Fulton Sheen in Alabama

I’ve spent the past week or so on a deep dive on Catholicism and the Deep South for a parish presentation. I foolishly thought I could do a decent job surveying the Florida missions, Catholics and racial issues from antebellum years through the Civil Rights movement with this fun addendum on Sheen, all in one hour.

Hahahahaha.

I ended up spending way too much time blathering on about the Importance of History, and found myself at the end of part I with 15 minutes to go. Well. Rush job, it was, for the rest of it.

I’ll be sharing parts of that presentation here over the week, and I thought I’d start with the Sheen info.

Fulton Sheen was, of course, an evangelist. His evangelism was not just limited to the page and recordings. He evangelized in person, and he put his money where his mouth was.

There is probably more information out there, but my quick bit of research turned up the following interesting tidbits.

(Sources: the Birmingham News archives, Sheen’s autobiography, Treasure in Clay and the book The South’s Tolerable Alien: Catholics in Alabama and Georgia 1945-1970. )

First, funding:

Fulton Sheen had resources. Resources through the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, of course, but also funds bequeathed to him personally by donors and those he simply raised for causes in which he believed.

Some of his Alabama-related gifts from the 1940’s-50’s. The parishes are all in the northern part of the state, in what is now the Diocese of Birmingham (But during this period – and until 1969 – part of Mobile.)

• $7000 to St. Margaret’s in Birmingham. (He apparently attended the dedication of the church, but I can find no record)
• Sometime between 1949-1952, contributed the altar for St. William in Guntersville
• 1949 contributed funds for a parish for Black Catholics, Immaculate Conception, which at his request was renamed Our Lady of Fatima.
• 1951 Contributed funds to St. Thomas in Montevallo
• Unknown year – $5000 for Holy Infant of Prague, Trussville
• Funds for Our Lady Queen of Heaven Chapel in Margaret Mines, a coal mining center that boomed and busted and is a stop in the road now. But according to this, Sheen visited:

One of Margaret’s greatest events was a visit by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who had a popular weekly 1950s TV show called “Life Is Worth Living.” He’d been invited by a highly optimistic local lady, and surprised everyone by actually coming to Margaret, where he delivered a fine homily to a huge crowd in the town park.

According to A.B. Crane, in a talk given to the St. Clair Historical Society in 1994, “… He spoke with the same interest, same detail, the same thoughtfulness, the same expression that he would have used if there had been five or ten thousand people there.”

He spoke at some conventions held in Birmingham and visited churches while he was here. Some clippings. From 1943:

1953:

(Always love the ads in old publications)

One of Sheen’s close local connections was with priests of the “North Alabama Mission Band” – priests who traveled this part of the state providing Mass and other sacraments, as well as evangelizing in rural areas which had Catholics, but no priests. He even spent a week with the band, evangelizing in the area, at one point.

Sheen was close friends with Archbishop Toolen of Mobile, and through him funded projects down that way, including the Martin de Porres maternity hospital for Black women and their newborns.

 In April 1947 ground was broken for this new project. At this ceremony Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen was the principal speaker. “This hospital is really a national institution, not just one for the city of Mobile,” said Msgr. Sheen after disclosing that contributions sent to him for this hospital had been received from every state in the Union.

Application was made for Federal funds as provided under the Hill-Burton Law. In 1949 this application was approved and one-third of the cost was assured by the Government. On Feb. 2, 1949, construction was started on the new hospital and finally in April of 1950 it was opened for patients.

On May 14th of the same year the dedication ceremony was held on the hospital grounds. Msgr. Sheen, whose continued interest and generosity had made the new Blessed Martin de Porres Hospital a reality, was again the principal speaker The total cost of this building was $616,000.00. Practically $225,000.00 was given by Bishop Toolen, Msgr. Sheen, and friends; $195,000.00 was provided by the Federal Government; $11,- 000.00 was donated by the Negroes of Mobile.

An interesting sidebar, from Jerome Gary Cooper, who entered Notre Dame in 1954 with the encouragement and support of Sheen:

Growing up in a devout Catholic family in segregated Mobile, Alabama, I had never heard of the University of Notre Dame until I was eleven or twelve years old. It was 1948 when Archbishop Fulton Sheen of New York, with a police escort, pulled up in front of my home on a dirt street in a black neighborhood in Mobile. He was accompanied by Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. My Daddy was raising funds to build a hospital for black folk, and the archbishop heard of the effort and wanted to help. Under Jim Crow laws at the time, black women were not admitted in hospitals in Mobile and had to have their babies at home. My Daddy, a graduate of Hampton Institute, had plans to change that. A popular radio personality, Archbishop Sheen was a nationally known figure and helped raise funds. While visiting, he asked me if I had heard of the University of Notre Dame. I told him I had not. Then he told me that it was a great college and one day, if I wanted to attend, he would be happy to write a letter of recommendation and help me get a scholarship.

In 1950, Mobile’s first African-American hospital opened not far from my home. It was named Blessed Martin De Porres Hospital. By then, Notre Dame had become my college of choice. A few years later, I wrote to Archbishop Sheen, and he wrote back: “Thank you for your kind and warmhearted letter, which brought to mind the happy occasions when I visited with your wonderful family in Mobile…. You have my hearty approval to use my name on your application to Notre Dame University. I shall be delighted to recommend you.” I still have the letter today. So with the help of an academic scholarship, I headed to Notre Dame in the late summer of 1954, climbing aboard the all-black “Jim Crow car” on a train from Mobile to Chicago. It was called the Hummingbird.

Tallassee is a small town between Montgomery and Auburn. In the 1950’s, a wealthy woman from Tallassee got interested in Catholicism and read her way into the church. She got in contact with Sheen, who told her to visit Catholic churches in her area – she said there weren’t any. He told her if she built one, he would preach the first Mass:

No one in Tallassee would sell land to the Catholics.  Yet, the Blounts owned a lot of property around town and especially along Gilmer Avenue, the main thoroughfare that is Alabama Highway 14 as well as Alabama Highway 229.  Roberts and Mildred handed over the land deed to the Vincentians, mission priests who were around the area, and the current St. Vincent de Paul Church was born.

The Colonel later joined his wife and converted to Catholicism, as well.  The Vincentian priests went door-to-door in Tallassee and invited people to the opening of the church.  They encountered no resistance.  On opening day, Archbishop Fulton Sheen visited Tallassee and indeed, he spoke at the first Mass!  The appearance of Sheen in Tallassee was big news in its day, and so many people crowded into St. Vincent’s, people gathered at the Armory nearby to listen to the radio broadcast on that day in 1954.

Finally!

From rural Alabama, to mission bands, to downtown Birmingham to Black Catholics fighting Jim Crow, we end up with…Melkites.

Sheen was Bi-Ritual and celebrated many liturgies in the Melkite rite.

In 1958, the Melkite National Convention was held here in Birmingham. I’ve written before about the long-standing presence of Eastern Catholics (as well as Orthodox and the Jewish population). 2000 Melkite Catholics gathered and Sheen celebrated the closing Mass.

A recording was made of the Mass and released with Sheen narrating. It’s very interesting!

By the way – the 1958 date is definitely incorrect. This convention was in 1960, using the newspaper archives as a resource – the 1960 convention is identified as the third national convention of this type, and there’s no mention of a 1958 convention in Birmingham.