FRANK SHEED ON THE STUMP
O'Boyle, Patrick J.
FRANK SHEED ON THE STUMP A loud voice & quick wit Patrick J. O'Boyle Speakers'Corner, near the Marble Arch in Hyde Park, might be thought of as London's tribute to free speech. It's the...
...With Maisie Ward, he compiled the speakers' training text for the C.E.G...
...Among them was the Irish Dominican Vincent McNabb, a brilliant and acerbic speaker who used to walk in his habit from the priory in N.W...
...On Sunday afternoons, speaking sometimes to large audiences, prophets of doom call for repentance while there is still time, gurus proclaim "nirvana is now," and defenders of mainstream religion set forth their doctrinal wares...
...Chesterton had been acclaimed...
...Sheed also brought considerable learning and a gift for apt and understandable phrasing to the task...
...After a light-hearted comment or two, he would launch into his topic, gripping the lectern and leaning toward his listeners...
...one could understand why her biography of G.K...
...I won't ask you to make a universe," Frank replied...
...frequently their intellectual combat would continue after the speaker had stepped down...
...He certainly had the voice Patrick J. O'Boyle is an engineer and free-lance writer who lives in Centerport, New York...
...In the 1940s, when I was often on hand to observe the proceedings, it was clear that one key to success in this apostolate was a loud voice...
...He must have spent the rest of the week thinking up abstruse questions on Catholic dogma, as evidenced by the blockbuster question he once put to Sheed: "Why did the Second Person of the Trinity become man as our redeemer, why not the Father or the Holy Ghost...
...Fields...
...I first encountered him one Sunday afternoon in 1946, and for the next several years I contrived to be present whenever he was scheduled to speak...
...Many years later, in his final illness, Siderman was visited by friars from the Dominican priory...
...A more penetrating questioner was Edward Siderman, a slight, middle-aged Jew who had been a fixture in Hyde Park from the early days of the Guild...
...Sheed beamed at him...
...For me, the C.E.G...
...Once, after Sheed had described the extraordinary order and design to be seen in the universe, a persistent challenger retorted by pointing to all the world's ills, and ended by shouting, "I could make a better universe than your God...
...Sheed and Ward published many of the most illustrious Catholic writers of the time—among them Chesterton, Belloc, Knox, Francois Mauriac, and Fulton Sheen...
...Frank stayed on in their modest Jersey City apartment (they had moved permanently to the United States in the 1960s...
...And by the time I've given you an answer you'll probably be sorry you ever asked...
...Smiling benevolently and applauding, Frank responded, "Well done, my dear, but you know, London is full of legs," and continued with his lecture...
...speaker who stood out was Frank Sheed, the author and publisher...
...fittingly, the introduction was by Frank Sheed...
...It's worth noting that Siderman often crossed swords with Vincent McNabb...
...for the job, a great booming baritone that sent shock waves across the park, its resonance rising and falling like the breakers on his native Australian Barrier Reef...
...London to Hyde Park every weekend—four miles in each direction...
...Usually he was preceded at the lectern by his wife, Maisie Ward, who was also his partner in a unique Catholic publishing house, Sheed & Ward, based in London and New York...
...Donald Soper, always drew flocks of listeners, in large part because his acidic remarks on the modern Babylon, uttered in stentorian tones, reverberated through the portals of Marble Arch and up through trendy Oxford Street, no doubt astonishing passersby headed for the fleshpots of the West End...
...Maisie Ward predeceased her husband, in 1975 at age eighty-six...
...He could be devastating with hecklers...
...Intellectually, he said, he was attracted to the church's teachings, but emotionally remained a cynic...
...But would you make a rabbit— just to establish confidence...
...Hecklers in the crowd did not suffer fools (or mundane speakers) gladly...
...In 1950, several years after the priest's death, Siderman wrote a remarkable book, A Saint in Hyde Park, in tribute to his adversary...
...Some street-corner preacher," was the reply...
...the size of the crowd around any particular speaker was determined as much by the capacity of his lungs as by the content of his message...
...It was only fitting," he concluded, "that this special relationship of infinite to finite, as embodied in the Second Person, should result in God the Son's becoming mankind's redeemer...
...Besides a strong voice, anyone who mounted the rostrum of the Catholic Evidence Guild in postWorld War II London needed a quick wit and a thick skin...
...Still, some of England's leading Catholic intellectuals braved the hostile audiences...
...One reason for Sheed's ease and poise on the platform in Hyde Park was experience: He had first taken the platform for the Catholic Evidence Guild in the early 1920s, and he kept it up for the next forty years, sometimes mounting a C.E.G...
...platform five times a week...
...Catholicism was made visible—and audible—at Speakers' Corner under the aegis of the Catholic Evidence Guild, founded shortly after World War I by Vernon Redwood, to expound church teachings in sidewalk milieux in a nation only 5 percent Catholic...
...A much-traveled man, he was at home on the dais, whether in Liverpool or Los Angeles, in New York, Chicago, or his native Sydney...
...As the warm-up act, she would often entertain with anecdotes, told with economy in her clipped upper-class accent, of famous personalities she had known—Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox...
...But once, in 1956, when he took a bad fall from the rostrum in Hyde Park and was taken unconscious to a nearby hospital, the attending doctor asked the ambulance man who he was...
...Oh," said the doctor, "they're all nuts...
...I'm delighted that you asked that question," he boomed...
...He then launched into an erudite theological broadside to the effect that God the Son was the infinite product of the Father's intellect, while creation was the finite result...
...A well-known Methodist preacher, the Rev...
...He was a master pitchman, feeling the pulse of the crowd and using his voice to good effect, emphasizing a point with a change in cadence, driving home an argument with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde...
...A learned man, McNabb could mud wrestle with the toughest East Ender...
...I got to know him pretty well at these meetings, for we rarely missed a Sunday session—I to listen, he to question...
...He was the author of some twenty books covering a wide spectrum— from sociology and apologetics to devotional and biographical works, as well as an excellent translation of Saint Augustine's Confessions...
...The crowd would stir in anticipation as Sheed mounted Commonweal 16 April 23,1999 the rostrum, doffing his Texas-style hat, his sparse locks in unruly disarray, his prominent proboscis and genial features giving the impression of an intellectual W.C...
...But he remained an agnostic to the end...
...On another occasion, when he was discoursing on the modern obsession with pleasure, a scantily clad young woman launched into her high-kicking version of the can-can in front of the speaker's platform...
...D Commonweal 17 April 23,1999...
...A slight, retiring-looking woman, she would mount the platform hesitantly, pausing to smile almost apologetically at the crowd even as it began to dwindle—who, after all, wanted to listen to a mere woman prattle about the mysteries of redemption...
...His best-known book, Theology and Sanity, gained the status of a classic, and no doubt had much to do with his reception of a doctorate in sacred theology from Rome, a high honor indeed...
...But the exodus halted as soon as she began to speak, for if her appearance was meek her language was incisive...
...When he died in 1982 at eighty-five, thousands packed Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York to pay tribute to a genial, unpretentious man of immense energy and dedication, known affectionately to some as "God's ambassador...
...He was still much in demand as a speaker, and still profoundly committed to his lifelong passion for making Catholicism better known and better understood...
...It's the traditional forum for cranks and protesters, political pundits, purveyors of new philosophies, proponents of social reform of the right, left, and center, and—often—real or would-be apostles of a variety of religions...
...He was then in his fiftieth year, at the height of his intellectual powers...
...in 1925...
...The crowd applauded, and I noted the slight smile of approval that crossed Siderman's usually impassive countenance...
...Agnosticism was rife, all of organized religion was under assault, the age of ecumenism was yet to dawn, and Catholicism was viewed with particular suspicion...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 8
