MEQUON, Wis. -- At a recent book-signing session in this Milwaukee suburb, author Thomas Reeves admitted he hadn't known much about Bishop Fulton J. Sheen before he began researching a biography. But Reeves added that the more he learned about Sheen, the more he came to admire him.

"Having written books about John Kennedy and Joseph McCarthy, I was absolutely delighted to write about someone who was heroic," said Reeves, a retired history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. "It is very difficult to find anyone who knew him who had anything much to say against him."

Reevesâ biography, "America's Bishop," is the first full biography of Sheen, who died in 1979. "Sheen will always be remembered as a man who helped set the tone of the 1950s," Reeves wrote. "For someone growing up in the 1950s, as I did, it was virtually impossible not to know about Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. His television show was widely celebrated, and his books seemed to be everywhere.

"I lost track of him in subsequent decades," he added, "and, perhaps like most people, linked him with President Eisenhower, Johnny Ray and Joe McCarthy, part of an era long gone and little lamented." But Reeves said that while "he is largely forgotten," he came to view Sheen as "the single most important Catholic in 20th Century America."

In an interview, Reeves cited four reasons for that conclusion. Foremost was Sheen's five-year run in prime time on the Dumont and ABC television networks. "Thirty million people watched him every week on television, and untold millions heard him on radio," Reeves said. "A few fundamentalists have been on the radio a long time, but they have not matched the audiences Sheen had.

"This was at a time when anti-Catholicism was still very strong in America," Reeves added. He believes Sheen's television shows "did a lot to pave the way for John Kennedy's election (as the first Catholic president.) People of all faiths watched him."

Reeves wrote that the popularity of Sheen's programs "was a sign that millions of Americans had gone beyond the crude caricatures so familiar in the nation's history, and were willing to accept Catholics as Christians and friends. It was exceedingly difficult for reasonable people to think of Fulton Sheen as a dangerous and malevolent subversive."

Sheen was also a prolific author, with 66 books to his credit. A dozen of those books are still in print. During the 1950s, Reeves wrote, "Sheen was eager to cash in on his popularity, furiously recycling his previously published materials in a blitz of books." How do those volumes stand the test of time?

"Although these publications were plentiful, unoriginal and inexpensive, they contain the usual Sheen wit and wisdom, and in intellectual content at least, they stand considerably above the Christian optimism books by Norman Vincent Peale and an assortment of 'feel good' fundamentalists to which they have been compared," Reeves wrote.

Third was Sheen's skill as a preacher. "I have not heard any Catholic begin to come close," Reeves declared. "Billy Graham called him the greatest preacher of our time."

Finally, Sheen raised millions of dollars in his role as director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, donating $10 milion of his earnings from broadcasts and writing. "My guess is that no one raised more for the Catholic Church in this country," Reeves said.

Sheen also was famed in his lifetime for converting thousands to Catholicism, including such prominent names as author Clare Boothe Luce and high-ranking U. S. Communist Louis Budenz. "It took somebody special to convert Louis Budenz and Clare Boothe Luce," said Reeves, himself a Catholic convert.

Luce, the wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, has recently been described as the Hillary Clinton of her era. Reeves called Sheen "maybe the only person who could have converted her."

Sheen, like feminist author Betty Friedan and over-the-top comedians Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison, grew up in the archetypal Middle American city of Peoria, Ill. But he spent his entire career on the east coast and became a thorough-going New Yorker.

In the book, Reeves detailed the behind-the-scenes feud between Sheen, an auxiliary bishop of New York, and New York's powerful archbishop, Cardinal Francis Spellman. Spellman's influence pushed Sheen off television, "and he drove Sheen out of the Archdiocese of New York," Reeves said. "Both of them were good men, actually," Reeves said, but he added, "there wasn't room for two Alpha-plus men in that archdiocese."

According to Reeves, a dispute over using Society funds for surplus food distribution was the flashpoint. "Quietly, both Sheen and Spellman appeared before Pius XII, and Pius sided with Sheen," Reeves said, adding that Spellman told Sheen afterwards, "I will get even with you, if it's the last thing I do." Reeves also told the Catholic Herald that he recently spoke with an elderly New York priest who said Spellman told him, "there's only room for one genius in this archdiocese."

When Sheen was appointed bishop of Rochester, N.Y., Reeves wrote, "it was shocking, front-page news," since Sheen was 71 and had no pastoral or administrative experience. He headed the diocese for three turbulent years. "He was not hidebound," Reeves pointed out. "He really believed in Vatican II. He decided if he had to go to Rochester, he would make it a model diocese" for implementing Vatican II reforms.

As bishop, Sheen "was way ahead of his time," Reeves said, referring to initiatives in ecumenism and low-income housing. "He could have accomplished more had he not hammered so hard," Reeves admitted, adding that most of Sheen's initiatives eventually came to fruition under later bishops.

Sheen also received national attention in Rochester as the nation's first Catholic bishop to denounce the Vietnam War. "Don't think Spellman's support of the war didn't play a role in that," Reeves observed.

Since the 1930s, Sheen had frequently warned against Communism. But by the time Sheen went to Rochester, "the war was a mess," Reeves said. "It was tearing the country apart. Sheen was not an ideologue, except about the Catholic faith. He doesn't really fit on any ideological scale. He was very liberal in many ways."

Reeves credits his wife, Kathie, with suggesting a biography of Sheen after their conversions in 1997. "I was trying to educate myself on Catholic America," he said. Compared to his McCarthy and JFK biographies, he added, "this was easier, there was less to hide."

Summing up Sheen, Reeves concluded that "there are not many people like that at any time, with both intellectual achievement and the ability to move the masses." He is pleased that since the book was published last fall, "people very close to him tell me I'm right on target. That matters a lot to me."

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© Superior Catholic Herald, 2002