Spreading The Faith New Book Presents Archbishop’s Fulton Sheen’s Recorded Thoughts On Life And Sacredness
“The Divine Beloved speaks to the soul in a whisper, but because the soul is waiting for a trumpet, it loses his command.”
- Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Neither before nor since has an American Catholic clergyman captivated the airwaves as Archbishop Fulton Sheen did in the middle of this century. Despite competition from Milton Berle and with nothing more than a blackboard and a piece of chalk, the bishop garbed in a flowing cape reached some 30 million Americans of all faiths who watched his television program “Life Is Worth Living.”
Cardinals would flock to this American Catholic prelate when he was in Rome. Among the famous Americans he converted to Catholicism were Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Ford II.
Then came the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Sheen was less than enthusiastic about some changes in a church that was changing rapidly, and he gradually faded from public view. He died in 1979.
Now, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, a new book of his writings and television essays - “From the Angel’s Blackboard: The Best of Fulton J. Sheen - A Centennial Celebration” - is being published by Triumph Books.
What the book shows, in an age when books about taking care of the soul top religion bestseller lists, is how timeless Sheen’s words are, said Patricia Kossmann, the book’s editor.
“In rereading many of Sheen’s works, it becomes readily apparent that his voice can never be fully extinguished,” she writes in the book’s foreward. “There remains in his written and spoken words a keen insight into the universal human condition and the universal quest for the divine in the ordinary.”
Born in El Paso, Ill., May 8, 1895, Sheen was ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of Peoria in 1919. He received his doctorate from the University of Louvain in Belgium and taught philosophy of religion at the Catholic University of America. He began his broadcasting career in 1930 on the “Catholic Hour” on NBC. By 1950, the program’s U.S. audience reached 4 million.
In 1951, then-Bishop Sheen was national director of the Society for the Propogation of the Faith and began his television series. At the height of the program’s popularity, the prelate received as many as 9,000 letters per day.
Kossmann remembers being mesmerized by Sheen as a grade-schooler while watching his Tuesday evening program with her parents. When she first met Sheen as an editor of some of his later books, she expected an imposing figure but was surprised as many were meeting him in person to discover a polite, slightly built man.
“But oh, those eyes,” she said, referring to the spellbinding way Sheen would look at his audience.
“It was like he could read your soul,” she said. “He never did anything, in his words or otherwise, that ever made you feel less than special.”
In making selections for the book, Kossman said she went through dozens of books seeking “the best, timeless wisdom.” The book’s chapters on subjects such as health and holiness, prayer and meditation and angels can be easily digested in a sitting.
A common theme of Sheen’s writings and broadcasts was encouraging people to recognize the sacred in their lives.
Courtesy is the homage of the heart to the sacredness of human worth and sanctity can be built out of patient endurance of a child’s slurping of soup or one’s inability to get rich, Sheen said.
“All of us would like to make our own crosses - tailor-made trials,” Sheen wrote. “But not many of us welcome the crosses God sends. Yet it is in doing perfectly the little chores he sends that saints find holiness.
“The big, world-shattering things many of us imagine we would like to do for God might, in the end, feed only our egotism. On the other hand, to accept the crosses of our state of life because they come from an all-loving God is to have taken the most important step in the reformation of the world, namely, the reformation of the self.”
Elsewhere in the book, Sheen makes the connection between world peace and the peace of individual souls.
“World wars are only projections of the conflicts inside the souls of human beings, for nothing happens in the external world that has not first happened within a soul,” Sheen said.
Bishop William J. McCormack, current national director of the Society for the Propogation of the Faith, said Sheen’s message has increased in relevance over time, particularly to people today who seek fulfillment everywhere but in their daily lives:
“Don’t live in the past. Don’t live in the future. This is the moment God has given us to be useful.”