What Frank & Maisie did in America

...The publishing seems to have been the special idea of Josephine Ward, Maisie's mother, to begin with...

...My father always believed that he would not have been a religious man at all if he hadn't found himself a Catholic...

...at least, they eased the Ward conscience for a while...

...On those terms the stuff could be accepted and even embraced gingerly...

...we were gypsies, oddities...

...thirty-five...

...But all that Evidence Guild work on soapboxes had made Commonweal: 602 the unexpected manageable, and even the dull endurable, for there were many other evenings when nothing happened at all, with the chair-priest dozing fitfully while the foreign smartypants talked himself out...

...He was an anomaly, there would never be another Frank Sheed, so his very eccentricity could be savored...

...Because if Americans in those days loved to listen, they dearly loved to listen to foreigners, and foreigners were still rare and strange enough to get away with murder, whether as psychoanalysts or English mystics or as just plain lecture bums...

...But their Catholic publishing seemed almost as bizarre as their Catholic tub-thumping in the starchy secularity of England...

...but what he did get gradually was a ragbag of witnesses, as the American church began to swap experiences and know itself...

...The most mischievous phrase a publisher, or anyone, can use is' 'Have you ever thought of writing a book?'' and Frank used it scandalously often...

...Father McGillicuddy would then do his best to look intelligent...

...The original Ward of Sheed and Ward was to be Maisie's brother, Leo, but he veered off in his own direction, leaving Maisie to step rather vaguely onto the masthead...

...Maisie was, in this one respect at least, a better model for Catholic feminists than even the great Dorothy Day...

...With this firmly in mind, Frank could cope with Father Says like a matador...

...Because Dorothy was always likely to yield ground to church authorities, if only in a jiujitsu (or feminine) manner, while Maisie yielded nothing except what the church or reason absolutely insisted on...

...Frank's private religious order, "The Little Dumb Sisters of the Ass of Bethlehem," only went public when the field was won...

...Thus, as if any help were needed, circumstances made Frank and Maisie even more Catholic than they were...

...Rome says" was tolerable to English Catholics, because somebody had to say: the alternative being chaos or the insipidity of Anglicanism...

...In truth, my parents were very far from being fanatics with that telltale gleam in their eyes...

...His running mental reservation about them is preserved in a story he used to tell about one bishop kissing another one's ring...

...Even on the most frantic of lecture tours, the pair of them would be found wading or darting through piles of half-baked efforts, eternal judges at an amateur open house...

...It's a record, I think, even among preaching priests, and an incalculable influence: godparents to a generation and more, sly strangers who sneaked past the school's puzzled infrastructure, its banana-republic officialdom, to talk to them, as you talk to a bloke on the corner...

...Toward the end of a fairly rigorous theological lecture, he would somehow manage to suggest complicity with the fuddled Monsignor, or whatever he found next to him on the platform, as if they'd practically written the speech together...

...In her view, if you didn't do it this afternoon, you surely wouldn't do it ten years from now...

...Sister had simply been chosen to pass it along...

...Some were asexually literary, others might be about life in the convent, opening those dusty windows for inspection and giving away the cabala-like secret that nuns were human...

...I'd rather lead an orchestra than play the flute," said Frank, in modest reference to his own writing...

...Official theology was made to sound so dry and 1 November 1985: 603 abstract that you wouldn't want to mess with it: only a few highly dedicated men had been chosen by Almighty God to think about it at all...

...For "Frank Sheed says" to wedge itself into this prim hierarchy would require a more sinuous effort even than getting the English to pay attention...

...But World War I had rather shaken faith in the March of Thought as well...

...Frank's response to the Depression was typically cerebral, but he knew very well what he was responding to...

...And while waiting for these to fatten, Frank could always busy himself with a series called "A Masterpiece a Month to Form a Catholic Mind" or with Walter P. Farrell's majestic Companion to the Summa, or his own translation of Saint Augustine...

...But Maisie's life was strewn with nolocontenderes: it was safer to admire her than to run the risk of "Father says" being routed by a woman...

...After the rococo of official sermons, and the false bonhomie of "Father Joe talks straight from the shoulder," these street-smart aristocrats had to sound good whatever they said...

...The Catholic school system had provided him all at once with a thousand lecture platforms, and this is where his campaign began...

...He had all the license he needed thanks to the notion that Catholics have more fun than other people, a notion stemming largely from Belloc and Chesterton but quickly accepted (among Catholics at least) as virtually an act of faith...

...It was all very exasperating for Maisie, who was cursed, in the quaint language of the day, with a masculine mind trapped in a female temperament, so that she would literally sob with vexation after a particularly dense set-to...

...When I talk of the American church as dead from the neck up, I am not doing justice to the whole cadaver...

...A group of city strays would gather in front of a rickety platform and hurl tipsy taunts or village-atheist challenges at my parents who would answer with a gravity worthy of a lecture hall...

...if that wasn't right, none of it was right...

...I once told him Commonweal: 606 that one of his nuns' books called Play It Cool, Sister, was just too arch for American ears, but he loved it...

...The beauty part of the trick (and Frank played a hundred variations on it) was that the priest was now effectively silenced...

...after the dialectic had been wrestled to the floor, Communism and Man rounds on the church as Maisie might have, demanding from it social action at least as throughgoing as Communism, and much more compassionate...

...So, who knows, perhaps Frank by example did as much in the long run for Catholic males as Maisie for females...

...3) Next, one must have all the markings of a demagogue, but manifestly not be one...

...in fact, I believe this requirement made Frank even more orthodox than nature intended (later critics who faulted him for this had no idea what it takes to start a revolution...

...You become what you read, so be careful" was its motto...

...Still such an orientation can put up quite a struggle, and Sheed/Ward would probably have wound up in the limbo of the smarties, if they/it hadn't abided by certain principles: (1) To challenge anything in the church, one must be personally devout...

...Foreigners had credentials as such, and the papist Sheeds slipped in on the same visas as the Reichiahs and the Ouspenskyites...

...They could already start talking "just war" theory before they knew precisely where the relevant countries were...

...By that time, Sheed and Ward had begun to look awfully assimilated, somewhere on the edges of the Universal Church...

...Such famous postwar converts as Chesterton and Ronald Knox valued the church for its sheer steadiness...

...Americans might not like to read but they certainly liked to listen...

...To begin with, the English view of the clergy was rather more relaxed...

...All she wanted was a fair fight, while all-Frank wanted was to avoid one, fair or otherwise...

...His wisdom had been established by this clever foreign fellow: one word from him would blow the whole thing...

...There was nothing about skyscrapers or Hollywood to prepare anyone for the Catholic church in America...

...But on the way home, they might well complain about the blandness of the meeting: "If only a good drunk had come along," my father would sigh — surely as strange a wish as for rain on Sunday...

...Since intellect as such was not considered of first Commonweal: 604 importance for lay-people, women easily became the brains of a Catholic family, if it made the little dears happier, and easier to live and sleep with...

...And once you had them, you just sat on them...

...Do you really mean that," she once said to me, "or are you just arguing?'' By her standards, I seldom meant anything at all...

...She would certainly have been a causist of some sort and probably an orator as well, because she was so good at it and because, unlike Frank, she burned to speak out...

...There was, its being England, an element of class in all this which expressed itself strongly to a child in atmospherics...

...Frank occasionally published secular books to amuse himself, but Sheed and Ward couldn't match the sales forces of the secular big boys, and besides you could hardly lay siege to Brentano's with one general-interest title on your list...

...Or so it seemed in the fat fifties...

...but large orders mean large printings and students do eventually graduate and a precious few of them, at least, continue to read...

...And this, I believe, was Frank and Maisie's decisive edge over native Catholic pioneers, such as Commonweal magazine which was considered wildly subversive for printing the same kind of stuff, and sometimes even the same authors, as Sheed and Ward...

...And in this respect, impertinent women already had a significant headstart...

...So I resigned myself to the delicate pleasures of outsideness at an early age...

...Yet it was not official, it wasn't written anywhere...

...Short of that, it didn't mattei how theoretically superior the church might be: the search for justice would simply bypass it, or trample it down...

...Or to hear it from a less antic voice: "Authority is intolerable but indispensable," said my grandfather Wilfrid Ward...

...But the enthusiasms were right for America, and by the forties and fifties, Sheed and Ward had helped at least to shade in the outlines of a counter-Catholicism to which a civilized person could repair...

...above all you kept them out of sermons, which were strictly for uplift — which also sounded dull...

...If the audience decides to plunk itself down for fifteen decades of the rosary and a couple of litanies between listens, you'd better plunk along with it (though Frank was known to peer dreamily through his fingers...

...He picked some pretty good American writers over the years...

...In fact by an irony almost too pretty to contemplate, the very same lectures that bought Frank a publishing house in America, complete with readers and working capital, could still be had for nothing at Hyde Park corner by any bystander with nothing better to do...

...Back at school, everybody listened to Frank...

...The above article is excerpted from his new book, Frank & Maisie (Copywright © 1985, by Wilfrid Sheed, reprinted with permission of the publisher, Simon and Schuster, New York, N.Y...

...Chesterton . . . Eric Gill . . . Leon Bloy . . . Maritain . . . Paul Claudel . . . Christopher Dawson . . . Romano Guardini . . . We'd never heard of such people...

...And since I consider this institution to be Frank and Maisie's most peculiar challenge, and its conquest their most aesthetically satisfying, not to say lasting achievement, I'd like to circle it for a moment, in the temporary guise of a middle-aged buzzard, to point out some of the oddities...

...While the Trotskyites and Stalinists were having it out across town, Maisie was visiting Dorothy Day's place on Mott Street, and later Chrystie, "a slum within a slum," and Day's farms, erratically manned by bums, and everyplace else one could find where the Gospel was down on its knees scrubbing the floors...

...The best of everything was trotted out for him, although he usually didn't look as if he strictly needed it, and he was deferred to in everything: not only ecclesiastical matters, but in all things short of sports, where a layman was encouraged to have his own opinions...

...So Maisie would light in merrily, to the alarm of the white collars, who had enough trouble with her tactful husband without having to fend off this ladylike dynamo...

...Wow...

...For although the country was crisscrossed by lecturers offering as many routines as vaudeville, no one had ever used the platform quite like Frank: that is, to be a lay-preacher, to play the clergy at its own game under its own nose...

...My first thought was that they were going to get killed up there by some loudmouthed bully, and to this day I myself suffer from incurable stage fright...

...A publisher simply puts up a soapbox of sorts and hopes that interesting performers will turn up...

...And if this seems naive she might have asked the heckler to compare Dorothy Day's apolitical efforts for the poor with the Communist party's in the thirties, forties, or any other time...

...But one shouldn't confuse eras...

...Being more English, and much more blunt, she was also more definite about the role of the clergy in the life of the mind...

...Frank always attributed his galvanic technique, indoors and out, to those bystanders who decided they had something better to do than listen to him, such as buying a sticky bun or taking in a flick or feeding the pigeons...

...In America, the people in black were the teachers...

...I don't suppose the theological world had ever undergone a. funny publishing house before...

...To write a book about Communism during the thirties, and leave out the thirties was, I think, a mistaken discipline...

...not only couldn't they talk religion, they couldn't talk anything that you'd want to bring into the living room...

...Pie in the sky when you die" was bad enough when attributed to Christians...

...By religious standards, Sheed and Ward's house organ was quite unprecedented in its breeziness...

...He had sown no apparent seed in the new land that the landscape couldn't handle...

...any damn fool could dispense the sacraments...

...Publishing, as those who know can tell you, is even more amorphous than starting a magazine or opening a restaurant, those other late-night brainstorms...

...Your wife certainly is a remarkable woman.'' Yessir, a real hellion...

...it serviced the incurably brainy and kept them orthodox...

...The Catholic literary revival set out at first to be just that, a revival, and not a new departure...

...Except for one taciturn, brick-faced Presbyterian cousin whom my father dragged round one day, I cannot remember a single non-Catholic that I ever met through my parents...

...Listen to how soon the word 'dollar' comes up at the next table," Frank said to me once, and the answer that day was approximately thirty seconds...

...Chastened by hundreds of backs receding over the years, sharpened to a fine edge by loneliness (he once recited the alphabet solemnly to an empty square, only to find a man standing in back of him), and kept forever on his toes by Protestant Alliance rowdies who literally tried to tie his shoelaces to the platform, he had developed the urgency of a man on a burning deck...

...The church couldn't be threatened by an argument, so one argued with abandon...

...Nevertheless, the English years made the attempt possible...

...and not just in glamour spots like Hyde Park, but in backwaters like Clapham and Pimlico and other places that properly belong in English comic monologues...

...Maisie even battled Dorothy Day about this when she found that the Catholic Worker farms were not producing...

...Perhaps he was right...

...Of course you've heard all this many times before from Father McGillicuddy," Frank would tell the audience...

...These are dangerous games, and it would be too much to suppose that Frank always won them...

...But at home, in the soft religious glow, they couldn't even say "dollar," but sat mute and indulgent as Frank shone...

...The schools and colleges and seminaries kept getting bigger and bigger in those days, and this included the libraries, regardless of whether there was anything to put in them or not...

...Even on lecture tours, Frank and Maisie never stopped publishing...

...Here was where the talent was, and more important to her, the vitality of the American church...

...at any rate, she backed it enthusiastically and staked the new house to 2,000 pounds — a sum slightly harder to translate into modern currency than the Roman denarius...

...At least, their London people often seemed perplexed by Frank and Maisie's American enthusiasms, and published them with little hope of success...

...Wells and Queen Marie of Rumania were interminably disembarking...

...His writings became textbooks, which is the surest method of embalmment ever devised...

...The anticlencalism of the Spanish Civil War was just bursting into flame, and as so often, I wish Frank had been just a little bit less abstract: I never knew a man to read newspapers so thoroughly — and use them so little...

...It was almost as if he had decided to play with the girls at the feminine sport of thinking — a thought that bothered me more than once as a little fellow...

...At first, the only thing that really struck me as strange was the sound of a man praying for rain in England...

...Frank Sheed hit the United States with a very useful collection of attitudes about all this: Irish enough to reverence the clergy as such — and Irish-Australian enough to be cynical about them...

...Isn't she something...

...So in this respect at least, the New York operation was quite different from the English one, although I'm not sure that Frank and Maisie, who tended to be country-blind, quhe saw it this way...

...And finally, (5) one must (and this is a counsel of perfection) be foreign...

...If she walked into an office and found nobody working, she wouldn't linger to hear about its manifesto...

...This biological improbability was, I believe, invented and promoted by them at least partly as a token of gratitude...

...From Social Realists it was — her most withering condemnation — "sheer humbug...

...Some priests resented him...

...November 1985: 607...

...He had one particular silky-smooth trick that I never wearied of...

...Where Frank's gift for hard detail did show was in his publishing...

...She was a wild card...

...The wilder of them might even challenge him in the early days...

...Because he could have published all the books he wanted and nobody would have come, he, and later Maisie, had to go out and create an audience, a mailing list — and some American authors, too...

...So although she continued to play all the instruments in her one-man band, Social Justice became Maisie's apostolate...

...Or he could caper...

...The Modernist crisis in the church had blown over for the time being, leaving the reformers in shambles...

...And Maisie (she of the wrong tennis dress) was wonderfully at home in shabby, serious surroundings...

...Dilettantism in the face of suffering was more than she could bear...

...How condescending, how pointless...

...If the end of this line was to be short skirts, Sheed and Ward must shoulder an ounce or two of the blame: revolutions have a way of getting out of hand, and the Catholic Revival eventually drifted away from its founders' dreams, and in far more serious matters than skirt lengths...

...The immediate agenda was to ransack the church for treasures: to rediscover Aquinas with Jacques Man tain, to collate Christian mysticism and the Oriental variety with E.I...

...Sheed and Ward published a record number of books by nuns, and they were a far cry from the pious guff of yore...

...Maisie all unconsciously played the foreign card even better than Frank (she couldn't play a card consciously without giving it away...

...Since the English hated to listen (let alone pay to listen: in that gabby country, it was like paying for water), Sheed and Ward, London, had relatively little to do with lecture platforms...

...The word "faith'' had a resonance for English Catholics of her era, like a summons in the Old Bailey, racketing down corridors of time, and that was quite enough sword and shield for anyone...

...Anyway, as I slopped around at the edge of the crowd in my gum boots and little school cap, I cared little about what got them up there...

...And if you've got a better one than the other fellow, it doesn't matter a fig (as Maisie would say) whether you've been ordained or not...

...Obviously, he was not going to get a great literature out of these tattered, sometimes braindamaged parochial-school veterans and numbed survivors of college theology...

...Later it mutated into something called Sheed and Ward's Own Trumpet ("You must stir it and stump it/and blow your own trumpet/or, trust me, you haven't a chance" — Ruddigore) which, from its pictures and headlines, might have been promoting a line of joke books...

...IN AMERICA, beginning in 1933, Frank and Maisie did more or less what they did in England: publishing books, they called it...

...The punishment for himself and Maisie was excruciating...

...If some lower clergyman began talking rot, one simply looked for another one...

...A full-dress affair at Notre Dame or a rainy night at Fulham were all the same to our speaker...

...Sheed and Ward's first American authors were still predominantly priests and nuns, in the old order...

...and now English (and monarchical) enough to respect the office totally and take the man as he found him...

...Except for certain political presses, few publishing ventures can ever have been so closely tied to a lecture platform...

...To take just one thing: whenever they were in England, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward trudged off every single Sunday afternoon — my father moaning to beat the band and praying for rain — to preach the Faith from soapboxes...

...When a priest came calling in America, it was a very big deal...

...then again perhaps he was the cause of it all, and was doing a bang-up job...

...The Communist superstition (later to surface as the "burn, baby, burn" fallacy), that you had to let things hit bottom before you could rebuild society, drove Maisie simply wild...

...But her mind was wilfrid SHEED was Commonweal's drama critic and book editor, 1964-66...

...So if Frank and Maisie chose to challenge it, they could not be rebuked or silenced, only frowned at mightily...

...So although several young American authors were cheeping and hopping around the barn in the thirties, they didn't come into their kingdom until World War II closed off the Atlantic and forced America to grow its own authors...

...But he meant it...

...Sheed and Ward began in a small way to flourish, almost to pay for itself, and Frank got to keep some of his lecture winnings...

...After a time, one knew what to expect of Frank...

...In 1936 he wrote what I consider to be his best book, Communism and Man, the first half of which was later used in Communist study circles and the whole of which was praised, in an anonymous review, by George Orwell...

...The soup kitchens and generally beat-up quarters where the Catholic Workers and others talked all night were a long way from the cushiony settings and faces of the lecture circuit...

...who didn't catch Frank, or Frank and Maisie, at least once...

...All those bishops he had tactfully wooed bore fruit in a body, and he knew a depressing number of them personally...

...The rock-ribbed confidence of her Edwardian generation seemed at once comical and awesome to Americans...

...Since this period coincided with the last gaudy parade of the Church of Cuteness — with Spellman and Sheen blown up like Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons, and Jimmy Durante saying the rosary on the "Father Peyton Hour" and topping it with Peyton's immortal "da family dat prays togedda, stays togedda" — it was handy to have such a bomb shelter, which could later be used as an attack station...

...Oh, you needn't do that," dimples the younger of the two...

...The only trouble in paradise was that they had to cope with the unworldly stinginess of the clergy, who wherever feasible demanded a "clerical discount" of bloodsucking proportions ("The vow of poverty means you never have to pay" — FS...

...All I knew was that no amount of respectability in other sectors could make up for this one eccentricity...

...In basic Catholic teaching, a working distinction is made between the spheres of intellect and will, and if you had to dump one of them off the sinking ship, intellect would have to go — but not in an argument it wouldn't...

...Nevertheless, her being a woman sometimes did help her victims to escape...

...In this, its role was almost like the meliorism of the New Deal: Sheed and Ward led its public exactly as far out of the Dark Ages as the powers that be felt it was safe to go...

...If they had done nothing else, Frank and Maisie would have helped change the whole style of Catholic intellectual discourse — which was an absolutely necessary first step...

...It was years before I got any further than that phrase in describing their work to my set...

...So loud, dull sermons came to seem part of the strategy, distancing the laity from even its own thoughts...

...One assimilated that fact very early in the quixotic parochial school system and continued to accept their authority — the alternative would be chaos and Unitarianism...

...Thank God it's an interesting religion...

...Many native strains of anti-intellectualism helped to nourish this Catholic aberration...

...At least for company...

...In that one limited field, intellect is king...

...And when I attended my first meetings, I saw little to shake the definition...

...And it made our home life about as Catholic as you can get outside a religious community...

...Eugene McCarthy, himself a spellbinder of sorts, once told me that he had learned much of his style from listening to Frank back at school...

...There was plenty of social action brewing in the thirties, as clergy and laity, together at last, strove to fashion a specifically Catholic response to the Depression, and this Maisie was alive to at once...

...Her lectures were not strictly theological (which is why I have treated Frank's mission separately) but literary, historical, social — and whatever she had just discovered...

...Thus the theology that was to revolutionize the American church turns out to be just the old street-corner stuff hammered out and refined off the skulls of random hecklers...

...It's not you I'm kissing," growls the veteran, "it's your bloody office...

...Only those hard, dusty years in the seminary, under proper supervision, qualified you to deal with the mysteries...

...Outwardly the platform Sheed was a model of almost Oriental deference to "the bloody office...

...Households varied in their degrees of pliancy, but very few Americans ever told a priest that he didn't know beans about politics or constitutional law, or, as Frank remarked after a sermon on marriage, "I was edified, Father, that you seemed to know so little about it...

...For Catholics before Vatican II, the land of the free was preeminently the land of Sister Say s — except, of course, for Sister, for whom it was the land of Father Says...

...Her passionate conviction at times made it seem almost bad taste to oppose her...

...There was a license for fiery women in those days: they could attack politicians and businessmen and such to their faces in ways their husbands were better advised not to...

...He made it a rule, quite indispensable in this case, to add up the pluses and forget the minuses...

...What does one know at five...

...Sheed and Ward had a little more on its mind than that...

...Watkin, to place the church in the history of culture and culture in the foreground of history with / November 1985: 601 Christopher Dawson...

...In fact, you should use your advantage like Billy-0 (another of hers...

...And then later, aflame with the parable of Martha and Mary, the wives would sit at the Master's feet asking questions against a background of silent husbands...

...I have yet to meet a Catholic over what...

...4) One must not tackle authority head-on, but, where possible, proceed as if it wasn't there...

...My parents are publishers," I would emphasize...

...down-to-earth, in a high-minded sort of way, and I'm not sure she would have gone looking for a religion if she hadn't been drenched in one from baptism on...

...Only slowly did I begin to realize that other people thought my parents were a little crazy Soapbox oratory is by definition crazy...

...But sometimes it takes a fresh voice to make people listen...

...And granted that few people ever made the abstract so real as Frank, it remained abstract, the Catholic curse...

...To put the matter backward, Frank and Maisie both believed stubbornly that American women were brighter than American men...

...Maisie could be more outspoken than Frank partly because it meant less...

...Evelyn Waugh, putting it most starkly, claimed that it was the duty of the educated classes to keep the clergy in its place...

...I remember not once but often being driven to lectures by bland, inarticulate men whose wives had arranged the lectures, and study groups, and paraphernalia...

...Because, whether in drafty gymnasiums with the chairs scraped hastily over the basketball court or in overblown, over-endowed arenas, the clerical nose was always there...

...I honestly doubt whether a native American could have done it right then...

...The doctrine of progress had been methodically blown apart in the trenches, while on the various home fronts, civilization seemed to be plunging into an era of unprecedented silliness and ugliness...

...Americans uniquely still had to be introduced to each other, while Europeans knew each other all too well...

...Because, if one had to boil the Sheed/Ward American mission down to one sentence, it would be that Frank and Maisie finally gave Catholics permission to think without benefit of clergy...

...American clericalism had completely neutralized the men...

...And worst of all, he remained alone on those platforms: no other lay preachers sprang up around him...

...But anyway, his mother's peasant Catholicism had rubbed off on him...

...Of my mother, I am not so sure...

...Owing to some private sense of fitness, of what belongs in a book — a book by him at least (he couldn't have used slang under torture) — he severely rationed the facts in his writing and stuck with abstraction...

...It didn't occur to young Maisie to move left politically with the rest of the crowd: Christianity was quite enough for her, if anyone ever tried it...

...FRANK and Maisie were also an institution, but in some subtle sense, Maisie by herself wasn't quite...

...Curiously enough, the fiery female convention was finally to prove a great ally for both of them...

...Absolute bosh," she would say to the Lord's anointed or anyone else...

...But during those years when the cat had the men's tongues, women, I'm convinced, made Sheed and Ward...

...Frank also visited the Catholic Worker frequently, and even if it was mainly to talk theology, he still had his old Marxist interest in the social issues...

...Because style was the Defense Department of Sister and Father Says...

...Thus, piling up enemies, aphasiacs, and woolly admirers, as well as some young followers who would change the face of American Catholicism, Frank lectured his stormy way from coast to coast across the Catholic ghetto, incidentally playing John the Baptist to his own publishing house...

...They had rushed into the vacuum between Catholic ears, and the "Sister who says," like a recorded announcement, was the first to be upgraded to something serious...

...America's many freedoms have not always and everywhere included the freedom to think...

...And since she always talked to the subject — the opponent being merely an incident tossed up by a tedious fate — she couldn't be accused of personalizing issues in the female tradition...

...But as late as the 1970s, nobody could have charted Maisie's next move...

...Since among new titles only Catholic books need apply, Frank and Maisie had merely to recommend one and then back up the truck...

...Having swallowed the royal family, he had no real difficulty with the American clergy...

...It was like looting the Vatican itself...

...He knew his books inside out and could, if he had had the time, have done all the copy-editing himself, whatever the subject...

...This was the world that young Sheed and Ward confronted in 1927...

...Observers of that period always remember Sheed and Ward's foreign authors first...

...But "Sister" barely existed to them as an intellectual concept, capable of saying anything, and "Father" was primarily a liaison figure with the Mind of the Church, as good or bad at it as his talent allowed him to be...

...But this was a long way away in the 1930s, when the Queen Mary was still racing the Normandie across the Atlantic, and H.G...

...2) One must not make fun of other people's devotions, however asinine...

...Frank, too, began to seem like an institution...

...They read incessantly, having to make judgments in a strange, uncongenial language...

...He was not content to bring European writing to America and dust his hands of the matter, he was going to take something back with him if he had to wring it personally out of every bright housewife, shy nun, and glib Jesuit he met...

...Two of his eight novels were National Book Award nominees...

...So Frank's footwork had to be impeccable...

...the people in black patrolled the world of talk like Secret Service men...

...Catholics then and even now did not need this...

...To look on the darker side a moment: the church did not quake and roll over right away in the face of thinking lay people, but continued on its jolly way toward one of its more arrogant phases, the postwar boom...

...Thinking itself was not only dangerous but dull, a cute double-bind so that if by chance you found yourself enjoying thought, you were almost certainly doing it wrong and heading for the tar pits...