Living Catholicism: BOOK REVIEW: Victory over Vice by Archbishop Fulton Sheen

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August 12, 2006

BOOK REVIEW: Victory over Vice by Archbishop Fulton Sheen

If there were full consciousness of the evil, perfect deliberation, perfect understanding of the consequences of acts, there would be no room for forgiveness. That is why there is no redemption for the fallen angels. They knew what they were doing. We do not. We are very ignorant – ignorant of ourselves and ignorant of others. - - Archbishop Fulton Sheen Victory over Vice

Victory Over Vice is a little book that gives you a chance to be a little less ignorant of yourself and your sins. Archbishop Fulton Sheen believes strongly that the last seven sayings of Jesus Christ can be the key to understanding and overcoming our tendencies toward the seven deadly sins. Each chapter of the book takes a sin (Anger, Envy, Lust, Pride, Gluttony, Sloth, and Covetousness) and explores it through the sayings of Christ. During his lifetime, Archbishop Sheen developed a keen understanding of human weakness and why people commit certain sins. This book makes the most of his understanding and is extremely insightful into our failings.

This isn’t a book only for those who commit serious, mortal sins, it is a book for all of us who sin and it does a great job of explaining why we have tendencies toward certain sins and how we can overcome temptation. I highly recommend taking a little time to read and meditate on this book – I think you’ll end up reading it more than once to really pull the wisdom and insight out of it.

Throughout the book, Archbishop Sheen gives us compelling tidbits:

Darwin tells us in his autobiography that, in his love for the biological, he lost all the taste he once had for poetry and music, and he regretted the loss all the days of his life. Nothing so much dulls the capacity for the spiritual as excessive dedication to the material.
Excessive love of money destroys a sense of value; excessive love of the flesh kills the values of the spirit. Then comes a moment when everything seems to rebel against the higher law of our being. As the poet has put it, “All things betrayest thee, who betrayest me.” Nature is so loyal to its Maker that it is always in the end disloyal to those who abuse it. “Traitorous trueness and loyal deceit” is its best poetic description, for in faithfulness to Him it will always be fickle with us.
The Fifth Word from the Cross is God’s plea to the human heart to satisfy itself at the only satisfying fountains. God cannot compel men to thirst for the holy in place of the base, or for the divine rather than the secular. That is why His plea is merely an affirmation: “I thirst,” meaning, “I thirst to be thirsted for.” And His thirst is our salvation.

As a matter of habit I fold down pages in a book that I find especially insightful. This way I can go back after reading it and review the points that especially effected me or interested me. This is only a little 118 page book, but I found myself folding down page after page after page. It not only awakens your heart and spirit to sins that you were unaware you committed. It brightens your mind to why you have a tendency to commit a certain sin. And it compels you to move closer to God, further from sin, and frequently to confession. Another great example from the second words from the cross, “Amen, I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

Two lessons are taught us by this Second Word from the Cross. The first is that envy is the source of our wrong judgements about others. The chances are that if we are envious of others, nine times out of ten we will misjudge their characters.
Because the thief on the left was envious of the power of our Lord, the misjudged Him and missed both the divinity of the Savior and his own salvation. He falsely argued that power should always be used the way he would have used it – namely, to turn nails into rosebuds, a cross into a throne, blood into royal purple, and blades of grass on the hillside into bayonets of offensive steel.
No one in the history of the world ever came closer to Redemption, and yet no one ever missed it by so far. His envy made him ask for the wrong thing; he asked to be taken down when he should have asked to be taken up. It makes one think of how much the envy of Herod resulted in an equally false judgment: he massacred the Innocents because he thought the Infant King came to destroy an earthly kingdom, whereas He came only to announce a heavenly one.

I could quote this book time and again. It wasn’t just a good or interesting read, it was a profound analysis of sin and how it affects us. Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s writing style and insight make it easy to apply these lessons to our own lives. I highly recommend it for all adults. You can purchase Victory Over Vice here.

God bless,
Jay

If you want people to stay as they are, tell them what they want to hear. If you want to improve them, tell them what they should know. - - Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Posted by jay at August 12, 2006 1:16 PM