Is It Impious to “Reassess” Fulton Sheen?

Too much establishmentarianism blinds a person to realities

Asking hard questions

It is a common enough phenomenon in Church history: a dazzling intellectual or writer starts off strong — and finishes weak. Think of Thomas Merton. I know that some people claim to find flaws in him from the first moment, but there’s no question he wrote inspiring, orthodox books for many years as Fr. Louis Merton, OSCO (just read Bread in the Wilderness sometime!), before letting his hair down (so to speak) in the 60s as he turned toward beatnik-style poetry, war protesting, liturgical experiments, Zen meditation, and interreligious dialogue.

Admittedly, Fulton Sheen did not let his hair down in the same way; there was a lot more consistency in him from start to finish. He was ever the polished and professional churchman. Yet I have noticed that some Catholics find it practically impious to raise questions about the soundness of this media figure, as if he is untouchable — as if he’s a major saint and a twentieth-century doctor of the Church.

Well, I say we must let the evidence speak for itself, in his favor, and also in his disfavor. We do not need more accelerated “crash canonizations” at this juncture of time. Tradition & Sanity is a place where we ask difficult questions and explore them honestly.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, like so many others of his generation, was full of great enthusiasm for the Second Vatican Council, and all the good it would do to renew the Church in the modern world. He was quite head over heals in love with it!

The awkward question must then be raised: Why did he fail to notice — as Archbishop Lefebvre and hundreds of other bishops at the Council had no trouble noticing — the harmful direction along which the northern European progressives were leading the entire affair? Why did he not join the large group of conservative bishops at the Council, the “Coetus Internationalis Patrum” (CIP), which was able to muster the votes of almost 900 Council Fathers on certain disputed issues?¹