Overview

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.

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Table of Contents

Reviews

-About the power of television and how one man used it so effectively. [UNVERIFIED--GARBLED IN TRANSITION TO NEW DATABASE]- -- Journal of American History -Named the 1999 Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association.- -- -Not only was Fulton Sheen the only ostensibly religious broadcaster to ever be commercially viable on television, but he enjoys residual popularity today.- -- John P. Ferre, University of Louisville About the power of television and how one man used it so effectively. [UNVERIFIED--GARBLED IN TRANSITION TO NEW DATABASE] -- Journal of American History Named the 1999 Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association. -- Not only was Fulton Sheen the only ostensibly religious broadcaster to ever be commercially viable on television, but he enjoys residual popularity today. -- John P. Ferre, University of Louisville About the power of television and how one man used it so effectively. [UNVERIFIED--GARBLED IN TRANSITION TO NEW DATABASE] -- Journal of American History Named the 1999 Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association. -- Not only was Fulton Sheen the only ostensibly religious broadcaster to ever be commercially viable on television, but he enjoys residual popularity today. -- John P. Ferre, University of Louisville Journal of American History -- About the power of television and how one man used it so effectively. Named teh 1999 Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association. -- Journal of American History -- About the power of television and how one man used it so effectively.

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)

<p> Journal of American History -- About the power of television and how one man used it so effectively.

Author Information

Christopher Lynch is an assistant professor and freshman seminar director in the Department of Communication and Theatre at Kean University, New Jersey.

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