Vessel of Clay
America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen
by Thomas C. Reeves
San Francisco, California: Encounter Books, 2001
(479 pages; $25.95, cloth)
reviewed by James Hitchcock
Some people epitomize the age in which they live, and no one epitomized the “golden age” of American Catholicism—roughly the three decades prior to the Second Vatican Council—better than Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Thomas Reeves’s book is the latest and by far the best biography of the famous prelate and is likely to remain so for a long time.
Born in central Illinois in 1895, Sheen was a typical American Catholic of his age in that he came from a family in humble circumstances. His subsequent life was far from typical, but it epitomized the Catholicism of his era in that certain features of that age perhaps reached their most conspicuous development in him.
After a brilliant academic record and a short period as a parish priest in Peoria (to teach him humility, his bishop later said), he became a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., a post he held for several decades, although teaching was never one of his highest priorities. (Oddly, although he had an earned doctorate in philosophy, he later also claimed a doctorate in divinity which he did not possess.)
By 1930 he was a popular radio preacher and greatly in demand as a lecturer. He also began a writing career for which the word “prolific” is scarcely adequate—a total of 66 books and countless articles over half a century. In the 1950s he showed his mastery of the new medium of television, where his weekly program cut into the audience of Mr. Television himself, Milton Berle, and helped drive Frank Sinatra’s weekly program off the air entirely. Next to Pius XII, Sheen was by then probably the most famous priest in the world.
Besides his presence in the media he was best known as a convert-maker to the Catholic Church, his list including the ex-Communists Louis Budenz and Bella V. Dodd, the violinist Fritz Kreisler, the author (and later ambassador) Clare Booth Luce, and the industrialist Henry Ford II.
Sheen’s fame, and his world travels, made him ideally suited for a position he was given in 1950—head of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, an organization primarily devoted to raising funds for foreign missions. Along with that directorship, he served as auxiliary bishop of New York. Reeves estimates that over a period of sixteen years he raised almost 200 million dollars.
But suddenly, in l966, he was made bishop of Rochester, New York, a transfer generally recognized as a kind of demotion, since it removed him from the nerve centers of Manhattan and left him as merely the head of a middle-sized diocese. After less than two years he retired, was made a titular archbishop, and remained active as a speaker and writer until his death in 1979.
Such is the bare outline of an extraordinary clerical career, one with no parallel in any other time and place and one that could have been possible only in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.
Behind this curriculum vitae is the story of a soul, a story that embodies all the ambiguities of the era.
James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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