Not every soul that is instructed remains faithful to the grace. Our Blessed Lord Jesus said in the parable about the seed falling in among stones on the roadway: "sometimes the grace does not fructify unto perseverance." One who came very close to it, and I hope someday finds grace, was a Mr. G. in Paris - a diamond merchant. I had gone from Louvain to Paris to preach on the first Sunday of February.  I stayed in a small hotel near the Opera Comique. In the parlor an Englishman was playing the piano. I invited him to dinner that evening. He admitted: "I have never met a priest in my life." "Well, we are just like anyone else" I told him. "If you prick me with a pin, I will jump too." We went to a restaurant near the hotel, and during the dinner he asked me if we priests ever had to answer moral questions.

His moral problem was this: "I have never met one good man or one good woman in my life." I thanked him for the compliment, and he then continued: "This past eleventh of January over at that table there, a woman was trying to break a lump of sugar into a cup of coffee. As she could not do it, I broke the lump of sugar for her. She told me how cruel her husband was to her. I asked her to come and live with me, which she did." Continuing his story, he said: "I get tired of these women in about a year, so this morning I bundled up all of her clothes and left them with the concierge. She anticipated my move and left me this note" which he proceeded to hand to me. It read: "Dear Puppy: If you refuse to continue to live with me until the eleventh of February I shall throw myself into the Seine." He asked: "May I continue living with her to prevent her suicide?" "No, you may not do evil that good may come from it; and secondly, she will not commit suicide."

After dinner, he offered to walk me back to the hotel, but I told him: "I am not going back to the hotel; I am going to Montmartre." He said: "I was just beginning to think you are all right, and now you tell me you are going up to that hellhole of Paris." "Yes, but there is something on the hill of Montmartre besides 'dives.' On that hill is the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where for night and day over fifty years there has been continuous adoration of the Blessed Sacrament." I begged him to go with me. He refused at first, and then relented - probably out of curiosity.

On the way up to Montmartre on the subway, I told him: "I have a thousand and one reasons for believing Jesus Christ is present on that altar tonight. You have only one: because I tell you so. Here will be at least a thousand men in adoration during the night. They are good men and if they have wives, they are good women and if they have children, they are good people in the world." As a matter of fact, when we entered, I recognized in the front row Jacques Maritain, the philosopher, and also the Romanian Prince Vladimir. "What shall I do - stand, sit, kneel?" Do just as you please." "How long?" Well, I intend to stay until the sun comes up over Paris tomorrow morning. But, "I added, I will leave whenever you care to go." He made no move to go and the next morning I offered Mass in the basilica.

As we descended the hill of Montmartre, he asked me if I would stay in Paris for a few days to teach him to be good. I promised to meet him that night at his apartment. At the appointed hour he came into the courtyard with another woman, not the woman he had mentioned the previous night. She could speak no English and he could speak little French. He said to me: "The three of us will go out for dinner." And I said: "No." Punning on the French word for crowd, which is foule, I said: "Two is company and three is foule. Furthermore, I have made an appointment with Mr.G. and I want to see him alone." I took Mr. G. aside and said: "Tonight you are either going out with that woman, or you are going out with me." He walked up and down the yard a few times and then came up to me saying: "Well, Father, I think I will go out with her." Two years later I saw him on the streets of Brussels. He did not recognize me. He was with another woman still - not the woman in the courtyard that evening. I have always had hopes that the good inspiration that he received during the night he spent with the men of prayer will eventually save his soul.

I was giving a Lenten course in the Paulist Church in New York City. After the talk, a young woman came into the rectory with a challenge: "I am an atheist; what are you going to do about it?" I answered: "I'll bet you a dime you cannot give me three good arguments for atheism; if you do, I will find three answers in a book that was written seven hundred years ago. She was not able to give three arguments, and so I collected the dime. "You ought to be ashamed not knowing them." I then began instructing her. The instructions lasted for almost a year.

On Easter I gave her First Holy Communion in St. Patrick's. About six weeks after her First Holy Communion, I phoned her: "Are you going to Mass every Sunday?" She replied: "Yes, I go to Mass everyday." "Do you go to Communion?" "No." "There is a reason for that. Are you going with a married man?" "Yes" she admitted. That particular evening I bumped into her and this man in the Waldorf-Astoria. He walked on ahead. She said: "I am marrying him before a justice of the peace, for he is not free to marry. He is a Jew and very well known in the theater. Tomorrow we will leave on our honeymoon, which will take us around the world." I said: "L., you will never be happy." Her last words were: "Well, maybe not."

"Every Good Friday as I preached the Three Hours in St. Patrick's Cathedral this girl would be under the pulpit, standing the entire three hours. One day I said to her: "Happy?" She said: "Yes, I would be - pointing to the crucifix - if it were not for Him." A year or so later, she asked me to give her husband instructions. The husband had been married to a Jewess. If he came into the Church he would be eligible for the Pauline Privilege. I was reluctant at first to give him instructions, but I finally entered upon them, and he proved to be one of the truest friends of my life. The chapel in my apartment was designed by this celebrated designer - a memorial to his skill and faith.

We made application to Rome for the validation of the marriage because of the Pauline Privilege. In due time it was received. He phoned her, for she was on a ranch in Wyoming, telling her the news to come home and be married in the Church. She said: "Sorry, I am divorcing you; I am marrying a cowboy." She married a cowboy who worked on a summer reach three or four months a year, and lived three or four miles off the nearest passable road. He was heartbroken and gave up hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of contracts in the theater and went to Arizona to ride horses and forget his troubles. As I gave him Holy Communion one Christmas night in the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in New York City, tears were streaming down his cheeks. After Mass he brought me a small golden crucifix. He said: "This was the wedding ring L. gave me when she married me; I told her I would never take it off. But when I phoned her in Wyoming and she told me she was divorcing me, I found the ring in the palm of my hand. I had it made into a cross. This was her gift to me - the gift of Faith and the cross of Christ."

This was his second marriage and a failure. I said to him: "You are still free to marry. Since you have had such a failure in picking a woman, I think you should allow me to court the woman and then you marry her." However, he did not pursue the courtship of the young woman I proposed, but married an actress who was received into the Church and I witnessed their marriage in Washington. His wife became an alcoholic and he spent the rest of his life alone, always loving, faithful and devoted to the Church. God gave me the grace to assist at his funeral.

A few years later, I received a telephone call from L., who told me that she was leaving the cowboy and wished to be received back into the Church, to which she is faithful to this day. As Saint Augustine observed" "Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, so ancient and so new. Late have I loved Thee."

A Jewish jeweler in New York whom I known for twenty-five years or more was always very kind to me. When I would ask him the price of anything, he would always say: "It cost me. .." Then he would check through his filing cabinet and be sure of the cost price; that would be the price for me. One year he went to Europe and during the trip at sea, as he was seated at the captain's table, I sent him a cablegram which read: "This cost me $7.87." He said he lost his soup in the reading of that cablegram.

One day he phoned me and said: "Would you like a large number of silver crucifixes?" I went down to see him, and in a little brown bag he had many dozens of silver crucifixes about four inches high. I said: "Where did you get these?" He said: "From Sisters. They brought them in to me and said they were not going to use them anymore - wearing the crucifixes separated them from the world. They wanted to know how much I would give them for the silver." What is wrong with your Church?" I answered: "Just that! The contempt of Christ and His Cross which makes it worldly." Those words became the channel of the Spirit working in his soul. I explained to him the cost of Redemption, the blood of Christ; he embraced the Faith and died in it.

In the parish where I worked in the early days of my priesthood, I took a census. Instead of knocking only at the doors of Catholics, I went to every single house in the poor parish. In a rather poor and tumbledown house, I was met by an elderly woman who told me that she had been a Catholic when she was a young girl. She invited me in while I was urging her to return to the Church, her son, who was evidently an automobile mechanic (which I gathered from the way he was dressed. and which I later learned was true) came in the back door. He was carrying a monkey wrench in his hand. He saw me in the chair and let the monkey wrench fly at my head. I had to dodge quickly to escape it.

He then went to the stairs and called his wife. The two of them standing over me, he said: "Look what the cat brought in." I said: "I would like to ask you a question or two about how much it cost to put a new carburetor into a Hudson." He said: "A Hudson is no good, and it is not being made anymore." Nevertheless, I insisted upon talking about prices, installation and service. After fifteen or twenty minutes he became rather normal. I said: "My good man, I do not have a Hudson; I am not interested in fixing up an old car." "Why, then, did you tell me you had a Hudson?" "I did not tell you I had a Hudson; I merely asked you how much it would cost to put a carburetor into a Hudson. I got on this particular subject just to prove that you could be kind." All of them afterward became devout members of our parish.

The pastor told me that he was given a gift of $10,000 to build a shrine altar to Our Lady. I expressed amazement that there was $10,000 in the entire parish. He said: "Well, it was given to me by such and such a woman." My eye ran down that street, and it seemed that none of the houses could be sold for $10,000. I inquired where she could possibly have gotten the money. He said: "Her brother was a bank robber, and I think that she probably was given this money, and is now returning it to the Church in reparation for his soul." I asked if he had ever tried to retrieve the robber, but he said he had not.

That afternoon, I called on the woman and her brother. He sat in an armchair, a very handsome, benign old man with a full head of white hair. I said: "How long has it been since you have been to Confession?" He said: "Seventy years." I said: "Would you not like to make your peace with God?" "No. That would be cowardice. Do you know my record? I have robbed banks and post offices to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars. I have spent over thirty years of my life in jail, and have killed two men. Why should I now, at the end of my life, be a coward and ask God to forgive me?" "Well" I said, "let us see how brave you are tomorrow morning. I will come here to your door at eight o'clock. I will not be alone; I will bring the Good Lord with me in the Blessed Sacrament. I am sure that you will not turn us both away." When I returned in the morning, he opened the door. I heard his confession and gave him Communion - which proved to be Viaticum because he died the next day. He was not the first thief the Lord saved on his last day.

Among the souls who have been treated during my days of "retreading" it just happened that two of them were associated with opera. One of them was a singer; and the other one, a vocal coach. When the coach first came to see me, she said that she was not sure that she would enter the Church. She began by laying down a condition. She said: "There is one thing that you must not talk about because if you do, you would prejudice me against the Church, and that is the crucifix." I said: "Very well, we will now begin with the crucifix because you do not understand it; otherwise you would love it."

When she was received into the Church, she would go backstage at the Metropolitan always holding a crucifix in her hand, reaching it out to singers who were a bit frightened to walk onto the stage, fearful of not fully playing their part. He encouraged them, and now some of them are also carrying the crucifix.

In conclusion, let no one make a false estimate of me and give me undue credit for being a convert-maker. As I said before, just as the tin soldier that a little boy plays with on a carpet before Christmas cannot with a touch of the hand be made into a flesh-and-blood soldier, so neither can I by myself make a Christian. I am only a porter who opens the door; it is the Lord Jesus Who walks in and does the carpentry and the masonry and the rebuilding on the inside. I have merely narrated cases where for the most part I had some success as a porter. I did not mention many in which I failed nor those who came into the Church and fell away, nor the occasions I had for bringing others closer to the Light when I failed to take advantage of the opportunity.

Years ago souls were brought to a belief in God by the order in the universe. Today souls are brought to God by disorder within themselves. It is less the beauty of creation and more the coiling serpents within the human breast which bring then to seek repose in Christ. Often times what appears to be a doctrinal objection against the Faith turns out to be a moral objection. Most people basically do not have trouble with the Creed, but with the commandments; not so much with what the Church teaches, as with how the Church asks us to behave.

I remember a stewardess on an international airline who began instructions. When we came to the subject of confession and sin, she said that she could not continue. I begged her to take one more hour of instruction, and then if she did not like what was said, she could leave. At the end of the second hour on that subject, she became almost violent and shouted: "Now I'll never join the Church after what I have heard about confessing sin." I said to her: "There is no proportion whatever between what you have heard and the way you are acting...Have you ever had an abortion?" She hung her head in shame and admitted that she had. That was the difficulty; it was not the sacrament of Penance. Later on I received her into the Church and baptized her first child. From my experience it is always well never to pay attention to what people say, but rather why they say it. So often there is a rationalization of the way they live.

BY  ARCHBISHOP  FULTON  J.  SHEEN  ( 1895 to 1979 )

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Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless. 

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.


HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -