A Plea for Intolerance

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 broadminded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broadminded. 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—providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. The evidence for this statement is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of religion, and, lastly, the love of novelty.

~ Venerable Fulton Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

The above quote comes from the chapter titled A Plea for Intolerance in Ven. Fulton Sheen's book Old Errors and New Labels. Since the election, Fr. Saguto, our pastor, has been sharing passages from A Plea for Intolerance in the parish bulletin. Now, he has kindly shared A Plea for Intolerance on our parish's website. The chapter is applicable to today and well worth reading in its entirety.