This is the sort of thing I may post from time-to-time. It incorporates material from an unpublished essay of mine.
1955, a Multiple Choice Question
Can you name one famous priest alive in 1955? Two? Three? Even four? 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 two Jesuits died that year; we will consider Teilhard in another section. 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. 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 20th 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 and not the malformed band of pranksters found in the 21st century. He loved the Jesuit life of the intellect and the wearing of the cassock.5
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.”6 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.”7 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.”8 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,”8 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.9 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.10
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.”11 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.”12 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.”13 And, “America [is] a country in which men are not used to ancient traditions, and are not often ready to understand them.”14 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.”15 Or, “pride always longs to be unusual.”16 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.”17 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!”18
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.”19 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.”20 Fulton Sheen wrote that in 1955’s Thinking Life Through. The Venerable 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 covered many topics still relevant today in his 1955 book: 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.”21 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.”22
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!”23 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.”24
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.”25 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.”26
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?”27
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.28 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.
Notes:
1. Lord, Played By Ear, (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956, pp. 127-128).
2. Lord, 218.
3. Ibid, 219.
4. Ibid, 393.
5. Ibid, 389.
6. Ibid, 395.
7. Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Dell, 1955, 13).
8. Merton, No Man, 41.
9. Ibid, 96.
10. Ibid, 151.
11. Ibid, 48.
12. Ibid, 122.
13. Ibid, 148.
14. Ibid, 189.
15. Ibid, 247.
16. Fulton Sheen, Thinking Life Through, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 27.
17. Sheen, Thinking, 53.
18. Ibid, 44.
19. Ibid, 118.
20. Ibid, 131.
21. Ibid, 150.
22. Ibid, 186.
23. Ibid, 236.
24. 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. 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. A September 28, 2023 Substack post by Kwasniewski seems to be the final verdict on Sheen in the post-conciliar years: praise of Teilhard, acceptance of changes such as Communion in the hand, and hysteria about the fledgling SSPX and Archbishop Lefebvre. It is clear that Sheen was robustly optimistic (albeit in a realistic way), patriotic and obedient to the Church and Supreme Pontiff. For a flash of Sheen’s wit and adherence to traditional doctrine during the same time period, see an interview from near the end of his life available on YouTube, “Interview Months Before Bishop Sheen’s Death” at The Joy of the Faith channel:
Thanks to Fr. Steven Soos for getting me to step back from my devotion to Sheen to examine the last years of his life.