The Cross and the Beatitudes

by Fulton J. Sheen

How different this is from the beatitude of the world! The world blesses not the meek, but the vindictive; it praises not the one who turns the other cheek, but the one who renders evil for evil; it exalts not the humble, but the aggressive. Ideological forces have carried that spirit of violence, class-struggle, and the clenched fist to an extreme the like of which the world before has never seen. To correct such a warlike attitude of the clenched fist, Our Lord both preached and practiced meekness. He preached it in those memorable words which continue the Beatitudes:

Meekness is not cowardice; meekness is not an easy-going temperament, sluggish and hard to arouse; meekness is not a spineless passivity which allows everyone to walk over us. No! Meekness is self-possession. That is why the reward of meekness is possession. A weak man can never be meek, because he is never self-possessed; meekness is the virtue that controls the combative, violent, and pugnacious powers of our nature, and is therefore the best and noblest road to self-realization. The meek man is not a man who refuses to fight, nor is he a man who will never become angry. A meek man is someone who will never do one thing: he will never fight when his conceit is attacked, but only when a principle is at stake. And there is the keynote to the difference of the anger of the violent man and the anger of the meek man.

If you have enemies, if they hate you, if they revile you, and persecute you and say all manner of evil things against you, and you wish to stop their hatred, to release the hatred in their clenched fists, drive them off the face of the earth—then there is but one way to do it: Love them!

Mercy is a compassion which seeks to unburden the sorrows of others as if they were our own. But if we have no such compassion, then how can compassion ever come back to us?

The poor in spirit will be hated by those who pursue self-interest; the meek will be opposed by the self-assertive; those who hunger and thirst after justice will be scorned by the indifferent; the merciful will be ridiculed by the unforgiving; the pure of heart will be the laughingstock of the Freudians. The world whose false peace is based on self-love will make war against those whose peace is based on conscience.