PEORIA, Illinois, December 6, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — As controversy continues to swirl over the Vatican’s decision to postpone the beatification of the Venerable Fulton Sheen, archival video has surfaced showing the famed televangelist condemning “false compassion” for drug addiction, crime, and homosexuality, among other social ills.
In a video recorded in the early 1960s, Archbishop Sheen lectured television viewers about what he called “false compassion” for criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts, and homosexuals. “False compassion, which is gradually growing in this country, is a pity that is shown not to the mug, but to the mugger; not to the family of the murdered, but to the murderer.”
It is the “social slobberers,” said Sheen, who “insist on compassion to the mugger, the dope fiend, the throat-slashers, to the beatniks, to prostitutes, to homosexuals, to the punks, so that today the decent man is practically off the reservation.” He reiterated, “This is a false compassion.”
A former professor of theology, the archbishop identified the origins of false compassion. “It started in literature,” he said. It was in the work of William Saroyan and John Steinbeck, for example, “where pity was extended through their novels to the good-natured slob.” It is in such novels that pity is shown, he said, “to every kind of pervert and degenerate.” ….
PEORIA, Illinois
