Author Mike Aquilina joins the Catholic Morning Show to talk about Ignatius Press bringing Archbishop Fulton Sheen's The Power of Love back into print ahead of Sheen's September 24 beatification. Mike explains why the book quietly disappeared for decades, how Sheen carries love from the Greek philosophers all the way to toddlers, teenagers, and midlife crises, and why it's the best short introduction to Sheen you can put in someone's hands. He also shares how Sheen's writing catechized him as a young revert — and the lunchroom scene that led to him writing the foreword.
Mike Aquilina, author of more than fifty books on the Church Fathers and Catholic history, joins Bo Bonner to discuss The Power of Love, Fulton Sheen's short meditation on love, newly rereleased by Ignatius Press with a foreword by Mike. He explains the book's long absence from print: it opens by assuming the recency of John F. Kennedy's assassination, which made it look dated to publishers — but past that opening, Mike argues, it's one of Sheen's most profound and clearest treatments of what love actually is.
Mike and Bo talk through Sheen's method: taking love from its roots in the Greek philosophers and its various forms through to the Christian idea of charity, then applying it to concrete life — how to love in a family, how to love a toddler, how to love a teenager, how to love through a midlife crisis. Mike points to the chapter on "little things" as the heart of the book, where Sheen tells the story of a man tipping his hat to Oscar Wilde at the lowest point of Wilde's life, and connects it to Mother Teresa's insistence on beginning with a smile — an act of love that changes the atmosphere of a home or a workplace, especially when you don't feel like it.
Mike also shares his own history with Sheen: a confessor and spiritual director who assigned him one Sheen book after another in his twenties, starting with Life of Christ and Three to Get Married, and, decades later, discovering a room of twenty-something archdiocesan employees who watched Sheen's old television show over lunch every day for inspiration. That story, told to Ignatius Press's Tony Ryan, led to the foreword. Why this book now? Because Sheen, Mike says, is an American original delivering the teaching of the ages in an American idiom.
Find The Power of Love at your local Catholic bookstore or from Ignatius Press. Archbishop Fulton Sheen will be beatified Thursday, September 24 at 2 p.m. Central at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle presiding as Pope Leo XIV's representative — details at CelebrateSheen.com.
Heard on the Catholic Morning Show, weekdays at 7 a.m. Central on Iowa Catholic Radio. More at IowaCatholicRadio.com.
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