The Blessed Archbishop & the Venerable Pope

As the Church celebrates last month’s beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), it is worth reviewing some of the insights he shared publicly. Many remember him as a vehement anti-communist. He warned against the destructive nature of that atheistic system and spoke of exposing its fallacies as part of his public mission. “Communism will set no rat trap to catch the rats in the barn,” he said, “but insists on the burning of the barn — that is, it remakes society by remaking man to the pattern of an economic animal.” His insights were not, however, limited to communism. The good archbishop was similarly appalled by Nazism and fascism.

Sheen wrote of the various ideologies to which man had surrendered his reason only to find that “the state has preempted it…so that now there is no reason but state reason which is fascism, or class reason which is communism as there once was race reason which was Nazism.” During the Second World War, he called Nazi paganism a menace to world Christianity and called for its destruction. He used Hitler as an example of what happens when ideology replaces God and moral truth. “Hitler had no need of God,” Sheen said. “In his own conceit, he was a god.” He mocked Hitler with his typical wit, saying he “proclaims the superiority of the German race over all the peoples of the earth with the possible exception of the Japanese, for Hitler has discovered that one of the Japanese sun-gods is a first cousin of the German god Wotan.”

Sheen saw the Catholic Church as the principal moral force standing firm against communist and Nazi totalitarianism during World War II. To him, this was not just a geopolitical struggle; it was a clash between Christianity and anti-Christian ideologies. Nazism and communism were related dangers, because both denied God and crushed human dignity. In broadcasts and writings, Sheen portrayed the Church as the guardian of truth and conscience. He saw her as a spiritually necessary counterweight to the godless regimes of the day.