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42 兩 L O YA L D I S S E N T worked for the United States Bishops’ Conference on Latin American issues. McGuire had also served as head of the group of religious orders with foreign missions. Much of his work consisted of fund-raising, and this put him in conflict with Fulton Sheen, who, as the director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, was responsible for raising money for the foreign missions. Sheen emphasized that donations to the Propagation of the Faith went to the pope, but did not help the individual religious orders directly. Given these circumstances, McGuire was not a fan of Sheen’s and had a raft of anti-Sheen stories that he told me almost nonstop on the flight to Rochester. For example, a missionary priest came to see Sheen and described the difficult conditions in which he worked. As the missioner was leaving, Sheen took off his watch with a flourish and said, ‘‘Here Father, I wish I could give you more, but take my watch to help your work.’’ Added McGuire, ‘‘Sheen used to buy those cheap watches by the gross!’’ McGuire and I sat in the last pew in the cathedral. As the procession entered, everyone looked around, and there at the end was Fulton Sheen. As people saw him, you could hear many gasp, ‘‘He’s so short!’’ As McGuire explained to me, Sheen was self-conscious about his short stature, which is why you never saw anybody else on the TV screen with him. Sheen, like the rest of us, had his faults. His years in Rochester were not happy, but it was truly unfair to ask him to run a diocese at age seventy -one, when he had no previous experience in pastoral ministry in a diocese. All must acknowledge Sheen’s extraordinary role on national TV in the 1950s, however, talking about spirituality and God. No spiritual leader since has ever done anything close to what Fulton Sheen did with his primetime TV show. My relations with Sheen were few and formal but cordial before the strike. I called to inform him about my situation at the beginning of the strike. Dan Maguire, who was in my room at the time, remembers (I don’t) that I told him I would be willing to return to Rochester to work as a priest in the diocese, but Sheen, who was cordial and noncommittal, told me to keep him informed about what was going on at CUA. After the strike I sent him further information. He thanked me in a letter and in- CUA: The Early Years 兩 43 vited me to stop by when I was in Rochester and fill him in on what had happened at CUA. When I next saw him, he was friendly and urged me to help him think through the role of Catholic grammar schools in the church today. But we never mentioned CUA or the strike. Again, however, I was in the dark about several things at the time of the strike. On the Monday morning before calling me, McDonald called Bishop Sheen to inform him that he was going to dismiss me from the university. Sheen apparently offered no objection but told McDonald he did not want me back in Rochester but would willingly allow me to teach elsewhere. This is a fascinating piece of information. It shows that the bishops, in accord with what Archbishop Vagnozzi said later, most definitely wanted to make a public example of me. They could very easily have gone to Bishop Sheen and persuaded him to call me back to Rochester for pastoral reasons. Frankly, this was the ordinary method of getting rid of a priest who was serving outside his diocese. But the bishops clearly wanted to send a signal to other liberal-minded priests. As it so often does in such circumstances, this course of action only backfired. Further Developments I thought that the matter of my tenure and ‘‘unorthodoxy’’ had been settled with the announcement, on April 24, 1967, that I had been reinstated and promoted. Just recently, however, I found out that this was not the case.8 A few months later O’Boyle wrote to Bishop Alexander Zaleski of Lansing, Michigan, the chair of the bishops’ committee on doctrine, that the executive committee of the board of trustees of CUA had unanimously endorsed his request to have the committee on doctrine examine my orthodoxy...

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