Fulton Sheen: Casting Fire on the Earth

By Robert Royal
In 1945, Louis Budenz – a Communist activist and managing editor of the party's newspaper The Daily Worker – was received back into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen. The two men had met earlier because Sheen had been publishing devastating critiques of Communism. The Communist Party USA sent Budenz to Sheen to try to turn him – presumably because Sheen had also expressed some criticisms of capitalism, and concerns 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 in the Soviet Constitution. But Sheen pressed on: "I told him I was not interested in discussing Communism; I wanted to talk about his soul."
Budenz and his whole family converted.
Priests, bishops, lay Catholics – amid all the talk about dialogue, listening, walking together, and other offshoots of synodality – take note: In the end, you have to turn, simply, to what it's all about.
As Sheen once said: "We are sinking because like Peter we have concentrated our whole attention upon the winds of public opinion, upon the currents of indifference, upon the military, economic, and political opposition from this quarter or from that. We are sinking for the same reason that Peter sank: We have taken our eyes off the Master."
How was Fulton Sheen able to demolish Communism and other modern idols and religious substitutes, yet at the same time possess the spiritual perceptiveness to know when to turn from the arguments to a direct appeal to the heart of another human being?
It helped to be a genius, to be sure. The story of his rise from humble beginnings in El Paso, Illinois to world-class academic excellence to global celebrity as a preacher and maker of converts will be told in many places as we approach his beatification in St. Louis next month. But it's worth touching on a few details of his meteoric rise for what they might tell us about our own moment. (The best introduction to the range of his thinking is his early collections of essays Old Errors and New Labels, which is Chestertonian in cleverness and unfailing in its philosophical incisiveness.)

But the foundation of everything according to Sheen was his vow to make a Holy Hour every day. It's not easy to sit quietly in the presence of God for anything more than a few minutes. Our minds, let alone our souls, are too restless. 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 at times dry and distracted. Still, putting yourself in the presence of the Creator daily can't help but make a difference to the creature, even one half-composed of fallible "clay."
Sheen did not, as many seem to want to do in the "synodal Church" today, rely merely on "conversation in the Spirit." He trusted God. But he worked. Hard. At the University of Louvain in Belgium, then the most prestigious theological center in the world, his doctoral dissertation won the highest honors and the Cardinal Mercier Prize. (It's been republished in a handsome edition by Cluny Media as God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy). Columbia University and Oxford offered him positions teaching scholastic philosophy.
But Sheen's bishop ordered him to return to Illinois – to see if this academic superstar would still submit to religious obedience. Sheen did 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 around the country – which, of course, made waves with other faculty. But he took his duties at CUA seriously, claiming that he prepared six hours for every hour of lectures. He also said that he spent about thirty hours of prep time for each episode of his blockbuster television program "Life Is Worth Living" – even though each epis...