The End of Christendom? What did Sheen Mean?

Fulton Sheen and the 500-Year Pattern: Why He Said We’re Living Through the End of Christendom

1.5 Minutes, From “The Muck and Mire of Catholic Life” available here at StE and on your favorite podcast app.

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Catholics today look at the cultural chaos around us and think, “This has to be the worst it’s ever been.” I’m in that group at times! But Fulton Sheen once pointed out that the Church has passed through a repeating 500-year cycle, or a pattern of collapse, purification, and renewal before.

He identified four major cycles:

The fall of Rome (5th century)
Civilization crumbled. The Church looked outnumbered and super vulnerable. Yet from that rubble came the monastic movement and the rebuilding of the West. Wester Culture today is a child of the Church, and the fall of Rome was the start of it.

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The corruption and breakdown of the early Middle Ages (around the 10th century)
Moral decay infected both society and the clergy. In response came a revitalized papacy and the Cluniac reforms; a monastic renewal movement centered at the Abbey of Cluny aimed at restoring strict Benedictine discipline, moral purity, and independence from secular control.

The rupture of the Reformation (16th century)
Christendom was torn apart. But the Counter-Reformation, new religious orders, and missionary fervor emerged to strengthen the Church and spread the Gospel even further.

The rise of modern secularism (19th century)
Revolutions and rationalism tried to bury God. The Church responded with clarified doctrine, global evangelization, and a century marked by extraordinary saints. I still believe we’re in that era of saints, probably more in this century than in the last!

Then Fulton Sheen said something that should make every Catholic today pay attention:

We are now living through the next great crisis — the end of Christendom.

Not the end of the Church. She’s indefectible. But the end of the Christian social order — a world shaped by Christian morality and Christian assumptions and understanding. In Sheen’s view, that loss is actually the beginning of something powerful.

“The Lord is marching the Church through its own 40-year sojourn through the desert, to purify, and strengthen us in preparation for the next great thing in Church history
-TJ Haines, c. 2022

Every time Christendom collapses, Christianity becomes real again. When we lose cultural privilege, the Gospel becomes sharper. When faith stops being automatic, it becomes intentional—a faith of conviction. When the Church becomes smaller, she becomes holier and more mission-driven.

Sheen believed our age—your lifetime and mine, is the time when the Church is purified of cultural Christianity, ordinary Catholics rediscover personal holiness, the laity take up their missionary calling, and Christians learn to witness boldly without social support or approval.

In other words, the world is being stripped away so that the faith can shine again.

We’re not witnessing the death of the Church. We’re witnessing the pruning before the bloom. Not the fall of the Church but her reemergence from the ashes. I have said for years that people err when they expect the Church to be reborn as she was in the past. That will not happen! What will emerge from the ashes will be something that will shock the world, including faithful Catholics.

this is the paradox, my friends; Christianity is strongest when the world declares it weak. Every “collapse” has led to renewal. Every “death” has led to resurrection. But first must come the cross.

If Sheen is right, this moment isn’t a funeral. It’s the forge where God is forming His saints. Trust and believe!

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