The then current word was 'involvement.' Some thought they should not be dedicated to the sanctification of souls. They said they had to be involved in the social and economic world. 

"The only thing that they thought mattered," Archbishop Sheen said, "was the social order."

From this critical opening, the Archbishop pivoted to a bit of recent history:

"In 1974, the Holy Father asked us to preach the Gospel to the people. Evangelization." The little man, a bit pale, pointed his right index finger at the huge assemblage. He said that people had little concern during some of the recent years for the Church. "They were interested in the Panama Canal, the Mideast and India. In the former decade the name of Christ was hardly named." 

"We forgot about the salvation of souls."

Here we see the prescience of Venerable Fulton Sheen on full display. But if he thought things were bad in the Church then, what would he think of our own time when entire orders of teaching sisters have evaporated, and you're more likely to see pant-suited sisters celebrated for riding a bus cross-country in support of the welfare state boondoggle du jour than for teaching children. Of course, modern-day prophet that he was, Sheen no doubt saw what was coming. Perhaps his angel was whispering in his ear.

The article as it was preserved.

At this point, Sheen again pivoted to bring the Blessed Virgin into the conversation, this being especially appropriate given the venue (IHM Parish) and the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

"The Immaculate Heart of Mary gives to us a model on how to live a life for the Church. When you love," the Archbishop warned, "you must be prepared to have your heart wrung and maybe broken. So when you love, you will have your heart broken."

This aphorism is almost word-for-word drawn from The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis. Most likely, Sheen cited Lewis as his source during the talk. But he applies the quote directly to the love our Lady had for her Son, Jesus:

"The Virgin Mary is the model. Mary has had her heart broken, but she loved her son and His mission. Oh, how He trained her to be a mother of all children. Oh, how Mary had to have a broken heart. How many times has she pondered those words, 'Mother, what matters is that I am doing my Father's will.'"

And by that, he didn't mean St. Joseph, of course. The article mentions here that Sheen pointed to the roof of the church and said, "There is my Father in heaven." To continue...

"Mary was taught one lesson after another about having her heart wrung. The climax was when it finally happened on the Cross. Mary was heartbroken. She surrendered her Son to the heavenly Father, sacrificed for the redemption of our sins."

"When they rammed that sword into Jesus, they also plunged it into the side of Mary. In the end, there is only one heart."

"This is the kind of love we have to have for the Church."

Did you catch that? By my interpretation, the good Archbishop was artfully interjecting a little of his own travail into the narrative. Here was a man whose heart was even then being wrung because of his love for the Church which he had served since his ordination in 1919. Here was a man who had allowed himself to be used up and burnt out in his unflagging efforts to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And yet here, at the end of his life, he has caught a glimpse of fell things to come, fell things already in progress within the Church. And his heart, quite literally, is broken.

Sheen continued:

"To remake the Church this is the kind of love we will have to have. We must sacrifice to prove our love. What is the mission of the Church now? Outside is the poor lost sheep. We must find them and bring them to the Lord. But if you love, you must be prepared to love and have your heart broken. I believe that the spirit of love is even descending upon Russia. After years, we have turned a corner: we can leave other things aside. 

"When the good Lord comes, he will show His wounds to the world. 

"The Church has failed in the last ten years.

"Is your heart broken?"

Part of me thinks that the good Archbishop, gifted speaker that he was, left unsaid his own implicit answer to that question: "Mine is."

In his unique, unintentionally prophetic way, Sheen was preparing all of us to have our hearts broken by the grotesque and ongoing failures of the Church that we love, failures that are more evident and horrifying than any that were known in his day. But he was also reminding us to have patience and trust in God: "The Church dies and rises again."

Two years later, on December 9, 1979, Archbishop Sheen would go to his eternal reward. He surely died of a broken heart that the ministrations of mere mortal surgeons could not mend.

"Inspired by penitence, he was beheaded." ~ The mysterious last days and death of Pope Saint Marcellinus

Pope Saint Marcellinus from Shea's Pictorial Lives of the Saints.

April 26 is the feast day of one of the most enigmatic Popes, Saint Marcellinus, who perished at the height of the Great Persecution in AD 304. Because his reign took place during a time when the Church was under extreme duress, the facts surrounding his pontificate are hazy. Similarly hazy is his fate. 

Following is the complete brief biography of Pope Saint Marcellinus as contained in the Liber Pontificalis, that useful if occasionally confused catalog of all the ancient popes prior to Saint Gregory the Great that was compiled in the late 6th century:

Marcellinus, by nationality a Roman, son of Projectus, occupied the see 8 years, 2 months and 25 days (or 9 years, 4 months and 16 days). 

He was bishop in the time of Diocletian and Maximian, from July 1 in the 6th consulship of Diocletian and the 2nd of Constantius (AD 296) until the year when Diocletian was consul for the 9th time and Maximian for the 8th (AD 304). At that time was a great persecution, so that within 30 days 17,000 Christians of both sexes in divers provinces were crowned with martyrdom. 

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For this reason Marcellinus himself was haled to sacrifice, that he might offer incense, and he did it. 

After a few days, inspired by penitence, he was beheaded by the same Diocletian and crowned with martyrdom for the faith of Christ in company with Claudius and Cyrinus and Antoninus, and the blessed Marcellinus on his way to his passion abjured Marcellus, the priest, that he should not fulfill the commands of Diocletian. 

And afterwards the holy bodies lay in the street for an example to the Christians 26 days by order of Diocletian.  

Then the priest Marcellus and the other priests and deacons took up the bodies by night with hymns and buried them on the Via Salaria in the cemetery of Priscilla in a chamber which is well known to this day, as Marcellinus himself had commanded, when in penitence, he was being haled to execution, in the crypt near the body of holy Criscentio, April 25.  

He held 2 ordinations in the month of December, 4 priests, 2 deacons, 5 bishops in divers places. 

From that day the bishopric was empty 7 years, 6 months and 25 days while Diocletian was persecuting the Christians.

In Loomis's edition of the Liber Pontificalis, a further passage is included, drawn from a single manuscript, which refers to a councils of bishops which took place in Italy during the Persecution:

And after a few days, a synod was held in the province of Campania in the city of Sessana [Sinuessa], where with his own lips he professed his penitence in the presence of 180 bishops. He wore a garment of haircloth and ashes upon his head and repented, saying that he had sinned. Then Diocletian was wroth and seized him and bade him sacrifice to images. But he cried out with tears, saying, "It repenteth me sorely for my former ignorance," and he began to utter blasphemy against Diocletian and the images of the demons made with human hands. So, inspired by penitence, he was beheaded.

Needless to say, these passages have inspired controversy ever since. Consensus seems to be that the so-called Synod of Sinuessa where St. Marcellinus professed his guilt before his brother bishops, was a fabrication. This seems likely as it would have been inconceivable for a synod of 180 bishops to be held in southern Italy during the apogee of the Great Persecution. Mentions of Diocletian, the Augustus of the East who ruled from Nicomedia, also seem to lend doubt to these accounts. However, a curious passage in Lactantius's work, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, may shed some light:

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Diocletian, whom prosperity had now abandoned, set out instantly for Rome, there to celebrate the commencement of the twentieth year of his reign. That solemnity was performed on the twelfth of the kalends of December; and suddenly the emperor, unable to bear the Roman freedom of speech, peevishly and impatiently burst away from the city. The kalends of January approached, at which day the consulship, for the ninth time, was to be offered to him; yet, rather than continue thirteen days longer in Rome, he chose that his first appearance as consul should be at Ravenna. [Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Chapter 17]

The twentieth year of Diocletian's reign would have been AD 304, so this passage refers to events late in the year 303. This makes it clear that Diocletian was in Italy near the time assigned to the death of Saint Marcellinus, and he was in Rome specifically for about a month. Furthermore, the Augustus was, if not wroth, at least peevish during this his only visit to the Imperial City during his reign. Why Lactantius doesn't mention the acts of the persecutors while in Rome, particularly with regard to Saint Marcellinus, is an interesting question. However, Lactantius is hardly alone in his silence. None of the key ecclesiastical historians of the subsequent generation mention this event, and several of the early compilers of lists of the ancient popes exclude Marcellinus's name all together. One important exception is the Liberian Catalog of AD 354 which lists all of the Popes up to that time, Marcellinus included.

Scholars over the centuries have attributed this lack of information about Saint Marcellinus to the shame associated with his name in antiquity. However, it is equally likely that because the death of Marcellinus coincided with the most intense period of persecution, that the records were lost or purposely destroyed. As we have seen in other posts, the destruction of Christian literature was one of key aspects of Diocletian's effort, leading later Christians like Prudentius to lament the "oblivion of a silent age," and Pope Damasus to seek out assiduously the stories of the persecution by those who had lived through it even decades later. Also telling is that after Marcellinus's death, there was an unprecedented papal interregnum of some seven years during which time the Church in Rome had no visible head.

A century after the death of Marcellinus in the time of Saint Augustine of Hippo, the name of Marcellinus would re-appear as part of his debates with the Donatists. One of his opponents, a Donatist bishop named Petilianus, would invoke Marcellinus among those who offered incense to the pagan gods and handed over the sacred texts to be burnt by the heathens:

Maximian also perished, at whose command that men should burn incense to their gods, burning the sacred volumes, Marcellinus indeed first, but after him also Mensurius of Carthage, and Cæcilianus, escaped death from the sacrilegious flames, surviving like some ashes or cinders from the burning. [Answer to Petilian the Donatist, Book II, Chapter 93:202]

Augustine answered this charge as follows:

For now you go on to make mention of the bishops whom you are wont to accuse of having delivered up the sacred books, concerning whom we on our part are wont to answer: Either you fail in your proof, and so it concerns no one at all; or you succeed and then it still has no concern with us. For they have borne their own burden, whether it be good or bad; and we indeed believe that it was good. But of whatever character it was, yet it was their own; just as your bad men have borne their own burden, and neither you theirs nor they yours. [Answer to Petilian the Donatist, Book II, Chapter 93:208]

This is far from an absolute denial of the accusation, specifically with regard to Marcellinus. Augustine well knew that some Catholic bishops in Africa had indeed surrendered the sacred books, as noted in a previous post. So he had to fall back to a position saying he doesn't believe all of the accusations, but that even if they are true, the sins belong to the men in question, not to the whole Church.

Based on our rather limited knowledge, it seems possible that Marcellinus managed to retain his position during the early days of the Great Persecution perhaps by temporizing, compromising or negotiating with the vacillating figure of Maximianus Herculius who was the Augustus of the West. We know from Lactantius and other sources that Maximian was a rather crass, greedy fellow who was not above having his policies influenced by favors, flattery or an influx of gold. Perhaps Marcellinus was able to achieve a sort of secret coexistence with Maximian that was only broken when Diocletian arrived in Rome late in AD 303 to celebrate his vicenalia. Perhaps one thing that made Diocletian peevish on his visit was the discovery that his colleague, Maximianus, had been less assiduous in his rooting out of the hated Christians than expected.

If Saint Marcellinus had indeed taken some questionable measures to help preserve his flock during the persecution, or even secretly abjured under torture, the sources seem to agree that he later suffered bravely for the Faith, likely having been martyred. The fact that the pontifical seat remained empty after the death of Marcellinus provides mute testimony to status of the Christian population of Rome in AD 304 as they hid in fear of the tempest, not even daring to name a leader for the Church for seven full years.

An even more detailed examination of the possible apostasy and repentance of Pope Marcellinus may be found at the excellent Unam Sanctam Catholicam blog here.

"See what the fear of temporal evils does and how great an increase of eternal woes results" ~ Saint Augustine's last letter

Saint Augustine on his deathbed, by Ottaviano Nelli in the Church of Sant'Augostino
in Gubbio, Itay

 In the year AD 430, Roman north Africa was overrun by a warlike barbarian horde known to history as the Vandals. Under the leadership of their brutal king, Gaiseric, the Vandals were bent on plunder, ruin and conquest to such an extent that the name of their nation lives on as a common noun in the English language with negative connotations reverberating across 15 centuries.

With Roman military resistance collapsing on every front before the overwhelming attack, Saint Augustine found himself trapped in his home city of Hippo Regius, deathly ill and under siege by a Vandalic host.

More about this dreadful period of history may be garnered from the video below, which is taken from The Life of Saint Augustine written shortly after the great saint's death by Possidius of Calama. Possidius was an eye-witness to much of what he records:


Also included in Possidius's Life of Saint Augustine is a fascinating letter which the great Doctor of the Church wrote during his final illness. This letter, written to Augustine's fellow bishop, Honoratus of Thiabe, is of import to our present tribulation, particularly as it relates to the response of our Catholic bishops to the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.

During this critical time in Roman north Africa, as the Vandals lay waste to all before them, many bishops and priests fled, leaving their people without access to the sacraments in the face of the unprecedented mortal danger. Augustine was asked by other bishops for advice on the best course of action. Was it acceptable for them to run and hide from the danger as Saint Paul had done in Damascus? Augustine's response is simply this: that flight is acceptable when the danger is particular to only one or a few, as in case of Saint Paul. However...

When the danger is common to all, that is, to bishops, clergy and laymen, let those who are in need of others not be abandoned by those of whom they are in need. Accordingly, either let them all withdraw to places of safety or else let not those who have a necessity for remaining be left by those through whom their ecclesiastical needs are supplied, so that they may either live together or suffer together whatever their Father wishes them to endure.... 

We ought not, on account of that which is uncertain, to be guilty of that which is certain, namely, neglect of our ministrations. Without these the ruin of the people is certain, not in the things of this life, but of that other which must be cared for with incomparably greater devotion and anxiety....And if some deserted their people, this is what we say ought not to be done. For such were not led by divine authority, but were deceived by human error or constrained by fear.

Now certainly, the situation of Augustine's time and ours are not exactly comparable. However, I have heard certain people, when making a defense of the harsh restrictions Americans find themselves under, compare the viral onslaught to an armed invasion. While I do not agree with such characterizations, I do think that the situations are quite comparable in that they both represent civilizational crises, grave temporal trials, with dangers that threaten all people alike.

As we continue to read Augustine's words, let us imagine he is speaking not to his colleagues of 5th century Roman Africa, but to us in our own times:

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When these dangers have reached their height and there is no possibility of flight, do we not realize how great a gathering there usually is in the church of both sexes and of every age, some clamoring for baptism, others for reconciliation, still others for acts of penance: all of them seeking consolation and the administration and distribution of the sacraments? If, then, the ministers are not at hand, how terrible is the destruction which overtakes those who depart from this world unregenerated or bound by sin! How great is the grief of their brethren in the faith who shall not have their companionship in the rest in the life eternal! Finally how great the lamentation of all and how great the blasphemy of some because of the absence of the ministers and their ministry! See what the fear of temporal evils does and how great an increase of eternal woes results. But if the ministers are present they are a help to all, according to the strength which the Lord gives them: some are baptized, others are reconciled, none are deprived of the communion of the body of the Lord, all are consoled, edified and exhorted to ask of God, who hath the power to avert all the things they fear—prepared for either issue, so that if that cup may not pass from them, His will may be done who can will no evil.

Apparently, some of his colleagues brought up the case of Saint Athanasius who fled from the Arians during the theological crisis of the previous century. Augustine rejects this argument as well, saying that Athanasius was a uniquely powerful figure against Arianism and that the greater Church perceived how needful his voice would be in the continuing struggle. However...

When the peril is common and it is more to be feared that someone may be thought to do this not from a desire of serving, but from a fear of dying, and when more harm may be done by the example of fleeing than good by the obligation of living, it should under no circumstances be done.

Augustine ends his advice with these strong words that ought to give pause, at least, to our contemporary Church leaders:

Accordingly, whoever flees under such circumstances that the necessary ministry of the Church is not lacking because of his flight, does as the Lord commands or permits. But whoever so flees that he deprives the flock of Christ of that nourishment from which it has its spiritual life, is an hireling who sees the wolf coming and flees because he cares not for the sheep.

Augustine concludes his letter with these words. Again, let us imagine he is saying them to us in our current tribulations:

We can find nothing better to do in these dangers than to pray to the Lord our God that He have mercy upon us. And some wise and holy men, with the help of God, have been enabled to will and to do this much, namely not to desert the churches, and in the face of detraction not to waver in maintaining their purpose. 

We have endured now several decades of a Church led by too many who better resemble the hirelings than the true shepherds. It would be well that we Catholics pay close attention to those leaders of our Church in the United States who are attentively providing their flocks with spiritual nourishment, often at the potential risk of their very lives, and those who have left the sheep to fend for themselves without access to sacramental grace.

Augustine's entire letter may be read here at Tertullian.org. You may also click here to find a print copy of The Life of Saint Augustine by Possidius which is well worth reading as "the rest of the story" on Augustine of Hippo from a reliable, authentic ancient source.