Exactly 74 years ago today, on February 12, 1952, speaking from a set in the Adelphi Theater on West 54th Street in New York City, the soon-to-be Blessed Bishop Fulton J. Sheen premiered his new TV show Life Is Worth Living. Having already hosted a radio; program for 20 years, Sheen was now breaking experimental ground in a new Roman Catholic outreach to the broader American society via the (then) very new medium of television. Sheen's show won an Emmy in 1953 (beating both Edward R. Murrow and Lucille Ball) and ran until 1957, regularly drawing as many as 30 million viewers.
I was not one of them. My family had bought our first television in 1952, several months after Sheen's premiere performance. But my parents preferred watching Milton Berle. The first time I ever recall seeing Sheen on TV was a special show he did on the occasion of the coronation of Pope Saint John XXIII in 1958. That said, even without me and my family in the audience, Sheen's program was amazingly successful. It was the most high-profile pubic presentation of Catholic faith at the time, presenting it in a way which was resonant with the dramatically changing post-war national culture and the new style of religion that spoke to that culture. Thus, Will Herberg, in his classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Doubleday, 1955) famously saw Sheen as a major mediator of Roman Catholicism's new post-war status as part of "the national consensus as one of the three versions of the 'American Way of Life'."
TV was new in 1952. Sheen was not. He already had a reputation as a serious academic, a successful convert-maker, a famous preacher both in the pulpit and on NBC's weekly Sunday-night radio broadcast, The Catholic Hour. Television, however, made Sheen one of the primary representatives of American public religion. Sheen himself took particular satisfaction in how his program both improved the Church's public image and led to greater inter-religious understanding among Catholic and non-Catholic Americans. Yet, as Church Historian Mark S. Massa has noted in Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (Crossroads, 1999), "Sheen remained a committed devotee of Thomistic ultramontanism. Sheen never wavered in his firm faith that Catholicism provided the best - and very possibly the only - answer to the question of human existence." Thus, Sheen's seemingly "nondenominational 'inspirational' chats" in fact were "profoundly Catholic reflections on the cultural state of the American union," a "natural law Thomism" that "sounded not far from the up-beat, 'can do' spirituality just then claiming the American religious mainstream in books, movies, and state of the union addresses."
Likewise Conservative columnist Ross Douthat, in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), recalled Sheen as "a courtly and more intellectual version of Billy Graham," who like Graham was "turning the new mass media to Christian ends" and "understood his era perfectly," while arguing, as an American Catholic apologist, that the Catholic Church was "a better custodian of American values than many of its secular critics." (Graham himself once called Sheen “the greatest communicator of the 20th century.”)
As so often happens, short-term personality conflicts trumped long-term interests, and Sheen eventually left Life Is Worth Living (and New York's most prominent pulpit) apparently as a result of opposition from New York's then very powerful Archbishop, Francis Cardinal Spellman. Sheen was famously welcomed back to Saint Patrick's pulpit by Spellman's kindly successor, Terence Cardinal Cook. And Sheen remained relatively active into his final years. I finally did get to hear him speak live in the mid-1970s when he came to preach at the Princeton University Chapel.
Sheen's beatification later this year will, first and foremost, be an acknowledgment by the Church of his reputation for heroic sanctity and his intercessory power, (On July 6, 2019, Pope Francis formally approved a miracle attributed to the Archbishop Sheen's intercession. This miracle involved the unexplained recovery of a stillborn infant, James Fulton Angstrom, in Peoria in 2010.) It also serves to remind us of the ever present need for the Church to use whatever tools an age provides to fulfill it eternal mandate to evangelize the entire human world.
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