Sheen of Eloquence.(Review)

America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen, by Thomas C. Reeves (Encounter, 479 pp., $25.95)

In the early 1950s, Fulton Sheen was the most famous Catholic in America. Already well known as a radio personality, Sheen in 1952 launched a weekly half-hour TV program called Life Is Worth Living. Attired in full purple regalia (he was auxiliary bishop of New York), Sheen each week stood in front of a studio camera and talked for 27 minutes and 20 seconds, without notes or a teleprompter. The speeches, actually carefully rehearsed and preceded by at least 30 hours of preparation on Sheen's part, avoided sectarianism and mainly concerned such topics as patriotism, freedom, democracy, right and wrong, and, very often, the menace of atheistic Communism.

The program was aired by the tiny Du Mont network, facing off against Milton Berle's show on NBC and Frank Sinatra's on CBS; Sheen's ratings soared, driving Sinatra off the air and attracting millions of non- Catholic as well as Catholic viewers. (The show remains the most widely viewed religious series in the history of television.) Sheen won the 1952 Emmy award for most outstanding television personality, beating out such competitors as Jimmy Durante and Lucille Ball; a Radio and Television Daily nationwide poll named him television's "man of the year." In 1955, the program moved to ABC, with a prime-time slot opposite Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life. (Sheen, still preoccupied with Communism, quipped, "Viewers will now have a choice of two Marxes-Groucho or Karl.") Sheen's face appeared on the covers of Time, TV Guide, Look, and Colliers; a young actor named Ramon Estevez changed his name to Martin Sheen, in the celebrity bishop's honor and with his permission.

By 1957, however, Sheen was off the air and on the slide into obscurity that would mark the last 22 years of his life. In part, Sheen was a victim of his archrival, the iron-willed and truculent Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who abruptly forced Sheen off TV by notifying ABC that the bishop no longer had his permission to preach on the air. Spellman was undoubtedly envious of Sheen's popularity; the relationship between the two had quickly become acrimonious, and culminated in a quarrel that went all the way up to the Vatican. Sheen, once a sought-after Lenten speaker in New York churches, was suddenly persona non grata. There had earlier been talk that he would be made a cardinal, but his progress up the ladder of clerical advancement was now clearly at an end-and so was the kind of Catholic culture that he represented.

The received story of American Catholicism is that the Church sailed robustly and confidently through the postwar prosperity, only to be deliberately undermined in the 1960s by the radical priests, nuns, and bishops who hijacked Vatican II; in fact, the old style of U.S. Catholicism was already dying out by the end of the 1950s. In this careful and sympathetically written, if not stylistically dazzling, biography, Thomas Reeves (author of the best-selling JFK biography A Question of Character) reconstructs the lost world that formed Fulton Sheen: the robust U.S. Catholic culture of which Sheen's TV triumph turned out to be the last gasp.

Reeves's impressive portrait of that bygone age is based on dozens of interviews as well as sheaves of Sheen's own papers and archival material. The papers are undoubtedly of greater intellectual interest than those of the typical 1950s TV host; Sheen had not just a Ph.D. (in philosophy) from Louvain, but the even more prestigious agrege degree from the same institution.

As Reeves documents, Sheen's public and private lives were an unsettling combination of the unquestionably devout and the unabashedly worldly. After a brief stint as a parish priest, he became a faculty member at Catholic University; but his real interest lay in building an off-campus career as a public speaker. His eloquence ...