Tempted by Pride
Ah, the power of the word of God. Or should that be the power of a certain celebrity-prelate of the Church of God? Or should it be more than a little of both?
Very little in the early life of Fulton Sheen indicated that he would become this celebrity-prelate, much less that at the time of his death in 1979 he would be singled out by the Jesuit magazine America as the “greatest evangelizer” in the history of the American Catholic Church. Born in El Paso, Illinois, in 1895, Peter John Fulton Sheen was the son of a hardware store owner, who had rediscovered his lapsed Catholic faith after marrying a pious farmer’s daughter named Delia Fulton following the death of his Protestant wife. When he was five the family migrated to Peoria. Ten years later the family moved to a nearby farm. Wherever they lived, all of the Sheens were devout Catholics, but none more so than Fulton and his mother. By the age of twelve the man who would become “America’s bishop” had chosen to dedicate his life to the Blessed Virgin and was “very conscious” of having a vocation to the priesthood.
But even when that vocation was realized, Father Fulton Sheen had little reason to anticipate anything more than making the ordinary life of a Midwestern parish priest a life worth living.
Whether young Father Sheen was likely to be content with such a life is another matter entirely. If his future stardom was far from certain, his distaste for rural life, his general fastidiousness, his budding vanity, and his scholarly interests could not be hidden — especially from himself. Or from a careful biographer.
Thomas Reeves is that biographer. An accomplished historian with a long string of books to his credit, Reeves has already given us portraits of two other significant mid-twentieth century American Catholics, Joseph McCarthy and John F. Kennedy.
Reeves the biographer is fair minded. And what does he say about the good bishop? In his hands, this man of God (who may yet become a saint of the Church) becomes someone other than a cardboard figure, someone bedeviled by real failings, and yet someone of solid intellectual and moral substance.
Before dealing with the substance behind the Sheen, let’s stay with the question of Sheen’s character for a minute. The capital sin that bedeviled this bishop was the sin of pride. To his credit, he realized as much. And to his greater credit, he never ceased working to conquer it. On occasion, he even managed to wrestle this sin to a draw. But win, lose, or draw, he refused to surrender to it.
“He Must Have Winced”
It is curious that Sheen was often referred to as the “American Chesterton.” The comparison has been offered because both men were public intellectuals and Christian apologists. Both wrote for and spoke to popular audiences. But key differences remain. Unlike Chesterton, Sheen earned a number of advanced degrees. And unlike Chesterton, the good bishop was quite capable of succumbing to the good life, whether that be hobnobbing with fellow celebrities or padding about his Washington, DC estate, and committing the very sin that Chesterton thought was the most grievous of the capital sins, namely the sin of pride, which Chesterton described as the “supreme evil” because it is the “poison in every other vice.” Also said Chesterton: “Most of the evil in this world derives not from staring into the bottom of a beer glass, but from staring longingly into a looking glass.” If Sheen, an avid reader of Chesterton, read these words, he must have winced.
Sheen, like Chesterton, was also a man of considerable erudition and deep spirituality. Sheen may have been a celebrity, but he was not a phony celebrity. Reeves goes to great lengths to document Sheen’s credentials as a man of learning and a man of faith. He also details the great lengths to which Sheen regularly went to be an equally effective evangelist, whether he was circulating among his fellow celebrities or preaching to the common man. And when he spread the Word of God Sheen could be just as effective as an author, a homilist, or a television performer.
A television critic once cracked that “Bishop Sheen can’t sing, can’t dance, and can’t act. All he is . . . is sensational.” Actually, that critic didn’t have it quite right. Sheen could act, even if he was doing something other than putting on an act.
If Bishop Sheen was the genuine article — and Reeves makes an airtight case for just that — his battles with Cardinal Spellman were the real thing as well. Here were two Catholic prelates of considerable, but very different, talents. Here also were the two leading lights of Catholic anti-communism. That considerable similarity stipulated, it was Sheen the preacher v Spellman the bureaucrat. Sheen the intellectual vs. Spellman the politician. One proud man vs. another proud man.
Rock Solid Core
In the end New York City simply was not big enough for both of them. Monsignor Sheen had moved there in 1950 at Spellman’s behest to serve as Director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. A year later he was elevated to bishop, having been nominated by Spellman. Reeves, in fact, detects no evidence of any “serious tension” between the two during the early 1950s. All of that changed rather quickly. The immediate issue concerned control of the Society’s funds (especially the one million dollars or more that Sheen insisted he had donated). Everything escalated from there. Reeves is prepared to believe that a clash was virtually “inevitable,” given the size of the egos and wills involved. He is also prepared to believe that it was the Cardinal who eventually forced the bishop to “retire” from television in 1957. What Reeves calls Spellman’s “vendetta against Sheen” did not reach the newspapers, but it was an open secret within clerical circles. For his part, Sheen never bothered mustering a defense, but he couldn’t resist lashing out with a tart, “Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
According to Reeves, Sheen’s 1966 appointment as bishop of Rochester was Spellman’s final act of “revenge” against his long time adversary. Seventy-one and without significant administrative experience, Sheen was almost destined for failure during his years in Reeves-defined “exile.” There Sheen added to his distance from Spellman by calling for a unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam. He also burnished his new-found liberal credentials by endorsing the civil rights movement and the reforms of Vatican II, as well as investing a good deal of personal time and energy in trying to alleviate the plight of Rochester’s poor. Clearly a member of the “progressive wing” of the Church at that time, Sheen’s “constant fear,” reported a Rochester observer, was that the Church “would be judged by other Americans as behind the times or irrelevant.” Reeves does not share that assessment. And rightly so, especially if Sheen is to be seen as the “American Chesterton.” After all, the original Chesterton preferred that his Church be right, even if the rest of the world was wrong, no, especially because the rest of the world was often wrong. So did Sheen. Witness his defense of Pope Paul VI and Humanae Vitae, a defense that Reeves tell us “surprised and angered” many in the Rochester diocese. Did they expect the prelate heralded by Ramparts magazine as the “social butterfly of the Renewal Movement” to join the outcry against the Pope? If so, Reeves, concludes, they simply failed to understand the man whom Thomas Reeves understands so very well.
America’s bishop may not have been above an old-fashioned shouting contest. He may have taken too much pleasure from his celebrity status. He may have succumbed more often than he would have hoped to Chesterton’s most poisonous of vices. But externals aside, there was a rock solid core to this man of faith, a core that could not be gutted, cannot be tarnished, and deserves to be remembered.
(This article originally appeared in Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton. Click here to order America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen.)
