Fulton Sheen: Tolerance, Intolerance, and Truth

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who will be known as “Blessed” after his beatification on September 24, 2026, was never afraid to tackle the tough subjects, or to be blunt (yet eloquent) in his rebuttal of the falsehoods that often seduced modern society.  The following excerpts from one of his essays illustrate the problem Americans, and to be honest, most modern societies of the current age, have in drawing a line between good and evil, truth and falsehood.

“Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong.”

The quote above serves as a great summation of Bl. Fulton Sheen’s teaching, and is taken from the same essay, A Plea for Intolerance, as the excerpts below:

“America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad-minded.”

“A bigoted man is one who refuses to accept a reason for anything; a broadminded man is one who will accept anything for a reason…”

“Another evidence of the breakdown of reason that has produced this weird fungus of broad-mindedness is the passion for novelty, as opposed to the love of truth. Truth is sacrificed for an epigram, and the Divinity of Christ for a headline…”

“Belief in the existence of God, in the Divinity of Christ, and in the moral law are considered passing fashions. The latest thing in this new tolerance is considered the true thing, as if truth were a fashion, like the hat…”

“In the face of this false broad-mindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, ‘You owe me’ and ‘I owe you,’ but they seem to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong.”

“The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error.”

“Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need…not a Church that is right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is wrong. The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon. Both of them claimed a child. The lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth — it cannot be divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise. She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broad-mindedness.”

Excerpts from A Plea for Intolerance by Bl. Fulton Sheen