Blessed Fulton Sheen has been dogging my steps recently.
Someone who attended his beatification last month recently asked me what I thought was important about his life and work.
Two days later, at a Cursillo Ultreya, a young man from Colombia mentioned that reading Sheen’s “Life of Christ” had given him a greater sense of what Christian faith was about. In it, Sheen writes that no other religion is so identified with its founder as is Christianity, and this impressed the young man. He encouraged others to find the book (in Spanish, of course).
The same day, someone sent me a YouTube link with an AI-generated recording using Sheen’s fake voice. The message was orthodox, but it wasn’t authentic. It discusses St. Padre Pio, who was canonized after Sheen’s death. I don’t think someone as precise and historically minded as Sheen would have called him a saint before Rome decided.
The next day, I bumped into another YouTube Sheen fake: “Five Things the Catholic Church Never Called a Sin.” Again, the message was orthodox, but it could not have been Sheen himself. The text included references to the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (published more than a decade after the bishop’s death in 1979), and to the private writings of what the Blessed’s ventriloquist names as St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Mother Teresa was alive when Sheen died. (Her private writings, which she had asked to be burned, were published years after her own death in 1997).
In the seminary, where we were taught to analyze (but not preach) the Scriptures, our professors told us that some of the letters of the New Testament were probably not written by their supposed authors but by disciples who continued their work. Someone immersed in the teaching of St. Paul, and using some of the saint’s texts, might write what was later assigned to the apostle. This applied to the Pastoral Letters to Timothy and Titus, perhaps also to Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians. The speculation of scholars does not affect the canonicity of the letters but presumes the utility of connecting messages to a revered supposed author. There is a special name for such writings, which were common in the early centuries even for secular writings: pseudepigrapha.
Sheen’s Lazarus-like resurrection in some corners of YouTube (typically using a picture of Sheen with an audio track) is what you might call pseudo-video. They are clickbait, but what is the ultimate point?
Thankfully, there is no need for fake Sheens. The genuine Sheen, from clips of his TV shows to interviews he had with others, is also accessible on YouTube.
And yet Sheen’s writings, I believe, are a much better introduction to his legacy. My father, a Protestant, watched Sheen’s “Life is Worth Living” television shows religiously the night they first aired. The shows were lectures and had a high quality of content.
Sheen’s style was dramatic. Actor Martin Sheen said he adopted the bishop’s surname because the preacher reminded him of a Shakespearean actor. I confess that I find his style of oratory a bit too much for me. His prose is high octane, also, but I like it better than the videos. The books are necessarily more complete and without the packaging — including some jokes on crutches — that a television show required.
The man was a popularizer, but also a real intellectual. He was familiar with ideas in ways that few bishops and few priests are today. He was very well read and could quote Marx on the German philosopher Feuerbach while criticizing priests who are not always conscious of where their ideas come from.
It would be interesting to know what Sheen would say about the nouveau Marxism making waves in our politics. At one point, speaking of the clergy, he asked:
“Why did Marx and Engels, Proudhon and Lenin, why did the proletariat not follow Christ? It was because to some extent, Christ was invisible. The churches did not make Him as visible as they should in the slums, among the workers, in the socially disinherited.”
Fifty years ago, Sheen saw that we were living “in a post-Christian world.” He saw in certain elements of the clergy a concern for externals that eclipsed attention to Christ. I met a priest in the missions years ago who complained that Sheen couldn’t accept the radical commitment of the younger clergy.
In his 1974 book “Those Mysterious Priests” (a book I wish I’d read a long time ago), Sheen speaks of the lack of contemplative prayer among activists. He quotes Merleau-Ponty saying, “Activism leaves no place for spiritual intimacy.” I heard later that the priest who claimed Sheen was hopeless left the priesthood. I think that Sheen, who was already deceased, would not have been surprised.
The Blessed lamented the decline of spirituality in the priesthood, specifically because priests had ceased to imitate Christ who was both priest and victim. Sheen quotes St. Augustine, who wrote, “Ideo Victor Quia Victima,” which he translates, “Therefore Victor because He is Victim.” The attention to paradox can be compared to G.K. Chesterton, who would also appreciate how much Sheen managed to meet and defeat modern ideas.
With priestly vocations in decline in the U.S., I think that Sheen’s emphasis on priestly spirituality is very useful. He is often rightly praised for promoting the practice of the daily Holy Hour, but Sheen’s perspective was not only the fruit of adoration and biblical meditation. His vision was Thomistic in origin but also based on a wide cultural knowledge. He was a philosopher as well as a preacher. He was a pastor but knew much of the writings of the classic psychologists. He was an orator who appreciated and quoted poetry and knew literature.
Priests today can learn much from him, if only they would read him. He quips about the priests who have absorbed unconsciously from the Zeitgeist what they could have learned better from study: “It is not that the priests read Marx. A cynic might say they read no more of Marx than they do of St. Thomas Aquinas.”
I have been surprised how some young conservative priests, whom I admire, are sometimes more aware of liturgical trappings like vesture and incense than theological and historical culture. Seminaries should teach men to be lifelong students, and there is no substitute to reading. That is perhaps where Sheen’s greatest value lies.
