America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen

By Melissa Brayer Hess and Marlene Monfiletto Nice

Book Overview

Among Fulton J. Sheen's thousands of converts were celebrities such as Clare Booth Luce and Henry Ford II, and former communists Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley. Reeves discusses these conversions and Sheen's close friendship with J. Edgar Hoover, and details for the first time the struggle between Sheen and his chief rival, Francis Cardinal Spellman, a battle of ecclesiastical titans that led all the way to the Pope and to Sheen's final humiliation and exile. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1893554252
• ISBN13: 9781893554252
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Length: 479 Pages
• Weight: 2.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A Brilliant Cleric: He Told Us So Himself

Fulton J. Sheen will never be canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church for two obvious reasons: his sins are bright scarlet and we know them too well. Sheen established a television intimacy with the American public in the 1950's that only a few individuals have achieved-Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson come to mind-through his apostolic use of that explosive new video medium. I was a lad in Catholic elementary school...

Wonderful book about a very great man.

This is a book that has been ignored by the media which does not want to hear about good Catholic clergy. The media only wants to know about scandal in the church - because the Catholic Church and that which it really stands for(as contrasted with the deedsof the fallible priests,and lay Catholics that can be found within it) is the mortal enemy to secular humanism, sexual license, abortion and the "if it FEELS right, do it"...

A Great Book

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I found this book to be not only an excellent read, but I thought that Reeves truly makes a case for the canonization of Fulton Sheen. While not ignoring Sheen's vanity or love of the good life, Reeves points out that Sheen often emptied his pockets to help someone in need and that he worked tirelessly for the conversion of sinners. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and grew to respect Bishop...

Extraordinary Biography--Extraordinary Man

Thomas Reeves's biography of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) is superbly crafted. This is not hagiography, for Bishop Sheen had faults and flaws--pride and an inclination to luxury chief among them, Reeves tells us. But Reeves's balanced and thoroughly researched study reveals a man of whom it truly is not too much to say that he, Sheen, was holy. For Archbishop Sheen, Reeves explains, "believed himself driven by...