The saints are always greater, because the Gospel is always greater. Greater than our usual categories, our customary ways of thinking. Archbishop Fulton Sheen was just that, as his beatification in St. Louis on Thursday illustrated. The homily of papal legate Cardinal Luis Tagle emphasized Blessed Fulton as a man animated by a special love for the poor, and with a passion for alleviating poverty.
Fulton Sheen was many things, so many things could be said about him – and many, many things were said in recent days. He was the imaginative evangelist, the mesmerizing preacher, the television star, the brilliant teacher, the penetrating philosopher, the faithful Eucharistic disciple, the priest who intimately knew the sacrifice he offered. He was still more, as the Catholic faith is always more.
Consider just one example. In July 1967, from his cathedral pulpit in Rochester, Blessed Fulton was the first American bishop to call for a withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. That America’s most famous bishop was a staunch opponent of that calamitous war was the solvent to a potential stain on American Catholic history.
In October 1966, Sheen was appointed as bishop of Rochester, widely viewed as Cardinal Francis Spellman’s way of banishing him from New York, the two famously having been at loggerheads.
In December 1966, Spellman told American troops in Vietnam – much to the dismay of the Vatican – that they “were holy crusaders. . .in Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”
It wasn’t exactly akin to Patriarch Kirill’s support today for Putin’s war against Ukraine, but it was uncomfortably in that direction. Sheen, no longer serving under Spellman as an auxiliary bishop of New York, was a grand enough personage that he could rescue the Catholic Church from being understood as blessing the war. More than that, Sheen was a great enough character to know that one could be fervently anti-Communist and also condemn the lethal folly then unfolding.
Both conservative and progressive at the same time? Proudly orthodox in his teaching, Sheen himself said, upon his resignation as bishop of Rochester in 1969, “I move too fast, I’m a little too progressive.” (“Progressive” then was not entirely the same as what that word implies today.)
Indeed, his rocky tenure in Rochester was marked by Sheen moving too fast on donating church land for low-cost housing and a tax he placed on new church construction to provide alms for the poor.
Cardinal Tagle, certainly aware that so much was known about Blessed Fulton – from the daily Holy Hour to the Marian devotion to celebrated preaching all over the world – chose to highlight Sheen’s only speech at the Second Vatican Council, delivered on November 9,1964, quoting it at length. Sheen encouraged the Council fathers to manifest a preferential love for the poor.
“Put your finger on the 30th parallel, and run it around a globe,” Tagle quoted Sheen’s address. “What do you find? Practically all the prosperity is above the 30th parallel, and the greater part of the poverty is below. . . .As only a wounded Christ could convert a doubting Thomas, only a Church wounded by poverty can convert a doubting world.”
The vast congregation in St. Louis applauded that line, and Tagle himself seemed a bit surprised that solidarity with the poor prompted that, adding “Wow!” The very Catholic assembly on hand also knew that the faith is always greater.
Blessed Fulton attracted so many to the Catholic faith because he was a model of so many different aspects that were attractive. What appeals? The aesthetics of sartorial splendour? The dimly lit confessional? Dramatic oratory? Silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament? A passionate commitment to racial equality? Denunciation of Communism? The Holy Mass lavishly photographed by Yousuf Karsh? A soaring sermon at St. Patrick’s? Preaching amidst the sunbaked savannah of the missions? A scholarly treatise? A simple reminder of God’s love? Sheen provided it all.
Tagle highlighted Sheen’s personal generosity. Long before he reached the peak of his fame, Sheen received in 1938 the large sum of some $70,000 from the estate of a Catholic benefactress. He dispensed of it within a week, sending most to Alabama so that the Sisters of Mercy could build a maternity hospital for black women in segregated Mobile. There are dozens of such examples. Sheen’s pastoral charity began with the concrete charity of the pastor.
The man who made “God love you!” his signature phrase, would no doubt have been delighted that Pope Benedict XVI entitled his first encyclical God is Love. What the Holy Father wrote there about the Church could have been written about Fulton Sheen personally.
“The Church’s deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility [munera]: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia),” Benedict wrote. (¶25) “These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable.
For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.”
Preaching the word and devotion to the sacraments were indispensable to Sheen’s life and mission, and so too were practical measures of diakonia for the poor and suffering.
When St. John Paul the Great said to Blessed Fulton at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1979 that he was a “loyal son of the Church,” he had that triplex mission in mind. Perhaps he recalled that 1964 speech on poverty at Vatican II. John Paul, for his part, echoed it in one of the fiercest homilies of his long pontificate in Edmonton in 1984, his voice shaking with righteous anger, warning that the “poor south will judge the rich north!”
Blessed Fulton Sheen, friend of the poor, pray for us!
