Quo Vadis America?
“Our nation is too full of those that are crying Down…Down with schools. Down with the churches. Down with teachers. Down with government. Down with the police. Can you build anything down? You cannot!” Archbishop Fulton Sheen exclaimed to his TV audiences about America during his popular TV show in the mid-1960s.
He honed in on the same theme twice — the first time during his mid-1950s telecasts. Although these were over half a century ago, it looks like he was actually doing the broadcast currently in 2020.
It wasn’t the first time Sheen seemed to see what was on the other side of the horizon from what was gaining some footholds in his day. Decades earlier he could foresee what might happen. And tried to reroute people.
“The subject of this telecast is patriotism,” he told his 1960s TV audience.
A sixty-odd-year-old video of Bishop Fulton Sheen speaking about the revolution of the sixties: “my revolution” prompts reflection in this election year of 2026. More on that video in a moment. But to that era, I can recall easily my arrogance.
- My certitude about the hypocrisy of religion.
- The only difference between men and women is anatomical.
- And that my mother had wasted her life by staying home to be a wife and mother.
- I could go on but I suspect you get it.
Of course, I was hardly unique. They were very heady times for the college-aged of my generation. All the rules were questioned…especially those governing women and their roles. And for most of us, just like the revolutionaries of today, we had no idea of what we were unleashing. Precisely like the majority of today’s insurgents, we thought we understood the revolution-based history of America. We were woefully ignorant of its contemporary across the Atlantic, the French Revolution.
Who was Antoine St-Just?
Indeed, most us have never heard of him.
At twenty-one years old, St-Just “electrified” the newly created French National Convention with his commanding speech about the deposed King of France: “As for me”, he declared, “I see no middle ground: this man must reign or die! He oppressed a free nation; he declared himself its enemy; he abused the laws: he must die to assure the repose of the people, since it was in his mind to crush the people to assure his own.”
Too many of us believe that the French Revolution mirrored America’s. Who could argue with Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality? Who could argue with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789?
Unless the words are carefully read and understood. For example, ‘Liberty consists of being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man or woman has no bounds (italics mine) other than those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights.”
Again, Sheen: “The American Revolution was about “governing ourselves,” he said. “What’s the revolution of today? What’s its nature?” he again asked. “Violence. Violence just for the sake of violence. I mean the new type of revolt which involves destruction of everything that is in the past.” Tear down the statues. Saints. Sinners. Presidents. Remove all history.”
Woke is not new
Bishop Fulton Sheen efficiently extinguishes any similarity between the American and the French Revolution calling ours the Jeffersonian revolution and the French, that of St-Just. In just twenty-four minutes, his talk, Quo Vadis, America, distinguishes between Jefferson’s revolution and St-Just’s… or that of the “old/new” Democratic Socialism.
Sheen begins by stating that there are two kinds of revolutions. He distinguishes the “Jeffersonian American Revolution” versus St-Just’s this way:
- The Jeffersonian was based on the dignity of man: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;
- They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- The conviction that all rights and liberties come from God.
Quite the contrary, however,
- St-Just exhorted that the way to power was through terror-the way to control people is through violence.
- People can be taught that the only way to save themselves is through violence.
- St-Justian Revolution is based on a “new elite”- a loud and dominant minority who force their will on the majority and a
- Mysticism which eclipses the old spiritual mysticism-my will or nothing.
- God and religion are the enemy.
- An attraction to Satanism
Although a Catholic, Sheen’s greatest audience came primarily from Protestants and Jews, with Catholic listeners and viewers coming in at third place.
Quo Vadis America? The Russell Kirk Center
There are many key themes that Sheen takes up… One theme is his unequivocal condemnation of Nazism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, and most especially Communism. He reminded the American people that Communism is not an ally. Beyond its false promises of earthly utopia is an enemy just as dangerous as Nazism and Fascism, if not worse. Communism had been condemned numerous times by the Catholic Church in the past and was described as a “satanic scourge” by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937). A large part of Sheen’s life was dedicated to fighting Communism and its influence in the United States.
As I complete this article,
Many polls predict a Democratic sweep in the House and Senate in the upcoming November election. They may be right. The Democrat Party attracts the young along with the growing cohort of those who detest the current president. There was a time I would have celebrated such a win. The Republican Party never appealed to me back when the Democrats were a political party. But the ascendency of the Democrats’ hatred of America, its Constitution, and all that I hold sacred, fills me with dread and sorrow. Just so, it seems fitting to look back at one of the founders, John Adams, who sorely suffered through the birth of this nation under God.
“It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distresses yet more dreadful. If this is to be the case, it will have this good effect, at least: it will inspire us with many virtues, which we have not, and correct many errors, follies, and vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor, and destroy us. The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals. And the new governments we are assuming, in every part, will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues or there will be no blessings… But I must submit all my hopes and fears to an overruling Providence; in which, unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.”
John Adams, July 3, 1776
