Sheen of Eloquence.

America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen, by Thomas C. Reeves (Encounter, 479 pp., $25.95)

In the early 1950s, Fulton Sheen was the most famous Catholic in America. Already well known as a radio personality, Sheen in 1952 launched a weekly half-hour TV program called Life Is Worth Living. Attired in full purple regalia (he was auxiliary bishop of New York), Sheen each week stood in front of a studio camera and talked for 27 minutes and 20 seconds, without notes or a teleprompter. The speeches, actually carefully rehearsed and preceded by at least 30 hours of preparation on Sheen's part, avoided sectarianism and mainly concerned such topics as patriotism, freedom, democracy, right and wrong, and, very often, the menace of atheistic Communism.

The program was aired by the tiny Du Mont network, facing off against Milton Berle's show on NBC and Frank Sinatra's on CBS; Sheen's ratings soared, driving Sinatra off the air and attracting millions of non- Catholic as well as Catholic viewers. (The show remains the most widely viewed religious series in the history of television.) Sheen won the 1952 Emmy award for most outstanding television personality, beating out such competitors as Jimmy Durante and Lucille Ball; a Radio and Television Daily nationwide poll named him television's "man of the year." In 1955, the program moved to ABC, with a prime-time slot opposite Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life. (Sheen, still preoccupied with Communism, quipped, "Viewers will now have a choice of two Marxes-Groucho or Karl.") Sheen's face appeared on the covers of Time, TV Guide, Look, and Colliers; a young actor named Ramon Estevez changed his name to Martin Sheen, in the celebrity bishop's honor and with his permission.

By 1957, however, Sheen was off the air and on the slide into obscurity that would mark the last 22 years of his life. In part, Sheen was a victim of his archrival, the iron-willed and truculent Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who abruptly forced Sheen off TV by notifying ABC that the bishop no longer had his permission to preach on the air. Spellman was undoubtedly envious of Sheen's popularity; the relationship between the two had quickly become acrimonious, and culminated in a quarrel that went all the way up to the Vatican. Sheen, once a sought-after Lenten speaker in New York churches, was suddenly persona non grata. There had earlier been talk that he would be made a cardinal, but his progress up the ladder of clerical advancement was now clearly at an end-and so was the kind of Catholic culture that he represented.

The received story of American Catholicism is that the Church sailed robustly and confidently through the postwar prosperity, only to be deliberately undermined in the 1960s by the radical priests, nuns, and bishops who hijacked Vatican II; in fact, the old style of U.S. Catholicism was already dying out by the end of the 1950s. In this careful and sympathetically written, if not stylistically dazzling, biography, Thomas Reeves (author of the best-selling JFK biography A Question of Character) reconstructs the lost world that formed Fulton Sheen: the robust U.S. Catholic culture of which Sheen's TV triumph turned out to be the last gasp.

Reeves's impressive portrait of that bygone age is based on dozens of interviews as well as sheaves of Sheen's own papers and archival material. The papers are undoubtedly of greater intellectual interest than those of the typical 1950s TV host; Sheen had not just a Ph.D. (in philosophy) from Louvain, but the even more prestigious agrege degree from the same institution.

As Reeves documents, Sheen's public and private lives were an unsettling combination of the unquestionably devout and the unabashedly worldly. After a brief stint as a parish priest, he became a faculty member at Catholic University; but his real interest lay in building an off-campus career as a public speaker. His eloquence is undeniable; his writings demonstrate a command of classical rhetorical tropes that every speechwriter today should study. Soon enough, he was preaching regularly at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, and in 1930, he launched a radio program, The Catholic Hour, that stayed on the air until Sheen decamped for television in 1952. His oratory could be poignantly moving, as in his 1938 speech at a New York rally against Communist atrocities: "Those who cannot pull God down from heaven are driving His creatures from the earth."

At the same time, Sheen was assiduously cultivating the rich and the celebrated. Over his lifetime he made hundreds of converts to Catholicism, and many of them had important names: Clare Boothe Luce, the newspaper pundit Heywood Broun, the former Communist party leaders Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley, and-perhaps Sheen's biggest catch-Henry Ford II. While at Catholic University, Sheen drove a black Cadillac (donated) and lived in a custom-built house in a wealthy Washington neighborhood far away from the university's shabby environs; this did not endear him to his underpaid colleagues at Catholic. In 1950, he quit his professorship to head up the U.S. office of the Vatican's missionary and relief organization. Although carelessly generous with the money that flooded to him from his books and speeches, he also indulged in vanities: living at the toniest New York addresses, wearing the finest haberdashery, even-inexplicably-padding his genuinely impressive resume with a doctorate in theology that he had never earned.

In 1966, Cardinal Spellman succeeded in getting the 71-year-old Sheen removed from his Manhattan posting and appointed bishop of Rochester, N.Y.; to a cosmopolite like Sheen, this was tantamount to a Siberian exile. At this new job, Sheen failed conspicuously. He abandoned the relentless anti-Communism of his earlier years-when he had, among other things, defended Joe McCarthy-in favor of an undifferentiated 1960s liberalism: He opposed the Vietnam War, pushed post-Vatican II ecclesiastical changes aggressively, and advocated farfetched Great Society programs rather than simple charity toward the poor. These ideas did not sit well with his conservative upstate New York flock. In what was surely his most bizarre move, in 1968, Sheen proposed tearing down St. Bridget's, an inner-city church in Rochester, and giving the land to the federal government for a housing project. The St. Bridget's fiasco prompted noisy demonstrations by outraged parishioners, and led Sheen to resign in 1969, a year short of the mandatory retirement age for bishops of 75.

His name was no longer exactly a household one, and his health was failing, but he moved back to New York City (his archenemy, Spellman, had died in 1967) and continued to travel, preach, and write. In 1977, he had open-heart surgery, the oldest patient at the time to have undergone and survived the procedure; after that came prostate cancer. He was almost always bedridden and in pain. Sheen wrote his autobiography from his sickbed, a crucifix in his hand, his editor from Doubleday at his side. When he died, on December 9, 1979, the autobiography was not quite finished (it was eventually fixed up and published in 1980), but it revealed that the dross of long-ago, and perhaps not-so-long-ago, vanity had been thoroughly burnt away. "I should have resembled more closely Christ, Who had nowhere to lay his head," Sheen wrote remorsefully. "I was like Peter, who 'followed the Lord far off.'"

Reeves's important and candid biography gives us a warts-and-all portrait of a major figure in religious history, a man who preached Christianity with vigor and eloquence, and ended up himself being a model of the Christian attitude toward suffering and adversity. Like St. Peter, he was taken where he would not go; but-also like St. Peter-he evidenced a holiness of words and example that will outlast his human failings.