This Day in Religious History (Death of Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn Abolitionist Preacher)

Mar. 8, 1887—Two days after suffering a stroke, the charismatic Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher died in his sleep at age 73. 

It was an uncharacteristically quiet end to a life of striving and strife, particularly from his Brooklyn pulpit, where for four decades he had moved thousands of listeners by denouncing slavery and other forms of American racism, paying tribute to a Christian god of love—and enduring the suspicions of his congregation and tabloid readers over an alleged affair with a married parishioner.

Several months ago, while walking through Brooklyn Heights, I had hoped to take a photo of a striking statue of Beecher by Gutzon Borglum (sculptor of Mount Rushmore) at the religious institution the preacher founded, Plymouth Church. But, because there was no easy access to it because of the high courtyard fence blocking the way, I’ve decided to get closer to him through his words rather than an image.

And what words they were—all the more extraordinary for being delivered extemporaneously, then transcribed by stenographers. Each Sunday, as many as 2,500 people, often coming over from Manhattan by Brooklyn Ferry, crowded into the church for the spectacle of the long-haired Beecher doing something unexpected.

It could involve Beecher, unlike his Calvinist minister father, Lyman Beecher (who sired six other sons who, like Henry and their father, became preachers), speaking of a benevolent God, nudging the axis of Protestant rhetoric from a theology of punishment to one of forgiveness and love. Or it could involve Beecher deciding, like his equally abolitionist sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, to provoke slaveholders—in his case, by holding a mock auction of a nine-year-old slave girl in 1860.

President James Buchanan’s proclamation of a “National Day of Fasting” on Jan. 4, 1861, as the secession movement swept the South, provoked “Peace, Be Still,” one of Beecher’s most astonishing bursts of oratory. Why was the country “observing a “day of humiliation,” he asked? It was for “the strangest reason the world ever heard,” he noted: because, with the rise of abolitionist sentiment, “the spirit of liberty has so increased and strengthened among us, that the Government is in danger of being overthrown!”

While pointing out the presence of “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin—slavery” in the South, Beecher refused to let the North off the hook, noting that, because it “loved money, and that quiet which befits industry and commerce,” the region had allowed the institution to spread even though, when the Constitution was written in 1787, it was framed “only to give oppression time to die decently.”

Nor was he done yet. Still in the same sermon, he castigated as well America’s policy toward Mexicans and Native-Americans (“What must be the nature of that Christianization which makes this Republic a most dangerous neighbor to nations weaker than ourselves?”).

When he wasn’t bitterly criticizing the “peculiar institution,” Beecher was, together with William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, part of a liberal theological movement that advocated for God’s love with depths of eloquence. “Religion is in the man, or it is not anywhere,” Beecher took to saying. 

In the 1870s, Beecher received attention of an unwelcome kind when friend and parishioner Theodore Tilton accused him of improper relations with his wife. His charm and exuberance were such that women were continually falling in love with him, making him a constant object of gossip and, among husbands, jealousy, whether or not he acted on temptation. The adultery trial that followed provided newspaper fodder (some say the coverage exceeded that accorded to the Civil War) before ending in a hung jury. The congregation of Plymouth Church absolved Beecher of wrongdoing, but a cloud of scandal lingered on him to his death, and even beyond.

 
Nevertheless, Beecher remains an important figure in American religious history. He helped establish that politics was a right and proper subject for the pulpit.  Moreover, biographer Debby Applegate, in The Most Famous Man in America, credits him with putting progressive evangelicalism and a gospel of love, happiness and self-fulfillment at the center of modern American Christianity, in a pronounced shift from its dour Puritan origins. 

This Day in Religious History (Cranmer Named Archbishop of Canterbury)

March 30, 1533—Thomas Cranmer achieved the dream of many British clergymen, before and since, when he was formally consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet the cleric’s immediate actions demonstrated that he was now in a position of extraordinary ambiguity, even danger. First, though he had secretly taken a wife while on a trip to Germany in the past year, he kept her out of public view lest he anger his monarch, King Henry VIII, who still believed in the Roman Catholic norm of priestly celibacy.

Second, though he was also obliged to take an oath of obedience to the pope along with one to the king, he insisted, in a secret oath immediately taken before it, that allegiance to the pontiff extended only insofar as it was consistent with loyalty to Henry.

The second action, in fact, underscored a prime concern of Cranmer for the next two decades: words. Words had the potential to bring him to the scaffold, as it would his clerical colleague, Bishop John Fisher, and a layman renowned for his intellect and faith, Sir Thomas More.

Yet words were also what he worshipped fervently only slightly less than God. They comprised his extensive library, which, at 700 volumes, exceeded not only private collections but those of Oxford and Cambridge in his time; they were what he insisted that students know thoroughly, as part of the Bible, when he taught at Cambridge; and they were the weapons he would use to transmit Protestantism and contribute to the literary landscape of Great Britain.

There is little if any reason to doubt that Cranmer was the most controversial figure of the English Reformation. If there is any historian who doesn’t agree that Henry was a capricious, cruel king, I would like to meet him. Similarly, for all the expert revisionism supplied by Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell remains best known as the ambitious roughneck who speeded the looting of the abbeys and the execution of those who ran afoul of Henry in the monarch's quest for a wife who could make him happy and produce an heir.

In contrast, Cranmer is seen, depending on one’s point of view, as the courageous herald of a new faith, a slippery theological facilitator of his king’s desires, or as a vacillating prelate who watched—and, on occasion, revised—what he wrote or said.

This post won’t review this contentious question. It will confine itself to how he got his position in the first place, and to an area on which much more agreement rests: his secure place in English letters.

Cranmer owed his position partly to an accident of fate: a plague, the so-called "sleeping sickness," that drove him away from Cambridge and out to Essex, where he was staying in the same neighborhood where Henry was lodging. It came to the attention of Henry and his counselors that Cranmer had found a justification for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon (a passage from Leviticus 20:21 against wedding the widow of one’s brother) and a means by which to implement it (a decision by the nation’s canonists and universities that marriage with a deceased brother's widow was illegal, thus bypassing the by-no-means-certain approval of Pope Clement VII).

At the direction of Henry, Cranmer put aside all his other labors to securing the monarch’s desire. In the summer of 1532, the death of Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury allowed Henry to replace an aged prelate who had finally dared to break with him over his increasing estrangement from Rome with someone far more compliant.Yet the new appointee, undoubtedly sensing what he might be in for, delayed his return to England for seven weeks in the hope that something might happen to prevent the appointment. But the paperwork came back from Rome (an institution that would, in time, excommunicate Cranmer) and he began his uncertain and dangerous work.

Within two months after his consecration, Cranmer had granted Henry his divorce. Amazingly, as others (including Cromwell) incurred the monarch’s displeasure and suffered the fatal consequences, Cranmer managed to outlive the king.

Cranmer’s dramatic death in 1556, in the short reign of the Catholic Queen Mary—first recanting his views, then publicly recanting the recantation, thus bringing about his immediate execution—secured his place among Britain’s Protestant martyrs. In the decade before his death, however, he made a lasting contribution to the new faith and his nation’s language.

In 1549, at Pentecost, his Book of Common Prayer was introduced, followed by a revision three years later. Written in English, it embodied his belief that services should be conducted in a nation’s language rather than the universal language of Latin mandated by the Catholic Church. Together with the King James Bible introduced in the following century, it formed the foundation of worship in now-Anglican England.

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) aptly summarized the influence of Cranmer through The Book of Common Prayer: “There is all the difference in the world between the crude bareness of the Litany as he found it, and its majestic rhythm when it left his pen.” Though not the sole author of the book, he is generally acknowledged as its prime mover and principal inspiration, in a way considerably different from the more committee-written King James Bible.

Through the following centuries of British life, as the country’s flag came to be flown through a worldwide empire, the cadences of The Book of Common Prayer became instilled in millions. Cranmer’s use of idiom, cadences, imagery, repetition, contrast and general rhythm impressed itself on the ear and heart. Using the simplest, most monosyllabic of (usually Anglo-Saxon based) words, he managed to imprint on generations of worshippers—and even those of his countrymen who have long fallen away from the faith—sentences and phrases impossible to forget:

“We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”

“Give peace in our time, our Lord.”

“Deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil.”

“To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”

“In the midst of life we are in death.”

“

Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

This work has also contributed phrases that have become titles of well-known books: P.D. James’ Devices and Desires, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast. It has also even informed the work of others who have not shared the prelate's beliefs in any manner, such as Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett. Even New Yorker literary critic James Wood, an avowed atheist, on the 350th anniversary of its slight amendation, noted that the “acute poetry, balanced sonorities, heavy order, and direct intimacy of Cranmer’s prose have achieved permanence.”

 

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.