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.

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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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