The Teacher Who Was Asked
Fulton J. Sheen | The Life Before the Platform
The man of the Holy Hour became a scholar and a teacher. Following his ordination in 1919, Fulton Sheen pursued further studies at the Catholic University of America and at the University of Louvain in Belgium. At Louvain he received the Cardinal Mercier Prize, reportedly the first American to receive that distinction. His intellectual formation drew deeply upon St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom faith and reason were not rivals. The discipline mattered. Sheen would later be remembered for the ease with which he explained difficult subjects, but intellectual clarity is rarely effortless. It begins with a willingness to study carefully, to make distinctions, and to submit one’s own cleverness to the truth. The audience would come much later. First there was the work of becoming a priest who could teach.¹
Obedience was no less important than intellectual accomplishment. The years of study might suggest an obvious academic career, with the young priest choosing among prestigious appointments and building a reputation upon his learning. Yet a priest’s gifts are not his private possession. They are given to him for the service of Christ and His Church. Sheen later recalled that when he returned from Europe, invitations had come from Columbia University and from Oxford. He sent the letters to his bishop and asked which he should accept. Bishop Dunne answered, “Come home.” He assigned Sheen to St. Patrick’s parish in Peoria, a difficult assignment, and only later sent him to teach at Catholic University. Sheen remembered the bishop explaining that he had wanted to find out whether the young priest would be obedient. Scholarship did not exempt him from the ordinary obligations of a diocesan priest. He had to be available to the Church that had ordained him.²
From 1926 to 1950 Sheen taught at the Catholic University of America. During those years he wrote extensively. The public heard clarity; the private life required study, revision, and an extraordinary expenditure of time. Sheen himself described a standing practice of preparing a minimum of six hours for every hour of lecture. He would spend summers reading and preparing courses so that, when he stood before students, the material belonged to him rather than to his notes. The lecturer had to decide what mattered most, how an argument should unfold, and how to make its conclusion intelligible to people who did not share his training. There is a form of charity in that labor. It refuses to use learning as a wall between the speaker and the listener.³
The microphone arrived after the work was already underway. Radio was changing the way Americans encountered news, music, argument, and religious instruction. A priest addressing listeners through that medium could no longer rely on the familiar setting of a classroom or parish church. He had to make an argument clear enough to follow in a living room, yet serious enough to honor the subject.
Sheen was unusually equipped for that work because he had already spent years learning to distinguish a sound argument from an attractive phrase. His learning was not something to be set aside when the audience broadened; it was the very thing that allowed him to speak plainly without speaking superficially. In 1926 he gave Lenten talks from New York. In 1930 he was invited to fill in for two weeks on The Catholic Hour, the radio program sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men and carried on NBC. The assignment became a continuing ministry through 1950. That invitation was the culmination of the intellectual and priestly work already underway: the teacher was asked to speak, and he accepted.⁴
The move from classroom to microphone was therefore more than a change of technology. In a lecture hall, a teacher could read the room, return to a difficult point, and answer questions. Over the airwaves, the listener was unseen. Sheen had to respect that distance without surrendering the substance of Catholic teaching. The same priest who spent hours preparing a lecture now had to consider how to reach someone listening at home, perhaps without any formal philosophical education.
The task was not to win applause for the teacher but to make the truth accessible. Nor was he speaking into an abstract century. His audiences lived amid arguments about the nature of the human person, the claims of the state, and the meaning of freedom. Those struggles belong to our next episode. Here the decisive point is that the voice on the radio belonged first to a man formed by study, priestly obedience, and the hidden discipline of the Holy Hour.
In conversation, Sara Beatty observed how interesting it is that everything is being condensed. For the past hundred years, everything has been about streamlining: how can I get from one town to another faster, so instead of a county road I create an interstate; how can I converse faster with my neighbor, so I get a telephone. Everything is being streamlined down to fewer and fewer engagements. Sheen came really at the beginning of the crush of that. We are kind of at the end, or at least it feels as though we are getting toward the end, because at some point everything is going to laser focus to the Word. All words, all teaching, all knowledge, everything is going to fold itself into Christ Himself, who was the Word.
Sheen was capable of taking in very complex intellectual pursuits and making them very accessible to any hearer, from childhood upward to senior citizens. He was naturally engaging. Part of the reason is that he was given a tremendous amount of speaking gifts, a tremendous amount of charisma, and an intellectual wit that allowed him not only to engage in factual information but to make what he was instructing somewhat fun and entertaining. In the end, however, all of the information that he is sharing with other people is external to himself. He is introducing us with his best gift to the eternal world, which is Christ. When we think about that narrowing of thought, bringing us down into the simplicity of what really matters, Christ is not simple, yet it is as though the light beam focuses on one thing so that it can pass through the mirror and be amplified again. Sheen is one of those focusers. He is bringing us to the essentials in a manner that is very reflective of the joy that is to be found in Christ.⁵
What is the purpose of learning the faith if we cannot communicate it faithfully and charitably? Sheen’s example places a responsibility upon every Christian who teaches, writes, or speaks about God. Truth is not made more persuasive by being diluted, nor more honorable by being made needlessly obscure. We owe our listeners the patient labor of understanding what we mean and why it matters. When we explain a difficult truth, are we opening a door for another person or merely winning a point? The life came first. The platform, when it came, served the life that had already been formed.
Journal Questions
- When you explain a difficult truth, are you opening a door for another person or merely winning a point?
- Where has obedience to authority whether in the Church, in a family, or in a vocation redirected a plan you had already made?
- What preparation do you undertake when no one will see the hours, only the result?
Closing Prayer
Lord, you are the source of all truth and the end of every vocation. You formed Fulton Sheen through years of study and through the ordinary obedience of a priest before you gave him a larger voice. Teach us to love the truth for its own sake, to prepare carefully when no one is watching, and to open doors rather than to win points. Give us the grace to accept the work You entrust to us, whether it is hidden from the world or offered in public service. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
End Notes
¹ Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen (Image Books, 1980), and standard biographical accounts. Education at the Catholic University of America and the University of Louvain, and the Cardinal Mercier Prize, are attested in Sheen’s autobiography and secondary biographies. Exact page numbers await confirmation against the physical Image edition. Claims of a completed Roman doctorate or of Sorbonne study remain unverified and are not asserted.
² Sheen’s retrospective account of the Columbia and Oxford invitations, Bishop Dunne’s reply “Come home,” the assignment to St. Patrick’s in Peoria, and the later explanation that the bishop wished to test obedience. The sequence is consistent in biographical accounts. Further confirmation in Thomas C. Reeves, America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (Encounter Books, 2001), and diocesan records is desirable before additional detail is added.
³ Sheen’s own description of his standing practice of preparing a minimum of six hours for every hour of lecture, and of spending summers in preparation. See Treasure in Clay and related accounts of his teaching method. The specific 1937 letter to Rector Joseph Corrigan reporting seventy-five to a hundred letters a day remains unverified and is not used in the spoken narrative pending a firm citation.
⁴ Contemporary program records and biographical accounts. The 1926 Lenten talks and the 1930 invitation to The Catholic Hour (sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men and carried on NBC), which became a continuing ministry through 1950, are documented in institutional histories and secondary biographies. A short contemporary Catholic Hour passage is still needed for quotation and should be located before final scripting. Later audience estimates are not used.
⁵ Sara Beatty’s observations on the streamlining of modern life, Sheen’s capacity to make complex intellectual pursuits accessible, his gifts of speech and wit, the external character of the information he shared, and his role as one who focuses attention on Christ as the Word are drawn from the recorded conversation of Garden of Graces, Episode III.
End of Episode III essay.