Hearing nuns' confessions is
like being stoned to death with popcorn.
Show me your hands. Do they
have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me
your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?
The proud man counts his
newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.
Jealousy is the tribute
mediocrity pays to genius.
Pride is an admission of
weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.
Love is a mutual self-giving
which ends in self-recovery.
The big print giveth, and the
fine print taketh away.
I feel it is time that I also
pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
If you
don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.
The
difference between the love of a man and the love of a woman is that a man will
always give reasons for loving, but a woman gives no reasons for loving.” Life Is Worth Living
Patience
is power.
Patience
is not an absence of action;
rather it
is “timing”
it waits
on the right time to act,
for the
right principles
and in
the right way.
Why are
those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of
religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by
pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.
Pain
without love is suffering or hell. Suffering with love is sacrifice. Love does
not have the power to kill pain or extinguish it, but it does have the power to
diminish it.
Fulton
John Sheen (born Peter John Sheen, May 8, 1895 – December 9, 1979) was
an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Roman Catholic Church known for
his preaching and especially his work on television and radio.
Ordained a priest of the
Diocese of Peoria in 1919, Sheen quickly became a renowned theologian, earning
the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy in 1923. He went on to
teach theology and philosophy at The Catholic University of America as well as
acting as a parish priest before being appointed Auxiliary Bishop of the
Archdiocese of New York in 1951. He held this position until 1966 when he was
made the Bishop of Rochester from October 21, 1966 to October 6, 1969, when he resigned
and was made the Archbishop of the Titular See of Newport, Wales.
For 20 years as Father, later
Monsignor, Sheen hosted the night-time radio program The Catholic Hour
(1930–1950) before moving to television and presenting Life Is Worth Living (1951–1957).
Sheen's final presenting role was on the syndicated The Fulton Sheen Program
(1961–1968) with a format very similar to that of the earlier Life is Worth
Living show. For this work, Sheen twice won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding
Television Personality, the only personality appearing on the DuMont Network
ever to win a major Emmy award.
Starting in 2009, his shows
were being re-broadcast on the EWTN and the Trinity Broadcasting Network's
Church Channel cable networks. Due to his contribution to televised preaching
Sheen is often referred to as one of the first televangelists.
After earning high school
valedictorian honors at Spalding Institute in Peoria in 1913, Sheen was
educated at St. Viator College in Bourbonnais, Illinois, attended Saint Paul
Seminary in Minnesota before his ordination on September 20, 1919, then
followed that with further studies at The Catholic University of America in
Washington, D.C. His youthful appearance was still evident on one occasion when
a local priest asked Sheen to assist as altar boy during the celebration of the
Mass.
Sheen earned a doctorate in
philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 1923.] While
there, he became the first American ever to win the Cardinal Mercier award for
the best philosophical treatise.
In 1924 Sheen pursued further studies in Rome
earning a Sacred Theology Doctorate at the Pontificium Collegium Internationale
Angelicum, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.
Sheen was for a year assistant
to the pastor at St. Patrick's Church, Soho Square in London while teaching
theology at St. Edmund's College, Ware, where he met Ronald Knox. Although
Oxford and Columbia wanted him to teach philosophy, in 1926 Bishop Edmund Dunne
of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Peoria, Illinois asked Sheen to take over St.
Patrick's Parish. After nine months, Dunne returned him to Catholic University,
where he taught philosophy until 1950.
In 1929, Sheen gave a speech at
the National Catholic Educational Association. He encouraged teachers to
"educate for a Catholic Renaissance" in the United States. Sheen was
hoping that Catholics would become more influential in their country through
education, which would help attract others to the faith. He believed that
Catholics should "integrate" their faith into the rest of their daily
life.
He was consecrated a bishop on
June 11, 1951, and served as an Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of New York
from 1951 to 1965.
A popular instructor, Sheen
wrote the first of 73 books in 1925, and in 1930 began a weekly Sunday night
radio broadcast, The Catholic Hour. Sheen called WWII not only a political
struggle, but also a "theological one." He referred to Hitler as an
example of the "Anti-Christ."
Two decades later, the broadcast had a weekly
listening audience of four million people. Time referred to him in 1946 as
"the golden-voiced Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, U.S. Catholicism's famed
proselytizer" and reported that his radio broadcast received 3,000–6,000
letters weekly from listeners.
During the middle of this era, he conducted
the first religious service broadcast on the new medium of television, putting
in motion a new avenue for his religious pursuits.
In 1951 he began a weekly
television program on the DuMont Television Network titled Life Is Worth
Living. Filmed at the Adelphi Theatre in New York City, the program consisted
of the unpaid Sheen simply speaking in front of a live audience without a
script or cue cards, occasionally using a chalkboard.
The show, scheduled in a
graveyard slot on Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m., was not expected to challenge
the ratings giants Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra, but did surprisingly well.
Berle, known to many early television viewers as "Uncle Miltie" and
for using ancient vaudeville material, joked about Sheen, "He uses old
material, too", and observed that "[i]f I'm going to be eased off the
top by anyone, it's better that I lose to the One for whom Bishop Sheen is
speaking."
Sheen responded in jest that maybe people should
start calling him "Uncle Fultie".
Life and Time magazine ran
feature stories on Bishop Sheen. The number of stations carrying Life Is Worth
Living jumped from three to fifteen in less than two months. There was fan mail
that flowed in at a rate of 8,500 letters per week. There were four times as
many requests for tickets than could be fulfilled. Admiral, the sponsor, paid
the production costs in return for a one-minute commercial at the opening of
the show and another minute at the close.
In 1952 Sheen won an Emmy Award for his
efforts, accepting the acknowledgment by saying, "I feel it is time I pay
tribute to my four writers—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." Time called him
"the first 'televangelist'", and the Archdiocese of New York could
not meet the demand for tickets.
One of his best-remembered
presentations came in February 1953, when he forcefully denounced the Soviet
regime of Joseph Stalin. Sheen gave a dramatic reading of the burial scene from
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, substituting the names of prominent Soviet leaders
Stalin, Lavrenty Beria, Georgy Malenkov, and Andrey Vyshinsky for the original
Caesar, Cassius, Marc Antony, and Brutus. He concluded by saying, "Stalin
must one day meet his judgment." The dictator suffered a stroke a few days
later and died within a week.
The show ran until 1957,
drawing as many as 30 million people on a weekly basis. In 1958, Sheen became
national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, serving for
eight years before being appointed Bishop of the Diocese of Rochester, New
York, on October 26, 1966. He also hosted a nationally syndicated series, The
Fulton Sheen Program, from 1961 to 1968 (first in black and white and then in
color). The format of this series was essentially the same as Life Is Worth
Living.
In September 1974, the
Archbishop of Washington asked Sheen to be the speaker for a retreat for
diocesan priests at the Loyola Retreat House in Faulkner, Maryland. This was
recorded on reel-to-reel tape, state of the art at the time.
Sheen requested that the
recorded talks be produced for distribution. This was the first production of
what would become a worldwide cassette tape ministry called Ministr-O-Media, a
nonprofit company that operated on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Parish. The
retreat album was titled, Renewal and Reconciliation, and included nine
60-minute audio tapes.
For several years,
Ministr-O-Media was one of the largest distributors of non-musical tapes in the
United States. The operation started in
the St. Joseph’s rectory dining room and eventually grew into five temporary
classrooms on the church property, employing nine parishioners full-time, and
at one point 18 workers in all. At its height, Ministr-O-Media staff and
volunteers were packaging and mailing 500 albums a week and, in ten years,
shipped a million tapes to clients worldwide. The effort generated income of
$15,000 per week.
St. Joseph’s Parish was
targeted to be closed due to lack of funding for repairs before the chance
connection between Sheen and Brady. The parish, founded in 1763, owed its
continued existence to the intervention of Sheen and the tape ministry that
rebuilt the church, in collaboration with a dedicated workforce of parish
volunteers.
At Sheen’s direction, most of
the tape ministry profits were turned over to the pope’s worldwide missionary
effort, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. In its decade of
existence, Ministr-O-Media routed over a quarter million U.S. dollars to this
charity
Sheen was credited with helping
convert a number of notable figures to the Catholic faith, including agnostic
writer Heywood Broun, politician Clare Boothe Luce, automaker Henry Ford II,
Communist writer Louis F. Budenz, theatrical designer Jo Mielziner, violinist
and composer Fritz Kreisler, and actress Virginia Mayo. Each conversion process
took an average of 25 hours of lessons, and reportedly more than 95% of his students
in private instruction were baptized.
According to the foreword
written for a 2008 edition of Sheen's autobiography, Treasure in Clay: The
Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen, Catholic journalist Raymond Arroyo wrote why
Sheen "retired" from hosting Life is Worth Living "at the height
of its popularity ... [when] an estimated 30 million viewers and listeners
tuned in each week." Arroyo wrote that "It is widely believed that
Cardinal Spellman drove Sheen off the air."
Arroyo relates that "In
the late 1950s the government donated millions of dollars worth of powdered
milk to the New York Archdiocese. In turn, Cardinal Spellman handed that milk
over to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith to distribute to the poor
of the world. On at least one occasion he demanded that the director of the
Society, Bishop Sheen, pay the Archdiocese for the donated milk. He wanted
millions of dollars. Despite Cardinal Spellman's considerable powers of
persuasion and influence in Rome, Sheen refused. These were funds donated by
the public to the missions funds Sheen himself had personally contributed to
and raised over the airwaves. He felt an obligation to protect them, even from
the itchy fingers of his own Cardinal."
Spellman later took the issue
directly to Pope Pius XII, pleading his case with Sheen present. The Pope sided
with Sheen. Spellman later confronted Sheen stating "I will get even with
you. It may take six months or ten years, but everyone will know what you are
like."
Besides being pressured to leave television
Sheen also "found himself unwelcome in the churches of New York. Spellman
cancelled Sheen's annual Good Friday sermons at St. Patrick's Cathedral and
discouraged clergy from befriending the Bishop."
In 1966 Spellman had Sheen
reassigned to Rochester, New York and caused his leadership at the Society for
the Propagation of the Faith to be terminated (a position he had held for 16
years and raised hundreds of millions for, to which he had personally donated
10 million of his own earnings).
Sheen never talked about the
situation, only making vague references to his "trials both inside and
outside the Church". He even went so far as to praise Spellman in his
autobiography.
While serving in Rochester, he
created the Sheen Ecumenical Housing Foundation, which survives to this day. He
also spent some of his energy on political activities, such as his denunciation
of the Vietnam War in late July 1967.
On Ash Wednesday in 1967, Sheen decided to
give St. Bridget’s Parish building to the federal Housing and Urban Development
program. Sheen wanted to let the government use it for African-Americans. There
was a protest, since Sheen acted on his own accord. The pastor disagreed,
saying that “There is enough empty property around without taking down the
church and the school.” The deal fell through.
On October 15, 1969, one month
after celebrating his 50th anniversary as a priest, Sheen resigned from his
position and was then appointed Archbishop of the Titular See of Newport
(Wales) by Pope Paul VI. This ceremonial position allowed Sheen to continue his
extensive writing. Archbishop Sheen wrote 73 books and numerous articles and
columns.
Beginning in 1977 Sheen
"underwent a series of surgeries that sapped his strength and even made
preaching difficult."
Throughout this time he continued to work on
his autobiography, parts of which "were recited from his sickbed as he
clutched a crucifix."
Sheen died of heart disease on December 9,
1979, having previously had open-heart surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital. He is
interred in the crypt of St. Patrick's Cathedral, near the deceased Archbishops
of New York.