The legal fight between the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Peoria over the remains of Fulton Sheen is over. Sheen returns to Peoria where the process for his canonization will continue. All quotes below are from Lift Up You Heart. Sheen urges us to advance from self-centered egotism to recognition of our dignity to a life centered on union with Christ.
When the ego dominates our lives, we blame little faults on others, and excuse great offenses in ourselves; we see the mote in our neighbor’s eye, and not the beam in our own. We wrong others, and deny that there is any guilt; others do the same wrong to us, and we say that they should have known better. We hate others, and call it “zeal”; we flatter others because of what they can do for us, and call it “love”; we lie to them and call it “tact.” We are slow to defend the rights of God in public, and call it “prudence”…we believe we are virtuous – merely because we have found someone who is vicious…. These are the temptations to which we are all prone when we allow the ego in us to become supreme.
Each human personality is so inviolable that it stands out, against all other personalities, as unique, incommunicable, and absolutely distinct. Because of his personality, or I, every man is a precious mystery. He cannot be weighed by public opinion; he cannot be measured by his conditionings; he belongs to no one but himself, and no creature in all the world can penetrate his mystery except the God Who made him. The dignity of every I is beyond our reckoning….The ego is always self-centered; ….[It] wants the world to serve it; the I wants to serve the world. Ego-centricity always leads to self deception….[It] flies from the truth, because it knows that truth would be its undoing. The I, or personality, seeks truth, for it knows truth would be its flowering and perfection….The ego defines liberty as the right to do whatever it pleases; the I, as the right to do whatever I ought. The ego in its affections says: “I love whatever I wish”; the personality, or the I, says: “I love whatever God wishes.”
There are considerable hidden reserves of natural goodness in everyone; they live on stubbornly in company with his predominant passion, even if that is turned toward evil. Because there is something in us that escapes infection, we are never intrinsically wicked, never incurable, never “impossible.”…Our happiness in the created goods of the world can draw us to their Creator. And our unhappiness, because no created thing gives the infinite joy we try to wring from it, can also lead us to the True Infinite….There is no escaping God; there is only the possibility of greeting Him with hate instead of love. For we cannot keep God out of our lives…..God finds us lovable, even in our rebellion against Him. He does not love us because we are lovable of and by ourselves, but because He has put His own love into us….[It] is the one way to peace which the world can neither give nor take away. Venerable Fulton Sheen, pray for us.