This evening I have been reflecting on the life and legacy of Fulton J. Sheen, one of the most influential Catholics of the twentieth century who died on this day at age 84 in 1979.
In 2011, I read his autobiography Treasure in Clay, which is really splendid. Tonight I was reminded that he dictated parts of it shortly before his death “from his sickbed as he clutched a crucifix.”
I want to share with you an excerpt from a brief piece by Fulton Sheen titled “Dying to Live“:
I do not suppose that thinking and writing about death every day will necessarily make it any easier to die one day or will make me any better at it.
I do know, however, that I will not always be in a position of wanting to think and write about these topics and so now is the time for it.
In Josef Pieper’s Death and Immortality, I just came across this excellent paragraph:
Continue readingAs a general rule, so-called “thinking about death” is probably a poor way of learning to die. Georges Bernanos in one of his last imaginative works, the Dialogues des Carmélites, has the dying prioress say: “I have meditated on death every hour of my life, but that does not help me at all now.” And when the philosopher Peter Wust learned for certain that he would never leave his sickbed, he asked in a diary note, evidently with profound surprise, why all philosophy failed him now.
DYING TO MEET YOU 