Classic Catholic

Why Catholics Can't Think (with apologies to Thomas Day)
I've so often wondered why there seems to have been a percipitious decline in Catholic intellectual life since the Second Vatican Council. Now I think I have an explaination. It comes from none other than Archbishop Fulton Sheen in this article on the decline of controversy. He says, for instance,

The Catholic Church perhaps more than the other forms of Christianity notices the decline in the art of controversy. Never before, perhaps, in the whole history of Christianity has she been so intellectually impoverished for want of good sound intellectual opposition as she is at the present time. Today there are no foe-men worthy of her steel. And if the Church today is not producing great chunks of thought, or what might be called "thinkage" it is because she has not been challenged to do so. The best in everything comes from the throwing down of a gauntlet--even the best in thought.

Here, here!