St. Fulton Sheen Of Peoria, Ora Pro Nobis!
By SHAUN KENNEY
I did not grow up with Fulton Sheen on either television or the radio, but one always heard about him in hushed tones as if he were an American afterthought.
Certainly we found his books and paraphernalia at just about every Catholic yard sale, and was Fulton Sheen a prolific writer!
Yet between his telegenic personality and his magnificent writing style was Sheen the professor — where for nearly two decades he would perfect what Americans saw on NBC in a classroom of 40 students at the very end of McMahon Hall at the Catholic University of America.
Picture a room roughly 40 feet by 40 feet with windows on two sides of the room, with 20-foot ceilings and radiator heat. A blackboard running along the side of the wall to one’s right, followed by a row of desks and chairs scooting across a hardwood floor. There, a younger man — clearly Irish but with that Midwestern accent that rings all too American — would greet you and gesture to a chair.
For an hour — maybe even three hours — Msgr. Sheen would either torture a text of Catholic scholarship or glide over the whole of several readings with one theme. Sheen was a popular teacher at Catholic University, as his presence on that newfangled device called the radio helped refine his craft as much as the students of Catholic University did.
Sheen’s departure in 1950 from the university was quickly followed up with his television show Life Is Worth Living during an era of “feel good” Christianity — no script, just Sheen and a chalkboard.
Throughout his ministry, Sheen rarely if ever prepared his text. More often than not, he worked from a reflexive memory that stitched together his thoughts after a period of meditation on the topic. His magnetism as a public speaker was well balanced against the fulminations of the likes of Fr. Charles Coughlin. Sheen’s presence just as the Cold War began heating up and after the McCarthy era was precisely the antidote to the uncertainty of the times.
For those of us who remember Sheen as precisely that — a memory — finding his work has been difficult in some respects. Gone are his radio programs into the ether. Lost were his television shows until the Internet allowed us to put Sheen back into our living rooms again. Sheen’s books were so prolific at the time he was writing them that few of them truly remain as examples of a great work.
We speak of Chesterton and Bellow, of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien — but rarely of Sheen, perhaps because of his own success.
More likely, there was a prodigious effort to erase the memory of Fulton Sheen precisely because of the enmity he inspired among his enemies — none of whom were more implacable than Francis Cardinal Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York.
In one of their more famous exchanges after a financial dispute where Spellman attempted to extort money from Sheen over a donation of powdered milk, Spellman pledged to destroy Sheen’s reputation, earning the rebuke from Sheen: “Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius!”
Thus Spellman committed himself to the project, taking Sheen from his public persona. In 1966 Pope Paul VI named him to the Diocese of Rochester, where unbeknownst to Sheen and the rest of the world it was embroiled in the sort of sexual abuse that Spellman not only covered up, but in his own way participated in the very same scandal.
Thus Spellman engaged in a sort of guilt by association. More than this, Sheen was no administrator, and the diocese he found was not readily apt toward financial reform. Thus Spellman engaged not only in the demission of Sheen’s reputation and public ministry during his own life, but dropped the poison pill that seems to have hijacked Sheen’s beatification today.
News that Fulton Sheen was to be beatified was greeted by Catholics in America with great satisfaction as a sign that maybe — just maybe — the politics of a bygone era had dissolved and the holiness of this remarkable person would be recognized in Rome the same way it has been loved in living rooms and kitchen tables across America.
Yet the postponement of Sheen’s beatification comes as a bit of a shock. Though those behind it have insisted — or rather, hinted — that it has nothing to do with the sexual abuse crisis, it now appears as if the Diocese of Rochester might be named in a wider investigation from the New York Attorney General’s Office – and that imperiously, Sheen’s name will be implicated as having been an archbishop during such a time. Spellman did his work well.
And yet.
There is not a soul in America, much less an honest soul in the Vatican or in New York, who believes for a moment that Fulton Sheen either tolerated or participated in the massive hierarchical coverup that Spellman and his confederates engaged upon over a multi-decade period.
In fact, had the Catholic Church in America taken to heart the teachings of Fulton Sheen, such abuses might never have occurred.
And, given the gross epidemic that was harbored by such men as Spellman, it was voices such as Sheen who stood fast against such times. Loyal to the Magisterium of the Church, Sheen defended her against all enemies with a fidelity to Thomism that avoided the rigidity sometimes attributed to the neo-Thomist project today. Loyal to the Second Vatican Council, he denounced rightly efforts to further reform the Church into something alien and abstract.
For Sheen, life was worth living because Christ lived it. Modernity was an abstraction, the “reform of the reform” was a distraction. Sheen believed more than anyone the idea of a Christianity that was lived — not thought about. It was Sheen who praised the likes of St. Thomas the Apostle for demanding to place his hands in the wounds of Christ — a real Christ, a suffering Christ.
This Christ who suffered and transfers the guilt of our sin onto ourselves for the very reason that Christ physically embodied our human nature — the very definition of Emmanuel: God amongst us.
No small wonder that Pope St. John Paul II, whose pontificate centered on the intrinsic value of each and every human life against the abstractions of the world, praised Sheen by saying he had spoken well of Christ and was a loyal son of the Church. The photographs of Sheen, his body aged and embraced by the Holy Father, are almost iconic.
They show a man deeply touched by the moment, and they will be as honored in Americas as much as photos of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa.
For myself and for millions of faithful Catholics who are seeking an accessible means of developing their faith in open fidelity to the Magisterium, Fulton Sheen’s accessibility and witness are equal parts restorative and reformative. Simply put, Sheen’s instruction is the Catholicism we have had stolen from us by the sorry substitutes for catechesis we have today.
As for the rest of us, St. Fulton Sheen of Peoria already has a special place in the hearts of Catholics despite his calumniators. After all, with enemies such as Spellman, who needs friends?
Free Christmas Cards!
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First Teachers warmly encourages readers to submit their thoughts, views, opinions, and insights to the author directly either via e-mail or by mail. Please send any correspondence to Shaun Kenney c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 or by e-mail to kenneys@cua.edu.
