The Passion Of Fulton Sheen – D. P. Noonan, 1972 ★

Enough of Fulton, Let's Talk about Me!

A challenge in writing these reviews is making it about the matter in hand, and not my feelings about a particular subject. It’s a challenge Rev. D. P. Noonan doesn’t just fail but blows completely past in this, his book-long review of the life of one of a man once widely known as “God’s press agent.”

In the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” our title character is famously mocked in rocking rhyme by former apostle Judas Iscariot: “If you could have come today you would have reached a whole nation/Israel in 4 B. C. had no mass communication.”

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s career seemed designed to address this oversight. Beginning on radio and later television, he became the face of Catholicism in an age when Catholics were still viewed by many Americans with fear and loathing. Sheen’s message was clear and salutary, employing Christian doctrine and common sense to reach an audience well beyond the traditional confines of a Catholic Mass. Late in the book, Noonan quotes Sheen on the importance of Easter:

The law He gave us was clear: life is a struggle. Unless there is a cross in our lives, there will never be the empty tomb – unless there is a crown of thorns, there will never be the halo of light – unless there is a Good Friday, there will never be an Easter Sunday.

Words to live by. Here’s the problem: For nearly all of this short book, Noonan offers too little of Sheen and too much of himself.

Who was D. P. Noonan, anyway? The jacket flap for Passion Of Fulton Sheen identifies him as assistant pastor of Saint Nicholas’ Church in Passaic, New Jersey and formerly a special assistant to Sheen. Whatever his relationship to Sheen might have been, it wasn’t that special, as this book’s introduction makes clear.

Noonan begins by describing his first meeting with Sheen as a decidedly underwhelming experience. He sought Sheen’s counsel regarding his doubts about a church appointment. Sheen made time for the young cleric, and offered words of comfort about the Christian life. Only on his journey back from Sheen’s office did it dawn on Noonan that Sheen hadn’t said anything very relevant to his situation.

Noonan then notes that one of Sheen’s many celebrity congregants, Joe DiMaggio, had a similarly off-putting experience up close, regarding Sheen’s take on DiMaggio’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe. It’s an anecdote sure to get your attention but leaves you wondering if this is a book or passive-aggressive score-settling.

“It has been said of Sheen that while he would like to be known as a popularist, he was at heart a king,” Noonan notes.

Later, he quotes an anonymous member of Sheen’s first congregation, in Soho, London:

“Things seem very confused. Then you have a talk with Sheen. Then things clear up. Then they become confused again.”

Noonan actually had written another book on Sheen before this one, Missionary With A Mike, published in 1968. No mention is made of this earlier book in The Passion Of Fulton Sheen, leaving me to wonder if this was a repackaging of that material, or whether it was a second trip to the well.

Sheen as he appeared late in life. He passed away in 1979, but remains today an oft-quoted Catholic. Image from http://epicpew.com/quotes-fulton-sheen/

Noonan’s acerbic take on Sheen’s personality certainly gets your attention and gives this book needed focus. I just wish he had done more to explain how Sheen put him off exactly. Was he too high-handed around the common folk? Was he too focused on his televised image?

Perhaps Noonan wrote about this more in Missionary With A Mike, if indeed that is a completely different book as I suspect. What you get in The Passion Of Fulton Sheen is as much about Noonan’s issues with Mother Church as with the man in the title. Written at a time when the radical Berrigan Brothers were all the rage among the Catholic intelligentsia, and Liberation Theology coming into view, Passion radiates a radical zeal that overtakes any analysis of Sheen, either as a person or as a figure.

Noonan sets the tone in Chapter 4:

The Church tends to become a ghetto, an exclusive club of middle-class respectability in league with the powers that be, far removed from the muck and mud of daily living. It has been all tied up in big buildings at home, giving financial scraps to the missions overseas. Sheen, with his indefatigable preaching and famed writing, has been for seventeen years a champion of the poor. The Church, the institution, has never really put itself on the line for the poor. The performance never matched the promise.

Later, he calls upon the example of that famous Christian martyr, Che Guevara, as “a reminder to the Church in Latin America of its unfulfilled duty to the masses, its failures to promote some kind of Christian socialism.”

All this is attention-getting prose; what does it have to do with Fulton Sheen?

Not that much. Noonan notes that Sheen early on spoke from a more socially-conscious viewpoint, but that over time his views became more conservative. Sheen even shifted rightward on the Vietnam War, apparently because of pressure from his immediate superior, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York. Could this have been what turned Noonan off?

I suspect so. Time and again, whether addressing the subject of Sheen or of the Catholic Church in toto, one gets a sense of an author frustrated by the failure of others to see the world as he does. While touching on Sheen’s many published books, his success as a radio and television commentator, and his wit [Asked about sharing a stage with a troupe of dancing girls, Sheen replied: “Even though I am on a diet, I can still look at the menu.”] Noonan returns inevitably to his own dissatisfaction with the direction of the Church post-Vatican II, sometimes connecting this with Sheen’s own career trajectory but more often not.

Vatican II was supposed to usher in an age of progressivism in the pulpits. I guess that was Noonan’s expectation, anyway. The fact it didn’t isn’t hard to understand given the nature of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, which has never been much for mixing what is God’s with what is Caesar’s.

Sheen did play a role in championing more conservative values than Noonan would have liked. Noonan spends an entire chapter on the unfairness of celibacy, and calls out Sheen for his doctrinaire attitude toward birth control:

Sheen always referred to birth control as birth patrol, for those who practice it, according to him, believe neither in birth nor control.

Sheen is a figure worthy of attention; for years there was talk of making him the first-ever American-born male saint. If Noonan wanted to drop a dime on his former superior, I just wish he had made it more interesting. He does offer a bit of detail on the big feud that took Sheen off the airwaves in the 1960s, a dispute with Cardinal Spellman that eventually landed Sheen a bishopric in what Noonan dubs both “Siberia” and “Calvary”: Rochester, New York. Apparently Spellman was selling goods to his own Church without identifying them as donations to same; Sheen called him out on this in the presence of the Pope.

That’s about the extent of the skinny Noonan delivers. Later, he notes that Sheen was as hobbled by his own personality as by animus from Spellman.

Spellman had influence with the people in power; Sheen had people-power. Spellman, not an imposing figure, was a poor speaker and an even poorer writer. However, he had a genius all his own. He was a consummate politician. He knew how to manipulate and use people to get what he wanted. Sheen never had any close friends among the powers that be and when the infighting between him and Spellman became rough, he had no friend in court to fight his case. He was surrounded by a few men who were opportunists, and many women who were just camp followers, fawners who never told him the truth about himself. They fed his voracious appetite for adulation and attention.

There is a lot to unpack in those last two sentences. Unfortunately, Noonan never bothers to do so. He spends pages instead ruminating upon the legacies of fallen liberal icons like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedy brothers, bemoaning the general direction of the Church, and shedding little light on what it was about Bishop Sheen beyond his association with mainstream Catholicism that so turned Noonan against him.