Monsignor's Tenth

Great is the Roman Catholic Church. Princes--and politicians--she has in plenty, and many a good priest. But her nearest equivalent to a great preacher is Radiorating Father Coughlin. Last week a son of Mother Church in whom she can take greater pride (he, as well as Father Coughlin, counts his hearers in millions) celebrated his tenth anniversary as a radio preacher on the National Council of Catholic Men's weekly Catholic Hour (NBC). Monsignor Fulton John Sheen celebrated the occasion appropriately, by preaching over the radio. His subject: "Memories."

Lean, black-a-vised, hollow-eyed, Monsignor Sheen is a persuasive, lucid speaker, with a well-cultivated voice, who can make religion sensible and attractive to great masses of people. Though his official job is teaching philosophy at the Catholic University in Washington, he fills 150 speaking dates a year. Three weeks ago he did not let an attack of grippe keep him from engagements in St. Louis and Cleveland, nor a fever of 102DEG prevent him from preaching at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, where for the tenth year he was Lenten orator.

Born 44 years ago in Illinois, where his Uncle Dan Sheen was law partner of Agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll, Fulton Sheen made a splash as a scholar in Europe, returned to Peoria with an invitation in his pocket to teach at Catholic University. But his Bishop, instead of telling Father Sheen what a bright boy he was and bidding him Godspeed, put him in a poor, tough Peoria parish for two years.

That was probably the last time that anyone suggested that there was anything inadequate about Fulton J. Sheen. With the spread of the Catholic Hour (from 22 to 95 NBC stations), Monsignor Sheen gets 3,000 to 6,000 letters a day, the Hour itself draws 27,000 a week, has mailed out 1,750,000 copies of Orator Sheen's talks.

Take away Father Coughlin's microphone and Social Justice and there would be little left but a parish priest. But Monsignor Sheen is much more than a pulpiteer: he is one of the Church's ablest converters. Much in demand for instructing converts, he spends ten hours a week at this quiet, heart-&-soul job. Some of his more notable converts: the late Hoovercrat Horace A. Mann and his wife, the late Heywood Broun, whom Monsignor Sheen baptized, gave last rites to and buried (TIME, Jan. 1). Monsignor Sheen is now preparing Henry Ford's grandson Henry II for reception into the Church and marriage with a Catholic, Ann McDonnell. But on none of his big-name pupils did Monsignor Sheen lavish more time & trouble than he did on a convert who brought him no temporal glory: his Negro cook.

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