Fulton J. Sheen

J.M.J.

Is Love Greater Than Hate? 

We stand today at a crossroads where the soul of a nation and the soul of each person meet.

Inspired by Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, Lift Up YOUR Heart (1950).

Across our nation—Minneapolis only the latest flashpoint—we are witnessing not merely social unrest but the deeper carnage of souls. In the darkened corners of human activity, where light is refused and truth is unwelcome, hatred grows like mold in a sealed room. Darkness is not a force in itself; it is the absence of Light. And long before a window is shattered or a life is taken, that privation has already taken hold of a soul.

Whenever hatred rises—no matter the grievance, no matter the banner under which it marches—violence becomes its natural offspring. Something is always destroyed before anything is struck: the image of God in another, the clarity of conscience, the capacity to love.

This is why every person must confront a question older than politics and more searching than ideology: Is love stronger than your hate? Not in theory, not in sentiment, but in the secret places where your heart decides what it will serve.

In an age when the Church should be the first to stand, we often find her paralyzed—not by persecution, but by indifference. We take sides instead of taking up the Cross. We trade the courage of Christ for the comfort of neutrality. And sometimes it seems that what wounded Him most was not the nails, but the coldness of those who simply watched.

And yet, if hatred destroys, love rebuilds. If darkness blinds, love restores sight. The saints have always insisted that the true battlefield is not the street but the soul, and that the victory of love begins with the transformation of the person. And it is precisely here—at the point where the world demands reaction and God invites conversion—that Fulton J. Sheen speaks with prophetic clarity. He reminds us that the struggle between love and hate is not first a social crisis but an interior one, where grace labors to raise the fallen and reshape the willing. Few voices have ever described this inner drama with greater precision or greater hope than his:

“Because the development of character requires constant vigilance, our occasional failures must not be mistaken for the desertion of God. Two attitudes are possible in sin – two attitudes can be taken toward our lapses into sin: we can fall down and get up; or we can fall down and stay there. The fact of having fallen once should not discourage us; because a child falls, it does not give up trying to walk. ... Sometimes, in the case of a continued weakness, it is well to count not only the falls, but to count also the number of times a temptation to do wrong was overcome. The reverses we suffer in the heat of battle can lead us to strengthen our purposes. The trials and temptations of life prove that in each individual there is an actual I-potential. The ‘actual ego’ is what I am now, as a result of letting myself go. The ‘possible I’ is what I can become through sacrifice and resistance to sin. Persons are like those ancient palimpsests or parchments, on which a second writing covered over the first; the original gloss of sin and selfishness has to be scraped off before we can be illuminated with the message of Divinity.

No character or temperament is fixed. To say ‘I am what I am, and that I must always be,’ is to ignore freedom, Divine Action in the soul, and the reversibility of our lives to make them the opposite of what they are.

No character, regardless of the depths of its vice or its intemperance, is incapable of being transformed through the cooperation of Divine and human action into its opposite, of being lifted to the I-level and then to the Divine level. The time element is not as important as it seems, for it does not require much time to make us saints; it requires only much Love.

Character building, however, should not be based solely on the eradication of evil, for it should stress, even more, the cultivation of virtue. Mere asceticism without love of God is pride; it is possible to concentrate so hard on humiliating ourselves that we become proud of our humility, and to concentrate so intently on eradicating evil as to make our purity nothing but a condemnation of others. [You have a choice] the difference in the two techniques—pulling up the weeds or planting good seeds.

A positive and not a negative goodness is the Christian ideal. A character is great, not by the ferocity of its hatred of evil, but by the intensity of its love of God. … When a Christian character is motivated by love alone, it finds much more goodness in the world than before. As the impure find the world impure, so those who love God find everyone loveable, as being either actual or potential children of God. This transformation of outlooks takes place not only because love moves in an environment of love, but principally because, in the face of the love diffused by the saint, love is created in others.”

— Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, Lift Up Your Heart (1950)

In the end, the question before us is not whether the world has gone mad, but whether we will let the madness enter our hearts. Hatred is loud, but it is never strong. It burns hot, but it burns out. Love alone endures because love alone creates. Hatred can shatter windows and scorch cities, but only love can rebuild a soul.

Every morning, we rise into a world that seems determined to rehearse its own ruin. Yet every morning we are also handed the same choice the saints faced: to lift our hearts or to lift our hatred. One leads to the Cross, the other to the crowd. One transforms the person, the other deforms the world.

And here the wisdom of Fulton Sheen stands like a lamp in the darkness: “The time element is not as important as it seems, for it does not require much time to make us saints; it requires only much Love.” If hatred destroys what is, love reveals what can be. If darkness blinds, love restores sight. No character is fixed, no soul is beyond reversal, no life is too tangled for grace to rewrite. Sanctity is not a matter of time, but of love.

So let us refuse the cheap victory of resentment. Let us reject the paralysis of indifference. Let us become, in our small corners of the world, the contradiction that hatred cannot comprehend: people who answer darkness with light, injury with mercy, and chaos with the steady, stubborn love of God.

For in an age starving for hope, the greatest revolution is still the simplest one: to lift up our hearts, and not our hatred.

"The only way to destroy hate is for an individual to absorb it and, in his own heart, convert it into love." ~ Fulton J. Sheen