Two Portraits of Archbishop Fulton Sheen America's Chrysostom Michael Pakaluk __________ An Extraordinary Conversation with Fulton Sheen Christopher M. Reilly
The Catholic Thing
By Michael Pakaluk and Christopher Reilly St. John of Antioch, called Chrysostom or "golden-mouthed" (d. 407), "is generally considered. . .the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit," according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Or are homilies even more golden if they are concise? Nearly all the surviving works of the 5th-century Bishop of Ravenna, Peter, are homilies noteworthy for their conciseness as much as their eloquence. Tradition has it that this Peter received his nickname, "golden-worded," when the Roman Empress heard him preach and pronounced him "Chrysologus!" Venerated as a saint and later declared a Doctor of the Church, today he is called "Doctor of Homilies." Not that golden words are the same as holiness. They ring hollow and appear manipulative, like a cheap clanging cymbal, unless they express sincere devotion. St. Paul sets down the principle: "my speech and my preaching were not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in shewing of the Spirit and power; that your faith might not stand on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God." (1 Corinthians 2:4-5) Fulton, the 20th-century Bishop of Rochester, New York – to be pronounced Blessed today – understood the point full well. A necessary condition of his preaching was to spend an hour before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer, which he did without fail for over 60 years. He was a philosopher and theologian first, but also – and this is quite rare – he was an orator, and recognized as a great one, when traditions of oratory were still being passed on, although dying out, within Catholic colleges and universities. He would say that he never spoke from a written text. Persons had to be addressed by persons, not texts. He would quote what an old Irish woman said about a bishop reading his speech: "If he can't remember it, how does he expect us to?" In his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, he tells how above all he studied for style G.K. Chesterton – "who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox and avoided what was trite" – but also C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge. After writing his dissertation in Louvain, Belgium, he taught at the seminary of the Westminster archdiocese in England, St. Edmund's, where Fr. Ronald Knox was his colleague. Perhaps it was Knox who introduced him to Chesterton in 1925. In any case, Chesterton later agreed to write an Introduction for Sheen's first book, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925). The book is based on Sheen's Louvain dissertation. But it is very far from a dissertation, or the dissertation was a most unusual one, because it is not written in a flat-academic style, but sparkling with Chestertonianisms and quasi-paradoxes. From the start, Sheen's words were golden on the page as well as from the pulpit. Its opening paragraph is a riff on Chesterton's "Wanted, An Unpractical Man," from What's Wrong with the World: Modern philosophy has seen the birth of a new notion of God. There is nothing of greater importance, as there could be nothing more ultimate. Even the very attitude of one man to another or of one nation to another varies with the conception of God. The outlook on the world changes the moment the outlook on God changes. And if we had intellectual vigour enough to ascend from effects to causes, we would explain political, economical and social phenomena less by credit sheets, balance of trade and reparations, than by our attitude towards God. The new notion of God is not that of a divinity who is, but of one which becomes. But to accept this notion, Sheen says, is necessarily to accept a changed view of human intelligence. How we understand God and how we understand our own intelligence rise and fall together: "What happens, then, when a philosophy rejects the intellect? It breaks the link between the world and God, denies a hymn of divine praise to the Creator, and knocks the world into an unintelligible pluralism." Though it was published in 1925, one cannot find a book m...