At four years old, I would drag my little chair in front of the television and sit enthralled whenever Life Is Worth Living with Bishop Fulton Sheen came on. My younger brother and sister, oblivious of the riveting man on the screen, played with their blocks and dolls behind me.
My mother told me this. I remember none of it.
We were Presbyterians, so there was no particular reason for me to be fascinated by a Catholic bishop who, as my mother quipped, “swooped into view like Loretta Young in a ball gown.” It turns out she wasn’t far off. Loretta Young was in fact a very close friend of Sheen’s.
But apparently, at four years old, I was captivated.
The seed sprouts
Which may help explain what happened 30 years later, when I found myself increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church—and terrified to approach a priest. I had never actually met one. Priests seemed to possess an otherworldly authority that didn’t exactly jibe with my rather libertine views at the time.
Perhaps my four-year-old brain had stored Bishop Sheen’s steadfastness as sternness, his clarity as strictness. Or perhaps sin had just made me afraid of surrendering to God’s call.
Sheen himself wrote, “Truth is like life; it has to be taken in its entirety or not at all….We must welcome truth even if it reproaches and inconveniences us—even if it appears in the place where we thought it could not be found.”
By my thirties, I had begun to long for that Truth. And it terrified me.
I was afraid of how I would have to change. I worried about how many friends I might lose. And I had a horror that becoming a Catholic would somehow turn me into a bland, smiling zombie who asked strangers in shopping malls, “Are you saved?”
But somewhere in the back of my mind was Fulton Sheen.
The solidity of his teaching—the sense that what he said was not merely his opinion but true—had lodged itself in me decades earlier. It became a thorn in my side, a recurring irritation that grew increasingly difficult to ignore. Apparently, the four-year-old in the little chair had been paying attention.
Our Lady to the Rescue
Not long after the pull toward the Catholic Church became too strong to resist, a friend invited me to pray the Rosary in the very building where Fulton Sheen had taught philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. I barely knew what a Rosary was.
That evening, I listened to the muffled voices around me repeating Hail Mary after Hail Mary. As I began to catch on, I slowly joined in. Then an unseen hand tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a Rosary. I have prayed it ever since.
That Rosary became the lifeline Our Lady used to draw me into the Church. Looking back now, the whole thing seems mischievously providential: a Presbyterian four-year-old mesmerized by Fulton Sheen on television; a wayward thirty-something afraid of priests and resisting the truth; and finally, a Rosary placed into my hand in the very chapel where Fulton Sheen would have prayed for the salvation of souls—with a statue of St. Thomas Aquinas looking on! (I would later become a Third-Order Dominican, which I’ve written about here.)
God had secretly been laying breadcrumbs for a very long time.
I believe that when we get to heaven, we will discover whose prayers helped haul us into the Barque of Peter. We may meet the grandmother we never knew was praying for us, the religious sister who offered a Rosary for some unknown soul, or the saint who took a particular interest in our salvation.
And when I see Fulton Sheen, I think I may have a question for him. “Was that you?” Because I have a sneaking suspicion our new Blessed may be somewhere near the top of my list.
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Source of Sheen quotation: Lift Up Your Heart: A Guide to Spiritual Peace by Fulton J. Sheen, page 34, Liguori/Triumph publishers, Liguori Missouri, 1997.
Image: ABC Radio, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
