By Robert Royal
In 1945, Louis Budenz —a communist activist and editor-in-chief of the party newspaper, The Daily Worker— was received back into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen. The two men had met before because Sheen had been publishing devastating critiques of communism. The Communist Party of the United States sent Budenz to Sheen in an attempt to win him over —presumably because Sheen had also expressed some criticisms of capitalism, and concern for workers and the poor—. When Budenz asked how Sheen could say that the USSR was not a democracy, Sheen pointed to articles 118 to 124 of the Soviet Constitution. But Sheen insisted: “I told him that I was not interested in discussing communism; I wanted to talk about his soul.”
Budenz and his entire family converted.
Priests, bishops, lay Catholics —amid so much talk about dialogue, listening, walking together, and other offshoots of synodality— take note: in the end, one must simply return to what it is all about.
As Sheen once said: “We sink because, like Peter, we have concentrated all our attention on the winds of public opinion, on the currents of indifference, on the military, economic, and political opposition of this or that side. We sink for the same reason Peter sank: we have taken our eyes off the Master.”
How could Fulton Sheen demolish communism and other modern idols and religious substitutes, and at the same time possess the spiritual insight to know when to set arguments aside and appeal directly to the heart of another human being?
It helped to be a genius, of course. The story of his rise from humble beginnings in El Paso, Illinois, to world-class academic excellence and global celebrity as a preacher and converter of souls will be told in many places as we approach his beatification in St. Louis next month. But it is worth touching on a few details of his meteoric ascent for what they may tell us about our own moment. (The best introduction to the range of his thought is his early collection of essays Old Errors and New Labels, Chestertonian in its wit and unfailing in its philosophical sharpness.)
But the foundation of everything, according to Sheen, was his vow to make a Holy Hour every day. It is not easy to sit in silence in the presence of God for more than a few minutes. Our minds, not to mention our souls, are too restless. And yet Sheen did it despite all his travels and responsibilities. As he confesses in his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, it was always enriching, but also sometimes dry and distracting. Even so, placing oneself each day in the presence of the Creator cannot but make a difference for the creature, even one made in part of fallible “clay.”
Sheen did not rely, as many seem to want to do today in the “synodal Church,” merely on “conversation in the Spirit.” He trusted in God. But he worked. Hard. At the University of Louvain in Belgium, then the most prestigious theological center in the world, his doctoral thesis earned the highest honors and the Cardinal Mercier Prize. (It has been reissued in a beautiful edition by Cluny Media as God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy). Columbia University and Oxford offered him positions to teach scholastic philosophy.
But Sheen’s bishop ordered him back to Illinois: to see whether this academic superstar would still submit to religious obedience. Sheen did so and served as a humble parish priest for a year, after which his bishop sent him, as originally planned, to teach at The Catholic University of America.
Sheen did not rest on his laurels there. He became a popular professor and began to be invited to lecture and preach across the country —which, of course, stirred waves among other professors—. But he took his duties at CUA seriously, and claimed that he prepared six hours for every hour of class. He also said that he devoted about thirty hours of preparation to each episode of his enormously successful television program “Life Is Worth Living,” even though each episode lasted only 27 minutes and 20 seconds.
What seemed easy and spontaneous was in fact the result of serious effort and careful preparation. In this he did what many great orators have done, from Cicero to Winston Churchill (it is said that Churchill devoted an hour of preparation for every minute of the great speeches he delivered). To put it in theological terms, Sheen relied on grace, but did not neglect human work.
It was that combination, along with a ready intelligence and wit, that made him such a formidable presence. And humility. The autobiography of such a man could easily have been a series of self-promotional displays of great things accomplished: the celebrated converts (Clare Boothe Luce, Fritz Kreisler, Heywood Broun, Horace Mann, Henry Ford II, Bella Dodd, among others). Or the millions of dollars raised for the Church and works of charity, especially after he was named head of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Or the sales of popular books such as Life Is Worth Living, Peace of Soul, or The Life of Christ —not to mention the millions of people who followed his radio and television programs—.
All of that is present in the autobiography, but held to a high standard: “I enjoyed the prestige of being a university professor, and of appearing on radio and television not only at home but abroad; I was popular, sought after, applauded loudly after lectures and banquet talks, was a friend of royalty and of the masses, my features became so recognizable that I was identified by a passerby in a revolving door, my face appeared in millions of homes. I earned the due kind of enemies, namely, the communists. But…how close was I to the Cross?”
And in the end he asks a question we should all ask ourselves: “Have I cast fire upon the earth, as the Lord asked?”
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.