Social Work Is Serving Without Christ

For my birthday my lovely wife gave me a book of quotes from Fulton Sheen and I hope to post one a day. I've written previously on one of his Life Is Worth Living episodes titled 'Social Work' and that is the topic of this first quote which is on the same subject but not from the show. It is from his book, Those Mysterious Priests.

If God appears dead in our nuclear age, it is because Christians and arid people have isolated Christ from His Cross. Some priests and religions have love enough for he hungry, but not love enough to redeem from guilt. (A bad word for modern man)The priest, in order to relate himself better to the world, may preach a "social Christ" or a "political Christ" or a "revolutionary Christ," but such indifference to the crucifixion produce sermons that are "sounding brass and clinking cymbals." The intellectual and moral commitment of the priest to the Sermon on the Mount needs also the existential surrender to the prolongation of the Cross. Mother Teresa of Calcutta expressed this idea: "Serving of the poor without the love of Christ crucified is social work."