Tomorrow, we will have a new American blessed. On Sept. 24 in St. Louis, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen will be beatified.
Sheen was a fascinating character. A sharp philosopher educated in top universities in Europe, he became a pioneer in Catholic communications, using the mass media of his time to evangelize and explain the Catholic faith to believers and nonbelievers.
From 1930 to 1950, he hosted an NBC radio show, “The Catholic Hour,” and after that a weekly primetime television show, “Life Is Worth Living,” that aired on the Dumont Network and later on ABC from 1952 to 1957.
During his lifetime, he was the most widely recognized Catholic in America. Yet much of his career belongs to an America we would hardly recognize today.
“Media” back then meant television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and books. There were three TV networks, all broadcasting in black and white. He died in 1979, long before the advent of the internet and social media.
Sheen also came of age in the postwar generation when the leading institutions in American life — the media, universities, political parties, business and community leaders — were all committed to Judeo-Christian values and beliefs about marriage, family, patriotism, and civic virtue.
It was a time when a television network would dedicate airtime for an unscripted show hosted by a Catholic bishop dressed in black clerics and a red episcopal cape, who wrote on a blackboard and paced the stage without notes, talking about Jesus and the direction of American society.
And it was a time when that priest could draw an audience of more than 30 million each week and win the medium’s highest award, an Emmy, for “Most Outstanding Television Personality.”
But Fulton Sheen was much more than some voice from a vanished era. His message and appeal remain timeless. I am delighted that he has been adopted by a younger generation of Catholics.
Watching him today, we realize we are in the presence of a real media professional, a showman in the best sense of the word; he had a flair for the dramatic, and his jokes and humor are perfectly timed.
There is nothing superficial about these performances. Sheen was a man of deep faith and used his gifts to speak about the most serious and urgent realities to a broad popular audience — loneliness, love, the sexual revolution, building character, sin and repentance, capitalism and communism, pain and suffering, death and judgment, the reality of heaven.
These subjects are even more important in our time, when the postwar consensus has long broken down and America has become a secularized society, its elite institutions indifferent to religion.
I would like to think that if Sheen were alive today he would be trying to use every new media platform to reach people and spread the joy of the Gospel. This is exactly what we are trying to do here with LACatholics, with Angelus, with my own channels on social media.
In the Catholic media, we are all walking in the footsteps of Blessed Fulton Sheen.
For me, the key to Sheen’s success and his continued power and relevance, was the hour he spent every day before the Blessed Sacrament.
The Eucharist gave him the supernatural perspective of hope, a perspective too often lacking in all media today. He refused the temptation to divide people, to identify enemies, to spread gossip or point fingers.
“Our world is full of prophets of gloom, and I would be one of them, if I did not practically believe in God,” he said.
Sheen never talked down to anyone, he lifted people up. He never watered-down the Church’s teachings or avoided tough conversations about our need for conversion.
He did not make himself the center of attention, he was just the messenger. And he had a gift for communicating beautiful truths in short, memorable expressions:
“It is only by being little that we ever discover anything big.”
“Life is worth living when we live each day to be closer to God.”
This is still the message that people need to hear today. It should be the message that underlies everything we communicate online and on social media. Life is worth living, and happiness is found in knowing the living God.
As our new blessed said: “Your unhappiness is not due to your want of fortune, or high position, or fame, or sufficient vitamins; it is due not to a want of something outside of you, but want of something inside of you. … You were made for perfect happiness. That is your purpose. No wonder everything short of God disappoints you.”
Pray for me and I will pray for you.
And let us ask holy Mary our Blessed Mother to help all of us to grow in our desire for that perfect happiness that is our purpose.
