As Bishop Fulton Sheen’s beatification approaches on September 24, St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry is drawing attention to a lesser known period of Sheen’s life: the three years he served as Bishop of Rochester, New York.
While Sheen is globally recognized as an extremely prominent Catholic media personality and prolific author, his years in Rochester are when he served as the local ordinary (bishop). This time is also, St. Bernard’s Vice President and Academic Dean Dr. Matthew Kuhner suggests, when Sheen may be clearly seen growing in virtue.
From celebrity to Rochester bishop
October 23 to 25, St. Bernard’s will host a conference that focuses on Fulton Sheen’s theology and sanctity, but also on his legacy in Rochester. If Peoria and New York are two legs of the three-legged stool of Sheen’s life, Dr. Kuhner says, Rochester is the third.
When Sheen arrived in Rochester, New York, in 1966 after being appointed bishop of the diocese, 3,000 people were waiting for him at the airport. At this point, while he had been Auxiliary Bishop of New York since 1951, he was quite famous for his media appearances. His television show Life is Worth Living had a weekly audience in the 1950s of approximately 30 million weekly viewers. He was also known for participating in the Second Vatican Council.
Kuhner shares that Sheen was given the choice of several episcopal sees and chose to become Bishop of Rochester; it was the only time he was the sitting bishop of a diocese.
Legacy as bishop
“This is where you see him be a bishop,” Dr. Kuhner says. We know what Bishop Sheen thinks about many issues of the era – from communism to war – but it is in Rochester where people can see Sheen’s approach to governing the diocesan Church.
Only several years after the Second Vatican Council, Kuhner says that Rochester in these years was a “petri dish” wherein Sheen implemented aspects of the Council.
Indeed, in 1969 Sheen ordained the first permanent deacon in the United States after the permanent diaconate was restored. He encouraged the formation of some of the first pastoral councils in parishes.
He also emphasized the involvement of lay people in the Church, forming an 8-person lay review board of the seminary. He opened the seminary to lay people, which laid the groundwork for St. Bernard’s to educate people in the faith even after the seminary shut down years later.
He also didn’t hesitate to get involved outside of Church grounds, “using the Church’s influence, wealth, and authority,” according to Kuhner, to get involved in urban ministry and service to the poor.
Kuhner shares one example of Bishop Sheen becoming involved in social justice issues when structural racism and redlining were prominent in the area. The Kodak film company was located in Rochester and the company bought middle managers' houses as a benefit — if they were white. Sheen didn’t just speak against racism, he bought homes for managers who were people of color.
A time of humility
As history attests, Bishop Sheen served only three short years in Rochester; he resigned less than a year before his 75th birthday, becoming a titular bishop of a diocese in Wales. But there’s another level to his short tenure, one that was perhaps a lesson in humility.
Kuhner explains that when Bishop Sheen came to Rochester, he moved quickly in making changes. He made changes at the seminary and the newspaper, he released an unbelievable number of pastoral letters, and he changed the Confirmation age, just to cite a few examples.
One of his vicars reportedly said, “Slow down, Bishop,” and Sheen replied, “I don’t have time to slow down.”
When he left Rochester, he apologized to the priests of the diocese for sometimes “monologuing” when he should have been dialoguing.
The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, Kuhner shares, was when Sheen wanted to sell a small inner city parish so that the federal government could use the land for public housing. Moving with his now well-known haste, he offered the parish to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development before he consulted with the pastor or the parishioners of the church to be sold.
There was an uproar -- priests were unhappy and so were lay Catholics. At one point, people stood in the street throwing pebbles at his car.
“He stared his failure in the face,” Kuhner says. “What he had to go through brought him low.” In the wake of this failure, he resigned as Bishop of Rochester and never completely returned to the celebrity status he had prior. “He prays for the Church, he prays for the world.”
Sanctification
Kuhner points out that Sheen is not being beatified solely because of his brilliant books and media presence. He is being beatified, as all Blesseds are, because they lived a life of virtue (as well as have been confirmed as an intercessor for a miracle). For a man that admitted that he was prone to vanity, Kuhner says, Sheen’s time in Rochester may well have been the path to his sanctification. “The humility of his failure resulted in a spiritual disposition that was incredible.”
He communicated this new understanding in a poem he wrote and distributed to his diocesan priests in the 1969 on the occasion of his 50th anniversary of priestly ordination:
"I see that if Secular Man turns us off,
It is because we give him only paperback sociology,
And not the Theology of the Crucified.
The doubting world, like Thomas, will believe
Only when we too show the red scars of love."
And indeed, Kuhner says, it may be these scars that make Bishop Sheen relatable. “If what it means to be an American saint is to be Fulton Sheen, who can proclaim the Gospel with such eloquence to 30 million people a week, I cannot do that,” Kuhner explains. “A crucial part of sanctity is not just preaching the truth, but being willing to be deconstructed by it and rebuilt.”
An ongoing legacy
Part of the impetus behind St. Bernard’s upcoming conference “The Life, Thought, and Holiness of Fulton J. Sheen: Proclaiming Christ and the Wisdom of the Cross” is to ensure that the attention given to Sheen’s legacy around the beatification is not just a "flash in the pan."
The conference will look at Sheen not only as a popular communicator, but as a “thinker, scholar, and theologian,” says Kuhner. In addition, there will be a keynote address by Monsignor Jason Gray, Executive Director of the Archbishop Sheen Foundation, on Sheen’s legacy in Rochester and interviews with faculty members who were ordained by the famous bishop.
Cheryl Hughes, author of the landmark book, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: Convert Maker, will also be offering a keynote on the spirituality and devotion that served as the engine for his work as an evangelist and bishop.
Sheen left St. Bernard’s his personal library and his manuscripts. Visitors can view his pectoral cross as well as his academic regalia, awards that he won, and other memorabilia at an exhibit on St. Bernard’s campus in Rochester.
The conference will also be a spiritual retreat – a reminder again that at the heart of Sheen’s legacy is his love for Christ, especially in the Blessed Sacrament.
On the occasion of the opening of the Sheen Archives at St. Bernard’s in 1976, Sheen had this to say about his own life:
There is no complete explanation of Fulton J. Sheen in these books, in these tapes. You have to look for a secret from the outside, where knowledge is converted into wisdom, and that is done only at the feet of Christ and his Blessed Sacrament.
