1955: A Turning Point in Church History

But Why?

This is another revised section of my longer essay. I suggest that 1955 was a pivotal year for the Catholic Church and the West, but, I ask, in what way? There was a whole lot of optimism at the time, but beneath the surface changes were gaining form and strength. Here is a piece I wrote about regaining a proper attitude of spreading the Gospel.

Can you name one famous priest alive in 1955? Two? Three? Even four? A bonus for thinking of a fifth one? Let’s see if your list matches mine: Fr. Daniel Lord, S.J., Thomas Merton (Fr. Louis, O.C.S.O.), Bishop Fulton Sheen, and, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. The bonus? Pope Pius XII. Popes are priests too. The two Jesuits died that year; I considered Teilhard in a previous post. Both Jesuits well-known in their time, although Teilhard has remained influential while Lord has dropped into obscurity. Merton and Sheen were “celebrities” of a sort: the first due to his writing and the second because of his radio and television shows plus voluminous writing.

Here is the multiple choice question. What attitude or event in the life of the Church in 1955 would prove to be the most influential? A) The American optimism of Fr. Lord; B) The restlessness of Merton; C) The realism and anti-Communism of Fulton Sheen; D) The changes to the Holy Week liturgy going into effect that year; or E) Pope Pius XII’s radio address implying that the time for European colonization should draw to an end? Let’s consider each in turn.

Fr. Lord (1888-1955) was a prolific author of tracts and books. He also was consultant to Cecil B. DeMille’s “King of Kings” and staged musical productions. His autobiography, Played By Ear, is a fascinating look at American Catholicism in the first half of the 20^th century, suffused with humor, gratitude, and a down-to-earth quality. Lord was an enthusiastic member of the Jesuits, provided we understand his version of the Jesuits as one an older generation would have known rather than the malformed band of pranksters found in the 21^st century. He loved the Jesuit life of the intellect and the wearing of the cassock.¹ Lord wisely stated that a priest “must be alert to new developments in faith and practice…but he must be in touch with the historic past that is rooted in Christ, and through Him to the long and unbroken history of God’s revelation to His earth-journeying sons and daughter.”² That was because “the question was not what the human mind would be without God’s revelation, but how long western civilization could exist if God’s teachings and the law of Christ were abandoned and forgotten.”³ Lord relates that his intimacy with the Mass came during his time before ordination, when he was helping and serving the Mass for a convalescing priest. “I never read a line on how to say Mass; I watched a holy man say Mass and imitated what I saw.”⁴ In keeping with his love of the Mass (contra a stereotype of Jesuits as little-concerned with liturgy), he considered the election of Giuseppe Sarto to the pontificate as (St.) Pius X as the “greatest single event of the twentieth century,”⁵ especially because of that sainted pope’s emphasis on frequent communion.

So far. So good. But, at the end of his life, Lord seemed optimistic and certain of continued progress in the United States.⁶ He lauded progress for Black Americans, and he saw Catholicism triumphant in education (schools and colleges), hospitals, missions, and literature. “Our seminaries bulge with clerical vocations,” he wrote.⁷

Lord succeeded in fulfilling his priestly duties and Jesuit vocation, but his vision failed. “A” is not the answer to the question.

*

“I do not intend to divorce myself at any point from Catholic tradition. But neither do I intend to accept points of that tradition blindly, and without understanding, and without really making them my own.”⁸ O restless man! American by choice. Monk by the abbot’s sufferance. Celebrity. Merton. Did Thomas Merton have something profound to say, or was he merely a gifted writer? Certainly his The Seven Storey Mountain is a modern spiritual classic, but once the restless monk ceases to write about himself—or did he?—and writes about Catholic themes, is he anything but banal? “A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.”⁹

In 1955 Fr. Louis (as he was known in religious life) published No Man Is An Island, a series of spiritual reflections I find unpersuasive and clichéd. It is not that he says nothing true. “A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed.”¹⁰ And, “America [is] a country in which men are not used to ancient traditions, and are not often ready to understand them.”¹¹ However, as I read I kept getting the feeling that Merton was really speaking to himself in passages such as these: “The immature conscience is not its own master….It simply parrots the decisions of others.”¹² Or, “pride always longs to be unusual.”¹³ Thus wrote the man who is often pictured in jeans and work shirt (not monk’s habit); who had a record player in his “hermitage,” and who engaged in an affair with a much-younger nurse. Oh, and then there’s that whole encounter with Buddhism thing.

Significantly, Merton knew he probably wasn’t a successful monk. “If he [the monk] dwells too long on the fact that the world remembers him, his very consciousness will re-establish the ties that he is supposed to have cut beyond recovery.”¹⁴ Was it a question of sincerity? Perhaps. “The sincere man, therefore, is one who has the grace to know that he may be instinctively insincere, and that even his natural sincerity may become a camouflage for irresponsibility and moral cowardice: as if it were enough to recognize the truth, and do nothing about it!”¹⁵

The Seven Storey Mountain is the one Catholic book my liberal friend “M” pushed me to read as I was moving out into the world. He sent me a copy when I was in Navy bootcamp in Illinois. I had to hide it (along with the Rolling Stone magazines) in the back of my garment bag hanging on my bedside locker. Years later, “M” left Catholicism to take up the annihilatory path of Buddhism, while I gained entry to the Catholic Church. Merton had his day. He contributed to the anti-war movement and increasingly wrote about political topics. “Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else.”¹⁶ Behold, the motto of an American generation, uttered by her celebrity monk. Today if he has any spiritual children, they are Buddhist-inclined seekers or liberal Catholics. “B” is not the answer to the question.

*

“When a civilization has faith, matter is used to symbolize the spirit….When a civilization refuses to believe in the spirit, then there is nothing to represent symbolically, and architecture settles down to the dull, drab line without ornamentation and without reference to another world.”¹⁷ Fulton Sheen wrote that in 1955’s Thinking Life Through. The Venerable (later this year to be beatified) Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was a great American. Like two other great Americans—Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan—he called Illinois home. Like Lincoln and Reagan, he fought for a godly America and against forces from within and without that would destroy it. But Sheen had one incalculable advantage over his two fellow Midwesterners: the Catholic faith.

Sheen’s 1955 book covered many topics still relevant today: the need for personal property, the good and bad points of the United Nations, marriage, alcoholism, the threat of Communism, juvenile delinquency, true and false freedom, training and discipline of children, selfishness, passions, coexisting with evil, and many more.

Better still, Sheen linked these elements together as part of a larger vision of life centered on God. “The secret of peace is the recognition first of the sovereignty of God,” he wrote. “Then the ordering of all things under that law.”¹⁸ Here is one example showing the links between private property and freedom. “Property involves responsibility and the surrender of responsibility is the surrender of freedom. Keep our souls free on the inside by obeying God’s laws; keep our souls free on the outside by a wide diffusion of property [hello distributism!], and we will preserve both our peace and our property.”¹⁹

Sheen was a great promoter of Mary’s message at Fatima and believed that Soviet Russia would bear witness to God’s power through Mary’s Immaculate Heart. “When Russia discovers the Faith, it will sweep it throughout the entire Western world; then we will know that Christianity has not failed!”²⁰ But he did not mistake the state of the West for true freedom, even if it had staved off totalitarianism. “The error of the Western world is to identify freedom with absence of physical restraint or an indifference which forgets purpose and perfection.”²¹ Sheen insightfully located the roots of these problems in families and the training of children. “The great tragedy today is that parents themselves are so often without any convincing standards to offer for the guidance of their children.”²² The lack of standards stemmed from a general lack of control of the passions. Sheen used his grounding in classical and Thomistic philosophy to argue that emotions need to be subject to right reason. “When all standards have been sacrificed, all norms abandoned, and right reason ignored, then the emotions are given primacy in life.”²³

Towards the end of the book, he provides a succinct call to arms for then (and now). “If, instead of fearing germs and Communists, we began fearing a breakdown of our moral order; if we restored the sanctity of home and marriage, raised children in discipline and love of God and became less tepid about defending moral law, then we would have less to fear of the enemy, for if God is with us, who can prevail against us?”²⁴

The answer appears to be “C.” But…not so fast.

*

Ven. Fulton Sheen, for all that he got right, was wrong about many things, especially one enormous thing: Vatican Council II. “In the almost two-thousand-year history of the Church the Second Vatican Council was only the twenty-first that convened. To have been present at that Council and to have had a part in it was one of the great blessings the Lord bestowed on my life,” he wrote in his autobiography.²⁵ Sheen’s usually-keen insight failed him regarding the Council, especially in the insincere manner in which documents were drafted, their apparent meanings distorted, and how a worldly spirit influenced their implementation. Americans have a deserved reputation for failing to understand nuance and obfuscation (thus making us poor diplomats due to our lack of the long view and expectation of honesty in negotiations). In this Sheen was, despite his experience in missions and church politics, thoroughly American. Again 1955 provides a useful vantage point.

“Pre-1955” is a rallying cry for some amongst the traditionalists.²⁶ I will not attempt analysis of the changes, since I am neither liturgist nor theologian. I will also not speak about the differences between the pre-and-post Holy Week liturgies because I have never encountered the older form except in books. My point is that Fulton Sheen apparently made no objection to the changes approved by Pius XII. Experts such as Peter Kwasniewski make a strong case that the 1955 Holy Week changes were the beginning of the liturgical and disciplinary avalanche culminating in the Novus Ordo and other post-conciliar deformations. Sheen certainly had a keen sense of liturgical propriety as shown in the books he co-authored: This Is the Mass and These Are the Sacraments. But Sheen had great respect for the papal office and was especially close to Pius XII. For Sheen, when a pope spoke, he was to obey. “My faith centered not just in the Creed, but in the Church, and it became personalized in the Pope as the head of the Church and the Vicar of Christ.”²⁷ Given that mindset, it is not surprising this seemingly clear-eyed churchman acceded to liturgical experimentation. Sheen’s inner theological compass seems to have been permanently skewed by the 1960s, so much so that he did not reject the Novus Ordo of Paul VI. By the time it was implemented he was retired and in declining health, which restricted his public activities. He had a chapel in his apartment, and I wonder about his liturgical practice in his private Masses.

Is “D” the correct answer? No. Contra Kwasniewski and others, I say the pre-55 effort is misguided and a red herring. Is it the battle we need to fight right now? Is it a battle to be fought at all? Let’s look at the fifth possibility.

*

In 1955 at Christmas, Pius XII made a radio address in which he “insinuates that it is the colonial wars as such that play into the hands of communism. Hence it is necessary to make peace by promptly granting political independence to the peoples demanding it.”²⁸ Frere Michel, in his magnum opus on Fatima and the efforts to faithfully promulgate the message and the requests of Heaven, sees the pope’s message as playing into the hands of the Communists of the USSR and its affiliates. He touches on the tragic effects of decolonization and the hardships endured by Catholics, both European and indigenous, as the Communists filled in the power vacuum in places like Vietnam. With several more decades of observation, we in 2026 can see how decolonization also drew non-Catholics into France, serving as a vanguard for unfettered immigration, the Islamization of Europe and further Islamization of the Middle East, and the phenomenon of open borders. I think that massive scale tragedy trumps the intellectuals’ discussion about re-instituting the “pre-55 Holy Week.”

The correct answer is therefore E.

Pope Leo XIV speaks constantly about dialogue and peace. Holy Father, it is in your power to unleash heavenly peace. First, you can do so by doing your primary mission of strengthening the brethren: believing Catholics, not heretics, unbelievers, or adherents of other (false) religions. Then you can preach the Gospel and the teachings of the Church, including devotion to Our Lady. You can do so by reading the “Third Secret” as revealed to Sister Lucia. Then, extol the Fatima message of reparation, prayer, and recourse to the Holy Rosary. Finally, tell the world’s bishops to join you in consecrating Russia (and only Russia, not Russia AND any other nation or the world in general) to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. Please.

Notes:

1. Lord, Played By Ear, (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956, pp. 127-128).

2. Lord, 218.

3. Ibid, 219.

4. Ibid, 229.

5. Ibid, 393.

6. Ibid, 389.

7. Ibid, 395.

8. Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Dell, 1955, 13).

9. Merton, No Man, 41.

10. Ibid, 96.

11. Ibid, 151.

12. Ibid, 48.

13. Ibid, 122.

14. Ibid, 148.

15. Ibid, 189.

16. Ibid, 247.

17. Fulton Sheen, Thinking Life Through, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 27.

18. Sheen, Thinking, 53.

19. Ibid, 44.

20. Ibid, 118.

21. Ibid, 131.

22. Ibid, 150.

23. Ibid, 186.

24. Ibid, 236.

25. Sheen, Treasure In Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen, (Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 281. Some have argued that Sheen “gave in” during the last few years of his life, and Peter Kwasniewski has written about some regrettable enthusiasms on Sheen’s part. In the last chapter of his biography of Sheen, America’s Bishop (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001, 328-362), Thomas C. Reeves writes about some seemingly contradictory and non-traditional views espoused by the Archbishop. It is clear that Sheen was robustly optimistic (albeit in a realistic way), patriotic and obedient to the Church and Supreme Pontiff. I think Sheen came to regret some of the support he gave for trends later seen to be corrosive. Here is a clip from one of his last interviews.

26. Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is one of the most prominent proponents of this view. See his good brief introduction to the issue, “Ending Seventy Years of Exile: The Return of the Pre-55 Holy Week,” New Liturgical Movement, April 19, 2021. For an even more thorough article, see Gregory DiPippo, “Compendium of the 1955 Holy Week Revisions of Pius XII: Part 10-Conclusion,” New Liturgical Movement, March 23, 2023.

27. Sheen, Treasure in Clay, 229.

28. Frere Michel de la Sainte Trinite, The Whole Truth About Fatima: The Third Secret (Buffalo, NY: Immaculate Heart Publications, 1990), p. 449.

********************

Books recently completed:

Frere Michel de la Sainte Trinite, The Whole Truth About Fatima: The Third Secret. The third volume of an indispensable examination of the Fatima message and how men in the Church have in some cases promoted that message and in other cases sought to suppress it. This is a painstakingly documented study.

You can Buy Greg a Coffee at this link. I donate funds from here to an orphanage in India run by the Consoling Sisters. Money earned from my Crisis articles goes to a great Catholic school for boys in Kentucky, St. Andrew’s Academy.

I have two self-published books available on Amazon; both are in verse: Against the Alchemists, which is a loosely-linked catechism in verse; and, A Verse Companion to Romano Guardini’s Sacred Signs, a sort of commentary on Guardini’s wonderful little book on many aspects of the liturgy and worship.