A thin, unsatisfactory examination of Bishop Fulton Sheen's rise to
television prominence in the 1950s. Lynch (Communication and
Theatre/Kean Univ.) sets out to examine how the bishop, the most
popular religious TV personality of that decade, made Catholicism
appeal to mainstream Americans. Lynch found and analyzed not just
transcripts but the actual tapes from Sheen's Life Is Worth Living
program. Because of this, he is able to demonstrate how Sheen
played off his audience with gestures, eye contact, and camera
angles, showing the bishop to have been a very sophisticated
manipulator of the new medium. Lynch also does a nice job in
reviewing the content of Sheen's half-hour monologues; the chapter
on his incorporation of Marian tradition into 1950s rhetoric on
women and the family is the best in the book. That said, Selling
Catholicism falls short because it usually fails to connect Sheen
to the wider culture, even though he addressed it so handily. Lynch
ventures all sorts of general statements about McCarthyism, nuclear
anxieties, and class mobility, but he never explains these
generalizations in any systematic or analytical way. Such vagueness
is due in no small measure to Lynch's apparent lack of secondary
research about the postwar period in America (as indicated in his
bibliography). In the third chapter, for example, Lynch asserts
that Sheen's emphasis on the hierarchical, "corporate" nature of
society attracted many in the '50s because the era emphasized the
"subordination of the individual," an intriguing yet undeveloped
(and unproven) assertion. Throughout the book, paragraphs culminate
with sweeping statements that strain credibility. Useful for its
assessments of Sheen's sermons. Yet Lynch has missed the mark he
set for himself: tying Sheen's popularity to larger cultural
trends. (Kirkus Reviews)
" When the popularity of Milton Berle's television show began to
slip, Berle quipped, ""At least I'm losing my ratings to God "" He
was referring to the popularity of ""Life Is Worth Living"" and its
host, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. The show aired from 1952 to 1957, and
Sheen won an Emmy, beating competition that included Lucille Ball,
Jimmy Durante, and Edward R. Murrow. What was the secret to Sheen's
on-air success? Christopher Lynch examines how he reached a diverse
audience by using television to synthesize traditional American
Protestantism with a reassuring vision of Catholicism as patriotic
and traditional. Sheen provided his viewers with a sense of
stability by sentimentalizing the medieval world and holding it out
as a model for contemporary society. Offering clear-cut moral
direction in order to eliminate the anxiety of cultural change, he
discussed topics ranging from the role of women to the perils of
Communism. Sheen's rhetoric united both Protestant and Catholic
audiences, reflecting -and forming- a vision of mainstream, postwar
America. Lynch argues that Sheen's persuasive television
presentations helped Catholics gain social acceptance and paved the
way for religious ecumenism in America. Yet, Sheen's work also
sowed the seeds for the crisis of competing ideologies in the
modern American Catholic Church.
General
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