Selling Catholicism: Bishop Sheen and the Power of Television

Selling Catholicism: Bishop Sheen and the Power of Television. Christopher Owen Lynch. University of Kentucky Press, 1998. 160 pp.+ notes, bibliography, index. Christopher Owen Lynch's biography of Fulton Sheen is a bit like the effusive bishop himself: best when ecumenical and problematic when stretching metaphors. Lynch's premises are sound. He argues that Sheen's "Life is Worth Living" TV series helped bring Catholicism into the American mainstream. Sheen's homilies aired between 1952 and 1957, a crucial period in American life marked by Cold War fears and pressures for conformity. By linking the church of Rome to Cold War anti-communism, Sheen equated Catholicism with Americanism. This helped reverse an historical association between Catholicism and immigrants and repaired reputational damage by Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. Lynch is also on target when identifying Sheen as the prototype of modern televangelists. In many respects Sheen was the heir to Bruce Barton, taking full advantage of TV's still-limited commercial possibilities. Sheen played to the camera, used dramatic lighting, didactic props, and pithy sound bites to convey his messages. Like Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Sheen used the prestige of his office to spin teleological but apocryphal tales. His insistence on wearing his cassock on-camera lent authority to a telegenic performance. Lynch deftly contrasts Sheen with his main competition: Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale. As a Catholic rooted in Thomist scholasticism, Sheen rejected the Calvinist predestination of Graham and the soothing nostrums of Peale. Lynch demonstrates how Sheen appealed to the medieval past to strike a balance between materialism and spirituality. The effect was a theology that was more redemptive than Graham's, but imbued with a stronger sense of sin than Peale's. Lynch also argues that Sheen had a political impact. By bringing Catholicism to the fore, he softened the sort of prejudices that led Al Smith to electoral disaster in 1928. Though biases remained, by 1960 it was possible to elect John Kennedy to the presidency. Lynch is more convincing discussing Sheen's media savvy than his importance as an intellectual. He sees Sheen as the middle ground between Graham and Peale. In truth, Peale was more the centrist than Sheen, whose rabid anti-communism and gender chauvinism placed him closer to Graham than Lynch acknowledges. The left is better represented as starting with the tough liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr and ending with pacifist anti-Cold War Quakers and Anabaptists. (Ironically, Sheen's late-life opposition to the Vietnam War pushed him further left.) Lynch too often represents American religious pluralism as a triad. Lynch also tends to confuse Sheen's educational credentials with his TV sermons. …