LIGHTS, CAMERA, HUBRIS.

America's Bishop
The Life and Times of
Fulton J. Sheen
Thomas C. Reeves
Encounter, $26.95, 479 pp.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Fulton J. Sheen was the best-known Catholic priest in the United States. His television program, "Life Is Worth Living," has been described as "probably the most widely viewed religious series in TV history." Prior to that, he had already become nationally famous as a radio preacher. He went on to another successful career as a fundraiser for the missions, collecting almost $200 million as the national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith.

Thomas Reeves is a recent Catholic convert and a Sheen admirer, who was surprised that there was no serious biography. His book fills the gap and reveals a man of complexity and contradiction. Although Sheen earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain and was awarded the university's prestigious agrege en philosophie, he invented a second doctorate for himself in theology, which was listed in every catalogue of The Catholic University of America from 1927 to 1950. He professed to be indifferent to money and was extremely generous in helping those in need, but, in the early 1940s, he built an air-conditioned home in a fashionable neighborhood in Washington, D.C. (It was recently resold for more than a million dollars.)

For years Sheen packed Saint Patrick's Cathedral every Good Friday for his dramatic preaching of the Three Hours' Agony, but afterwards he hosted a private dinner party in one of Manhattan's most expensive restaurants. He was faithful to his daily Holy Hour, but he was not above using it to record thoughts and ideas for future sermons, books, and articles. Late in Sheen's life, during his tenure as the bishop of Rochester, the same contradictions appeared. He was eager to implement the reforms of Vatican II, but he often did so autocratically, with disastrous results.

Sheen could be as careless with the truth as he was with money. When challenged about statements he had made about psychoanalysis, he claimed that he never preached from a written text, although he had been doing so in his radio broadcasts on "The Catholic Hour" for seventeen years. Some of his autobiographical disclosures have the ring of old novena stories. After celebrating Mass as a young priest in Lourdes, he asked the Blessed Mother for a sign of her favor, specifying "before I would reach the outer gate of the shrine, a little girl aged about twelve, dressed in white, would give me a white rose." According to Sheen that is precisely what happened. He claimed that, during a few months of study in Rome (when he supposedly earned his second doctorate), he read every line that Saint Thomas Aquinas ever wrote.

Vanity is the occupational hazard of the famous preacher, but Sheen was ambitious as well as vain, and he was ambitious before he was famous. As a young priest-student in Louvain, he said seven Hail Marys every day that he would become a bishop. Later, however, when the bishop of Oklahoma City offered to promote his episcopal aspirations, Sheen politely declined. Having been raised on a farm in Illinois, Sheen had no desire to return to the boondocks even with a miter. When Francis Spellman was named the archbishop of New York in 1939, Sheen took to his bed for three days, depressed that the appointment had not gone to him.

Despite these unflattering revelations, Reeves's book is by no means a vindictive hatchet job. If the author is relentlessly honest in exposing Sheen's flaws, he is equally generous in recognizing the man's many virtues and the outstanding contribution that he made to American Catholicism as a preacher, convert-maker, fundraiser, and ambassador of good will. Reeves is especially good at placing Sheen at the various stages of his career in the evolving context of American Catholicism.

Reeves has done his homework. His book is based on wide reading, numerous interviews, and extensive archival research. It is a page-turner, as he traces Sheen's career with admiration and even affection. Reeves also puts his finger on Sheen's major weakness as a scholar: he spent most of his life preaching and speaking to admirers who hung on his every word. As a result he received little of the critical feedback that might have caused him to substantiate or modify the sweeping generalizations that he was prone to make on subjects like Freudian psychology and communism.

Sheen clashed with his patron, Cardinal Spellman, in 1955 and again in 1957, when Spellman tried to use the funds of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith for purposes that Sheen considered inappropriate. When the dispute was appealed to Rome, the Vatican supported Sheen, not Spellman, despite Spellman's close ties to Pius XII. Sheen did not rely exclusively on Holy Hours for success in this battle. In 1958 he brought $11 million to Rome (one million of it his own money). Reeves tells this story as completely as one can in view of the fact that much of the relevant documentation has mysteriously disappeared from the ecclesiastical archives, as he explains in his fascinating author's note.

The least satisfactory chapter in this book is the final one. The author accepts uncritically James Hitchcock's simplistic explanation that the crisis in the church in the 1960s was due to the flight from the absolute. Even more difficult to accept is Reeves's irresponsible assertion that Raymond Brown questioned the "authenticity" of the priesthood. Nor does Reeves give due credit to the perceptive analysis of Sheen in Mark Massa's Catholics and American Culture (Crossroad). Massa calls attention to the irenic character of Sheen's television programs in the 1950s, which represented a development in Sheen's theology from the polemical radio preacher of the 1940s. That development is conveniently overlooked today by those who venerate Sheen as an icon of an immutable pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

Reeves has knocked Sheen off his pedestal, and justifiably so. Nonetheless, the toppled figure still commands respect and seems more real and human on the ground than he did in the air. "In his heyday,"church historian John Tracy Ellis has said of Sheen, "almost literally millions called his named blessed for the religious inspiration, the kindling of renewed hope, and the spiritual enrichment that he brought to their lives." That judgment still stands, and Reeves's book confirms it.

Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is professor of historical theology at Fordham University. His most recent book is The History of the Archdiocese of New York (Editions du Signe, 1999).