Even Saints are Products of their Times

News flash: Saints can be wrong sometimes.

Now, don’t panic. There’s nothing impious in realizing this reality. After all, what makes saints exceptional is they continuously strove to overcome their human weaknesses and errors in their quest for sanctity. But, with the exception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this process was never completed in this life: even after years of living a life of holiness, a saint might still make errors.

For example, practically every saint prior to the 16th century accepted geocentrism: the (now-disproven) theory that the earth, not the sun, was the center of the solar system. No Saint challenged this theory and all accepted it at face value, because everyone—saint or sinner—accepted it at face value. We don’t look down on these past giants of the Faith for being wrong about this, because it’s not an obligation of any man or woman to be right about everything, even saints.

Which brings us to Bishop Fulton Sheen, who is being beatified in St. Louis today. 

Sheen’s story should inspire all Catholics, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s a man worthy to be on the path to sainthood. He was America’s greatest Catholic evangelist in the 1950’s, and possessed a deep love of the Eucharist and the Blessed Mother. It is my hope and prayer that today’s bishops look to his zeal for souls and do all they can to imitate him in holiness.

Yet if you dig just a little bit into his life, you find that he held some views that aged like warm milk. In 1970, for example, he was interviewed on a host of issues by famous conservative commentator William F. Buckley, who asked why the Church no longer exercises the power of excommunication as she did in previously centuries. Why the change? he asks Sheen.

Sheen’s answer sounds like something from today’s boomer progressive bishop playbook: the Church is changing with the spirit of the times; she is more related to the world than in the past; Vatican II brought the world into the Church and took the Church into the world; the Church used to be “locked up in itself.” Buckley then fairly pushes back and asks why, if this is all the case, everyone is leaving the Church. Sheen essentially answers that it’ll take time for the changes to bear fruit and then talks about the Church being more compassionate than before.

Frankly, if a bishop today gave an answer like that, all right-thinking Catholics would justifiably cringe in embarrassment.

Does this mean Sheen was just a progressive bishop, and that he shouldn’t be beatified? No. To make that judgement would be to fall into the error many moderns: judging past figures’ statements and actions in a modern context. To call Sheen a “progressive” would remove him from his historical context; it would insert him into another time and place with its own debates.

Being a product of your times means two things, both of which apply to Sheen’s comments here. First, you imbibe the assumptions of your time, most of which are unspoken (which is why they’re assumptions). Second, you don’t know what the future will hold.

In Sheen’s time no Catholic dared question the prudential judgement of Church leaders; and in fact had little reason to question it. Things on the whole seemed to be running smoothly, so why challenge those in charge? So if the Vatican says, “We’ve got to make a few changes in order to support the mission of the Church,” a random bishop in America isn’t going to question that. Thus, if Rome wants the Church to be “more compassionate” and says that’s the way forward, then Sheen, being a good Catholic and a product of his times, will go along with the program. Even the biggest critic of Vatican policies today would have done the same back then.

Further, Sheen, like his contemporaries, would have no way of knowing how this compassion shift would turn out. He honestly believed that even though it wasn’t yet working out well in 1970, eventually it would—because Rome said so. He didn’t know—couldn’t know—that the future of the Church in the West would include millions of souls leaving the Church and rampant heresy among even the clergy and the episcopate. Very few, in fact, perceived that future (a certain controversial French archbishop was one of the rare exceptions). The gift of prophecy is not a requirement for sanctity.

It’s easy for us to judge in hindsight, and it’s a flaw of our modern era to instinctively look down on our ancestors. Even Catholics who appreciate tradition can do it at times. One of the hardest things to do—even for saints—is to step outside the times in which one lives and look beyond its cultural assumptions.

In other words, we shouldn’t think Sheen isn’t worthy of canonization just because he got wrong something that almost everyone got wrong. What he got right is far more important: holiness, a passion for souls, and a deep love of Our Lord and Our Lady. That’s the path to sanctity for all of us.

Saints, like all of us, are not infallible, nor do they necessarily even have foresight. In many ways, this makes them even better role models for the rest of us. They overcame their limited vision to focus on the Beatific Vision. We would do well to do likewise.

Blessed Fulton Sheen, pray for us!