Selling Catholicism: Bishop Sheen and the Power of Television by Christopher Owen Lynch (review)

BOOK REVIEWS485 In any case, these complex issues surrounding "the making of a modern university " are rehearsed against a background of special scholastic aspiration that for the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) concentrated on the seminary education of priests. The Vincentians came to Chicago from St. Mary's Seminary (founded in 1818) in Perryviile, Missouri, to establish the parish of St. Vincent de Paul in 1875. Later,Archbishop Patrick Feehan asked the Vincentians to conduct a college for men. They accepted his invitation and opened St. Vincent College in September, 1898, with a student body of about seventy and a faculty of ten. In 1907 the school's 1898 charter was revised, giving it greater academic latitude and a new name: DePaul University. There might be many things for which DePaul can claim distinction in the history of Catholic higher education in this good land, but none can trump its position in the vanguard of coeducation, a policy that escaped neither ecclesiastical notice nor stinging criticism. DePaul, in 1914, was the first Catholic college to admit women with a status entirely equal to men. The authors of the early chapters acknowledge their debt to the splendid scholarship in Lester Goodchild's "The Mission of the Catholic University in the Midwest, 1842-1980," where DePaul's ecumenical character is featured: among other pioneering policies, curricular requirements excused non-Catholic students from taking courses in religion. Chapter notes are good but would serve readers better as footnotes; the illustrations and index are excellent. Edward J. Power Boston College Selling Catholicism:Bishop Sheen and the Power ofTelevision. By Christopher Owen Lynch. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 1998. Pp. xii, 200. $24.95.) In his outstanding popular history of "The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church" —American Catholic—Charles Morris offered an assessment of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen as a most distinguished "public face of Catholicism in the mid-1950s" who was "elegant, elevated and brilliant": "all at the same time, he managed to be religious, undogmatic, humane and unthreatening ." Clearly, Morris appreciated the complexity of Sheen even as he acknowledged and admired his popularity. This perspective stands in pointed contrast to that offered by Christopher Owen Lynch in his Selling Catholicism: Bishop Sheen and the Power ofTelevision. Lynch, a professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Kean University,has written a textual analysis of forty-two episodes of Bishop Sheen's Emmy Award-winning television series, "Life Is Worth Living" (although he never quite explains how and why he settled on those particular shows). Al- 486book reviews though he never claims the expertise of a historian, he does assert in the introduction that his book "is a rhetorical study that places the bishop in the context of a wider culture" (p. 7). Here, disappointingly, Lynch fails to fulfill his selfstated goal. Despite a lengthy bibliography which contains many of the standard and essential sources in the field of American Catholicism, it is painfully obvious that Lynch is not sufficiently familiar with them to make accurate and reasonable judgments about how Bishop Sheen should be properly contextualized in American history. For example, in noting that "Catholics began to become self-critical in the late fifties," the author correctly makes reference to John Tracy Ellis. Rather than focusing on Monsignor Ellis' appraisal of the reasons behind the dismal state of American Catholic intellectualism, Lynch instead argues that Ellis "was one of the first to admit in a public forum the limitations and mediocrity of Catholic ideology" (p. 5)! Surely, this misrepresents the historical significance of Ellis' critical essay. On a more positive note, Lynch constructs his thesis on several basic ideas: that Sheen helped pave the road to ecumenism, that his message was an especially timely one as Catholics moved into the mainstream of American life and culture, and that Americans in the fifties turned to religion to ease their fears and alleviate the tensions of the ColdWar world. His Chapter 4 on Marian piety ("A Television Troubador Sings His Medieval Lady's Praises"), constructed around the unifying theme of Sheen's idealization of the Middle Ages, is the book's best. Here, although he offers nothing new...