This Day in Religious History (Fulton Sheen Receives Holy Orders)

September 20, 1919—A 24-year-old seminarian who was once told by his college debating coach that he was “absolutely the worst speaker I ever heard” was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in the Diocese of Peoria, a role that called for sermons. Little did Fulton J. Sheen imagine that he would become, in the words of the Rev. Billy Graham (who would know about such things), “one of the greatest preachers of our century.”

I’m still not sure of the exact process by which Archbishop Sheen acquired the extraordinary oratorical skills that made him the most effective preacher of the radio and network television eras. But reading the story of the above tough-love assessment given to the future televangelist before a crucial debate with the University of Notre Dame has convinced me that training and motivation can lead to at least incremental improvements—and perhaps more—in the speaking styles of many priests.

Sheen’s turnaround out has given me hope, after years of sitting in my pew on any given Sunday, believing that the ability to preach can’t be solely a gift from God.

In 1948, my Uncle Pete, like millions of other Americans, bought a TV so he could catch on a regular basis Milton Berle. Anyone challenging the slapstick comedian’s supremacy at 8 o’clock on Tuesday evenings was, it was understood, entering “the obituary slot.”

But four years after he started, the Dumont Television Network, in a bit of shrewd counterprogramming, chose to enter the lists against Berle. Before long, people like my grandaunt Hannah and her husband Jack would be watching Life Is Worth Living religiously, helping the prelate to clobber “Uncle Miltie” in the ratings.

(Berle came up with a good one-liner to account for his fall in the ratings: "He stayed on longer than I did because, let's face it, he had better writers. Mark, Luke...").

All these years after his greatest success, you can still catch Sheen, this time on the Catholic cable network Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN)—and, I’m sure, many viewers have. On the occasions that I’ve done so, while channel-surfing, I’ve been struck, as so many were at the time, by the man’s sheer theatricality—those piercing eyes, those flamboyant scarlet robes, those outstretched arms at the end of the show as he called out, “Bye now, and God love you!”

His props—including that omnipresent blackboard and that four-foot statue of Madonna and Child on a pedestal —were minimal, and I have a feeling that, if the prelate were alive today, he would scorn Powerpoint as a puny accompaniment to his real assets—including that voice.

In his history Catholics and American Culture, Fordham University historian Mark Massa, S.J., has noted that many Protestants—and even some Catholics—wondered at the time of Sheen’s peak in popularity if he might be simplifying theology a little too much.

I’m afraid that Sheen’s own character and legacy have been simplified in the nearly three decades since his death, often to his detriment, by supporters and detractors alike. He never sounded an uncertain trumpet against secularism or Communism, but he was also not an strict ideological captive of the right wing.

Even his penchant for simplification, so much the bane of intellectuals, appears eminently defensible when placed in religious and historical contexts. Christ, for instance, spoke in parables, allowing his complicated understanding of Talmudic texts to emerge in concrete tales understandable to the agricultural society of his time. In A Knock at Midnight, another immensely gifted 20th-century preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., summarized years of study on the dignity and value of labor with a simple anecdote about a cleaning woman.

Here are some points to ponder about the host of Life Is Worth Living:

* Sheen was viscerally anti-Communist, but that did not necessarily make him a boon companion to the Republican Party. The archbishop was friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, but at the time the FBI director was seen as almost beyond party, since he had been retained in office by Democrats as well as Republicans. (Hoover was also not publicly known for the abuses of his office that would damage his legacy during the civil-rights era of the 1960s, or especially after his death in 1972.) More to the point, though Sheen appeared before the American Legion to denounce Communism, he did not associate himself with Senator Joseph McCarthy, as several other American bishops did at the time.

* Sheen made an enemy of original benefactor Francis Cardinal Spellman. In my book, anyone who ended up on the wrong side of Spellman couldn’t be all bad. Though Spellman had pushed Sheen’s appointment as director of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Church's principal source of missionary funds, the two soon quarreled. Sheen was so persuasive an advocate for his own cause that, even at the height of Spellman’s influence with the Vatican, the broadcasting priest was able to convince the pope to side with him rather than the cardinal. For this defiance, Spellman succeeded in exiling Sheen to Rochester, where the bishop’s tenure ended unhappily because of lack of organizational skill and his alienation of a significant component of the diocese by fully implementing the reforms of Vatican II.

* Sheen enjoyed friendly relations with members of other faiths. Like another Spellman church enemy, Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing, Sheen stayed on good terms with non-Catholics. For instance, he supported the creation of the state of Israel and assailed anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms during World War II (“For a Catholic to be anti-Semitic is to be un-Catholic.”)

* Sheen was unafraid to tell the truth, whether people liked to hear it or not. It should have made many Americans think twice about this nation’s involvement in Southeast Asia when Sheen—whose sermon on “The Death of Stalin” gained unexpected relevance when the Soviet dictator had a stroke and died within the fortnight after it was delivered in 1953—came out against the Vietnam War. He repeatedly criticized Kodak, the largest employer in Rochester, when it would have been safer to speak out once or, better yet for himself, not at all.

Sheen was not without flaws, to be sure. Biographer Thomas C. Reeves has listed a few of these, including inordinate vanity and gilding of an already impressive resume (i.e., adding a second doctorate to the one he already had). He might also have tried to ferret out harder the insights of psychology rather than attack Freud for the religious skepticism evidenced in works such as Civilization and Its Discontents.

But revelations in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall have shown just how correct Sheen was in blasting Communism as “the final logic of the dehumanization of man.” Bringing the word of God to millions—and easing the assimilation of Catholics into the American mainstream by conveying a sense of optimism, self-confidence and intellect—are also significant contributions to the Church in the wider national culture.

Only a couple of months before he died in 1979, Sheen was embraced at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by another master communicator and evangelist to millions, Pope John Paul II. In one of the great ironies of histories, the cause for Sheen’s canonization was initiated by John Cardinal O’Connor, a successor to the office of Archbishop of New York that had once been held by the televangelist’s church enemy Spellman.