THE NATION'S PULSE: Will the Emmys Get Their Own Patron Saint?
Craughwell, Thomas J.
T H e n a T I o n ’ s P U L s e Will the Emmys Get Their Own Patron Saint? by Thomas J. Craughwell With 40,000 saints on the booKs, you’d expect to find some interesting characters. St....
...After all, Sheen was going up against two incredibly popular television programs, Frank Sinatra’s show on CBS and NBC’s Texaco Star Theater starring “Mr...
...His audiences may have considered him a celebrity, but Sheen always thought of himself as a missionary...
...But he is also a model for the clergy, a priest and bishop of deep personal holiness and unshakable fidelity to the faith who was astonishingly effective in bringing the Catholic message to millions...
...It requires test results, x-rays, medical reports, and the testimony of the attend ing physicians...
...On Life Is Worth Living there was no music, there was no comedy, there were no leggy starlets, there was only Sheen dressed in full bishop’s robes—black cassock with purple piping, purple cape, purple skullcap, a heavy gold cross around his neck—moving around the set and talking to the audience at home...
...On February 24, 1953, Sheen read the funeral scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but with this twist: every time Caesar’s name was mentioned in the speech, Sheen replaced it with Stalin: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears...
...The move to canonize Archbishop Fulton Sheen could not have come at a better time...
...And as in a court case, the canonization process requires evidence, although for canonization the evidence the Church is looking for is two miracles performed by God through the intercession of the prospective saint...
...The question is, can medical science explain these unexpected recoveries...
...was one of those Drexels...
...It was an effective bit of anti-Communist drama, but it’s what happened later that made the shtick truly memorable: ten days after the program aired, Stalin died...
...Among Sheen’s other high-profile converts were Henry Ford II, son the automobile tycoon, Fritz Kreisler, the violin virtuoso, and Clare Booth Luce, the congresswoman, author, and wife of Time magazine’s publisher, Henry Luce...
...The conversion of Broun and Budenz was a blow to the Communist Party in the United States...
...brought in 50 converts a week (that’s an astonishing 57,200 converts during Sheen’s 22 years on radio...
...Time’s death notice for Life Is Worth Living, was premature...
...He was handsome, witty, intelligent, and blessed with a beautiful speaking voice (not to mention a genius for theatrics...
...On Good Friday the vast cathedral could not accommodate all the thousands who came, hoping to hear Sheen’s three-hour-long sermon...
...His energy, his wit, his fresh take on ordinary problems, his down-to-earth yet inspiring way of discussing religious questions made 6 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H o M a s J . c R a U G H W e L L him an overnight sensation, with 5.5 million households tuning in every week to watch Bishop Sheen...
...Callixtus was a reformed embezzler who became pope and died a martyr...
...Television,” Milton Berle...
...ines whether y w s a heen the will m be - - ilar to a trial...
...There had never been such a high-profile missionary, a e n o l ” r u o c l o h a e h T “ t a h d t a m i t s e c n o n e h S nd e rarely o e ne who e wa t s so phen C om t ena i lly H succe a ssful...
...That it was Sheen, the Party’s most determined, most eloquent opponent, who won them over made the loss of Broun and Budenz especially hard to take...
...W i s olic Church’s canonization process is Cath , ys man In s a declared hat determ aint...
...What the Causes of Saints people are looking for is a miracle...
...during his 22-year run, listener requests for printed copies of Sheen’s talks ran to the millions...
...Mann was an unlikely convert...
...But at the end of the evening, the Emmy went home with the bishop...
...He is the saint the Church in America needs...
...Lots of saints were charismatic, but Sheen had star power...
...One man who was won over by Sheen’s radio talks was Colonel Horace E. Mann, the campaign manager of Herbert Hoover’s successful bid for the presidency in 1928...
...Katherine Drexel was the heiress to an American banking empire...
...Once the first miracle is approved, the candidate is given the title “Blessed...
...Patrick’s Cathedral, a capacity crowd top celebrity...
...Thomas J. craughwell is the author of Saints Behaving Badly (Doubleday...
...f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 6 5...
...The candidate’s promoters collect testimony from witnesses who knew the potential saint personally...
...Now, for the first time in its 2,000-year-history, the Catholic Church is considering for sainthood an Emmy Award-winning television personality—Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen...
...politicians in the know suspected that during the presidential race, it was Mann who had scuttled Catholic Al Smith’s chances of getting into the White House by stirring up anti-Catholic feeling among voters in the South...
...If there is any doubt, the reported miracle is rejected (as occurred in Fall 2002 when the Vatican rejected a miracle attributed to an Irish candidate for sainthood, Matt Talbot...
...I come to bury Stalin, not to praise him...
...Which leads us to his publications—Sheen wrote over 120 books and pamphlets, many of which made the best-seller list, and a fair number of which are still in print today, including his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, and the Wartime Prayer Book, a little volume he put together during World War II and which has been reissued recently for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...the overflow stood outside listening to the oration over loudspeakers...
...T H e n a T I o n ’ s P U L s e Will the Emmys Get Their Own Patron Saint...
...Whenever he was scheduled to preach the 1950s Sheen was the Catholic Church in America’s of 6,000 crammed the pews and aisles...
...Katherine at New York’s St...
...In any medium Sheen was great, but on television he was brilliant...
...Whatever Mann’s prejudices may have been, Sheen broke through them...
...The following year the Emmy Award committee nominated Sheen in its Most Outstanding Television fellow nominees were Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, and Edward R. Murrow...
...If not, Archbishop Sheen may be a step closer to achieving the title “Blessed...
...He reminds the Catholic faithful that in an age that is materialistic, secular, even pagan, their religion offers a coherent, soul-saving alternative...
...The process is off to a good start...
...Should both cases turn out to be true miracles, Sheen will become America’s newest saint...
...Invariably, the miracles reported are the healing of an incurable or life- threatening medical condition...
...Between 1930 and 1952 Sheen was the main attraction of the radio program, “The Catholic Hour...
...He had stiff competition: Sheen’s It was a glitzy life for the former farm boy from most prominent Catholic pulpit in America so he could hang out with Hollywood big shots and get the red carpet treatment everywhere he went (although that did come with the territory...
...The baby was gravely ill from complications suffered during delivery...
...On every program, in every sermon, in every afterdinner speech, Sheen tried to draw non-Catholics to the faith, bring lapsed Catholics back to the Church, and strengthen the faith of practicing Catholics...
...But it was another incident in the bishop’s anti-Communist crusade that viewers of Life Is Worth Living always remembered...
...Sheen was a natural in front of the cameras, and viewers loved him...
...Then the medical file is reviewed by three physicians in Rome to determine if the cure really is inexplicable in the light of medical science...
...If a second miracle is approved, the candidate is declared a saint...
...The woman suffered a torn main pulmonary artery...
...After family members and friends invoked the intercession of Archbishop Sheen, the woman and the baby were suddenly healed...
...But when Heywood Broun, a hard-bitten socialist journalist notorious for his anti-clerical rants, and Louis Budenz, managing editor of the Communist organ, the Daily Worker, entered the Church, Sheen’s reputation as the convert-maker extraordinaire soared...
...El Paso, Illinois, yet Sheen didn’t embrace television, radio, and publishing, preaching from the Personality category...
...From the 1930s through (Remember Drexel Burnham Lambert...
...The Vatican is extremely stringent about miraculous cures...
...At this moment the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints is studying one thousand pages of medical data and eyewitness testimony to determine if an elderly woman from Champaign, Illinois, and an infant born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were healed through the prayers of Archbishop Sheen...
...When his program Life Is Worth Living debuted on February 12, 1952, Time magazine described its place on the schedule as “the obituary spot...
...He used the media as he used his intellect and charisma—to win souls...
...by Thomas J. Craughwell With 40,000 saints on the booKs, you’d expect to find some interesting characters...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
