Editorials

...Something had to be done to counter the Soviet deployment of SS-20s and Backfire bombers...

...No, Commonweal was not published by Frank Sheed, but perhaps that was only because the magazine was already being organized before this energetic Australian ever got to America...

...What kept him going...

...We miss the greater part of reality, we live unaware of the God who holds everything in existence...

...And yet U.S...

...We take it for granted that this was only an opening move in a complicated chess game...

...Catching hold of the fact that the editor was from "a lay-edited Catholic journal in the United States," the bishop immediately replied, "Oh, that must be published by Frank Sheed...

...If you talk for victory, sooner or later you will cheat...

...Theology and Sanity was one of about two dozen books he wrote...

...Augustine's Confessions that Sheed & Ward had planned to reprint, he translated the work anew...

...Into his eighties, when Frank Sheed rose to speak, he began with a characteristic gesture: pushing aside the microphone...

...But the important part of the president's message was what went unsaid...

...It is even put into doubt by President Reagan's own negotiating proposal, which, if the Soviets were to accept the president's "zero option," would leave NATO still without this supposedly essential level of weaponry...

...That is why President Reagan's November 18 address on arms control was so welcome...

...deterrent...

...Its office in London was blitzed into rubble in 1940, an employee in the States ran off with the funds in 1943...

...To read the strategic analysts on this whole imbroglio is to discover, again and again, how much more heavily political factors, rather than strictly military ones, weighed in the NATO choice...

...Instead of leading to NATO strength, the Western missile deployment seems to be a prime source of NATO disarray...

...This doesn't mean that East-West bargaining can be isolated totally from the overall climate of conflict or coexistence...

...Of course, we doubt whether most of the demonstrators in the streets of Bonn, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Berlin understand this any better than we do...

...Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward were a glorious part of the Catholic revival of the twenties and thirties...

...Exactly how the new NATO missiles were to function militarily-what they were to target, and why-was never very clear...

...The president's descrip-tion of the arms imbalance in Europe is open to question...

...Earlier this year, a traveling Commonweal editor was introduced to a bishop in London...

...AH his life, he recalled in The Church and I, he had been saying the three prayers which begin by invoking Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and end, "May I breathe forth my soul in your blessed company...

...but none of that prevented Sheed & Ward from publishing the best in Catholic thought, from the Chesterbelloc and Paul Claudel to Henri de Lubac and John Courtney Murray...

...When he found himself dissatisfied with a translation of St...

...to resp6nd to Moscow's attack on Afghanistan...

...Frank Sheed admitted that he was of that race...

...For four years, he recalled, "I lived, breathed, ate, slept, theology...

...Some people believed he drew energy directly from his irrepressible and irreverent wit, from a memory full of wild song lyrics, from the bottomless supply of Ronald Knox limericks and Chesterton stories...

...He was twenty-seven, on his way back to Australia to complete a law degree after four years of outdoor speaking for the Catholic Evidence Guild in London...

...There was no hint of the earlier doctrine of "linkage" that tied progress on arms negotiations to Soviet good behavior everywhere on the globe...

...There was a combative aspect to all this - combat with the hecklers, combat with modern ignorance in general - that someone temperamentally shaped like Frank Sheed couldn't help but enjoy...

...The Soviet Union has been discredited as never before in Western Europe...

...and their publishing house, Sheed & Ward, as Frank put it, was "in the thick of the fun...

...But up to now the Reagan administration has seemed determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: identifying itself with counterrevolutionary terror in Central America, casting every conflict in East-West terms, talking (and selling) armaments at every opportunity, acting as though Europe needed only a good show of "firmness" (we'll make those neutron warheads-slap!-whether you like it or not) to fall meekly into line...

...The controversial deployment of Pershing II missiles and of intermediate-range cruise missiles promised by NATO has its roots in a 1977 warning by Helmut Schmidt against European overreliance on the U.S...

...Frank Sheed considered himself a "non-mystic" and denied ever having "what is usually called a religious experience . . . the very feel of divine contact...

...R.I.P...

...strategic forces by means of this new intermediate level of missiles has not only been roundly questioned by a number of very tough-minded military analysts...

...To him, it simply meant "seeing what's there" - and few of us, he argued, ever manage to see what is there...

...strategic capacities...

...to provide a "missing link" of weapons that would couple NATO's battlefield forces with U.S...

...to provide visible commitment to Western Europe (hence the land-based missiles rather than sea- or air-based alternatives...

...They were within it, they are within it, and will be within it for ever and ever...

...Every once in a while, it seems as though someone actually understands the issue-and then it doesn't...

...That is about the way we feel when following the debates over medium-range theater nuclear weapons in Europe...

...military think-tankers had largely prompted Schmidt into action-and it is Schmidt today who is taking apolitical beating because of NATO's American-led decision...

...Frank Sheed always referred to that experience with the Catholic Evidence Guild as his advanced education in theology...

...that would be illusory...

...He delivered over seven thousand open-air lectures in his lifetime, and he and Maisie Ward crisscrossed the continents, talking, writing, starting organizations...

...The give-and-take (often more take) of streetcorner speaking forced him to search behind the formulations of the catechism and the institutions of the church "not only to answer the questioners, but to relate Christ's revelation to their appallingly various natures, in order that they might discover unrealized needs in themselves and find those needs met in Christ...

...It does mean, by implication, that the administration now recognizes that both East and West may have solid grounds of self-interest for reaching and respecting agreements on arms even while the two superpowers, with their allies and clients, are in sharp conflict otherwise...

...Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag, Afghanistan, and Poland took care of that...

...Trying to keep both the London and the New York branches of Sheed & Ward operating during World War II, he made fifteen wartime crossings of the Atlantic, once on a banana boat, once sleeping on the bomb rack of a B-24...

...But one of the lessons he took from that experience ought to be chiseled into the memory of anyone regularly engaged in public debate: "The first principal fact of life I did not know when I began is that one must never talk for victory - to show oneself right and the other man wrong...

...Sanity was something he was, well, crazy about...

...BRIEF EDITORIAL: FRANK SHEED...

...On November 20, Frank Sheed did.ank Sheed did...

...At the same time, the necessity of "coupling" current NATO arms and strategy with the U.S...

...In God and Mammon, which Sheed & Ward published, Francois Mauriac describes "the race of people who, born into Catholicism, realize in earliest manhood that they will never escape from it, never leave it...

...The old vigor of the streetcorner campaigner for Christ and the church was not to be denied: if God had meant men to use microphones, he would not have created Frank Sheed...

...In 1947, Frank Sheed himself added Theology and Sanity to this roster of works...

...He simply thought that the presence of God should impinge upon any sane person - like the presence of trees, grass, and sky...

...They are not reacting to the finer points of deterrence theory but to a political message that the Reagan administration has been delivering, namely that nothing else counts for much in international relations except getting tough with the Russians...

...so is the Soviet counter-description...

...It is to be hoped that after waiting a year from his election to make a serious foreign-policy speech, President Reagan plans to follow it up with equally serious bargaining...

...And ironically the political dimension has become the decisively counter-productive one...

...It was, in fact, the very year when Commonweal first appeared - 1924 - that Frank Sheed made his first lecture tour in the U.S...