by Johnny Zokovitch
I live in St. Louis, and perhaps one of the biggest events to happen in this city in recent memory was the beatification Mass for Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen last month. It is estimated that more than 50,000 attended the Mass and surrounding events, turning it into the equivalent of a Catholic version of Lollapalooza, with faithful of all stripes streaming into The Dome at America’s Center.
For me, not so much.
Friends from around the US reached out asking if I was going. (I didn’t. I attended Climate Week in New York City instead in support of my wife’s work with the Midwest Climate Collaborative. And for good pizza. And a good bagel. Like I said, I live in St. Louis.) Plus, any Mass that has a procession of 1,000 priests, 89 bishops and archbishops, 260 deacons and nearly 1,000 seminarians is always going to be a hard pass for me. My wife said it best when she asked: “How can this many clergy and Catholic lay people turn out for Bishop Sheen’s beatification but not turn out to protest the detention and deportation of immigrants happening right now in this country?”
If it’s not clear, I am not a Fulton Sheen fanboy. I understand and appreciate that there are testimonies for his work in fighting housing discrimination and, as a pro-peace Catholic, I recognize both the risk and the power of his witness in opposing the war in Vietnam at a time when many in the US Catholic hierarchy were supporters or silent.
On the other hand, Sheen also stood out as the consummate “Cold Warrior,” influencing perhaps more Catholics’ views on communism, Cuba, and the Soviet Union than any other clergy person of his time. He framed it as an apocalyptic battle between the atheism of Russia and the pious faith of the United States. He preached a version of Catholicism that supported US foreign policy and the military-industrial complex that underpinned it. There is a cogent throughline from his preaching a Catholicism that fully embraced the jingoistic patriotism of the US during the Cold War and dressed it in religious justification to how Catholics ever since have blessed and endorsed a range of US military expeditions around the world, from counterinsurgency efforts in Latin America to conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. His accommodation of the gospel to US culture, while mitigating the suspicion that many Catholics in the US lived under for much of this nation’s history, also served to blur the lines between the gospel of Jesus and the American establishment’s worldview.
This is best demonstrated, albeit perhaps unintentionally, in an article published by OSV News, “Why the FBI investigated Archbishop Sheen during WWII.”
“By the early 1950s, both the bureau and its long-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, had done a complete about-face on now-Bishop Sheen and invited him to speak at a graduation ceremony of newly inducted agents … [H]e went from being someone who might be a threat to national security to an American legend.”
So color me confused as to why he was being named a saint in the first place. As an exercise, I started my own list of US Catholics (whose lifetimes overlapped with Sheen) who led lives that profoundly and radically mirrored Jesus’ own. It was extensive. Such lives seem to me at least as deserving as Sheen to be held up as a paradigm for the faithful.
For anyone paying attention, such a contrast could be inferred when Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is promoting the canonization effort of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day, spoke in admiration of Archbishop Sheen as part of the program prior to the beatification Mass. The chasm that exists between the witness of Day and the witness of Sheen couldn’t be more striking.
After extensive research – besides the requisite attribution of miracles the Church requires for sainthood – what it seems to boil down to for Sheen is his pioneering role as a televangelist, specifically as a televangelist who made Catholics proud to be Catholic while also making Catholics more acceptable to their Protestant neighbors.
Thinking of the history of televangelists in my own lifetime, I feel confident that this isn’t something to celebrate.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/ and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.