Biography by Sheen

Into the candlelit vastness of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, one day last week, drifted Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists and Communists as well as Roman Catholics, to attend a Solemn High Mass of Requiem for the soul of the late Heywood Broun. There were faces from Washington (Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter), from City Hall (Mayor LaGuardia), from Broadway (Tallulah Bankhead, George M. Cohan, George S. Kaufman, Irving Berlin), from newspaper row (pavement-pounding reporters along with Franklin P. Adams, Westbrook Pegler, Rollin Kirby, Roy W. Howard, Herbert Bayard Swope). Many friends of Heywood Broun, accustomed to going to church only for funerals and weddings, did not know when to kneel or bow. Few of them had ever heard a funeral oration like that which was presently delivered to them by the man who last spring baptized Heywood Broun a Catholic: Monsignor Fulton John Sheen.

Handsome, hollow-eyed, musical-voiced Monsignor Sheen, philosophy professor at the Catholic University of America, is one of the most brilliant U. S. pulpit and radio orators, and one of the most astute of Catholic minds. Before baptizing Broun, he instructed him in the faith for ten weeks. Before Broun died last fortnight, Monsignor Sheen administered to him the Church's last rites, and gave him a special blessing from Pope Pius XII. Heywood Broun, voluble to his friends on all other subjects, never talked much about Catholicism. To mourners at the funeral, Monsignor Sheen's address -- which he called "The Biography of a Soul" -- was a lofty revelation. But to some of Broun's friends, Monsignor Sheen's eulogy, with its references to "the Broun nobody knew" and its implication that his lifetime liberalism counted less than his hour in the vineyard, was a pain.

Heywood Broun, said Monsignor Sheen, had tried psychoanalysis, had lain on a couch for hours of "questionings on trivial incidents," but "never once did he find peace." He turned to the Church, he told Monsignor Sheen, for four reasons:

" 'Firstly, a visit I made to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. . . .

" 'Secondly, the election of Cardinal Pacelli as Pius XII convinced me that there is only one moral authority left in the world and that is the Papacy.

" 'Thirdly, a fear of death. I should dislike to appear before the judgment seat of God with my soul in the condition that I believe it is in now. . . .

" 'Fourthly, to me there is nothing more ridiculous than individualism in either economics, politics or religion. ... I love my fellow man, and particularly, the down and out, the socially disinherited and the economically dispossessed. ... I want, therefore, a religion which has a social aspect. ... I have never been a Communist and never will be a Communist. I have very often defended birth control. But I would not do it now; for I have begun to see a spiritual significance of birth.' "

Said Monsignor Sheen: "I never met a person who had a clearer premonition of death. 'Let us hurry,' he would say, 'I may not live another month.' ... At the next to the last instruction, I reminded him of the seriousness of the step which he was about to take. ... He arose from his chair, put his arm around me and said, 'Father, you're worried. You will never regret receiving me into the Church. I promise you that.' . . .

"He who might have been a Chesterton for America, as he hoped a certain literary colleague of his would one day be its Belloc, was given only one brief hour in the vineyard of the Church. . . . Thus ends the biography of a soul as far as this world is concerned. To but few men of his profession has come the thrill of living as he has lived. . . ."

Monsignor Sheen's remarks were more than funereal eloquence. They were probably intended partly as an answer to those Catholics who still viewed Heywood Broun as an unreconstructed Red, who ought never to have been accepted by the Church. And they were undoubtedly voiced, by one of the nation's most influential Catholics, as the sincerest tribute he could make to a man who had sincerely been his friend.

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