Rationalizing Evil

 The hour of the common man was dawning, Sheen declared. The Messiah walked this earth teaching children and fishermen. “If I wanted a good moral judgment about the war, I should a thousand times prefer to get it from a garage man, a filling station attendant, a WPA worker, a grocer’s clerk, or a delivery boy, than from twenty-three Ph.D. professors I know about in just one American University.” The reason was easy to find. “The educated know how to rationalize evil; the masses do not. Evil to them is still evil. . . . Their judgments are better because their moral sense is higher, for virtue does not increase in direct ratio with learning.” It was character, not learning, that made a nation great; and “character is in the will, not in the intellect.

Thomas C. Reeves, America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), pp. 143-44.