Today the Church beatifies Fulton Sheen. Most Catholics outside the United States know him as the bishop on television: the cape, the blackboard, Life Is Worth Living. Fewer know that in 1943 the FBI opened a file on him.
PHOTO
Library of Congress, NYWT&S Collection.
Why
Sheen had preached against communism since the 1930s. In 1943 that became awkward. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies against Hitler. Criticizing Stalin sounded, to some, like undermining the war.
The first document in the file (FBI 94-4-6389) is a letter to J. Edgar Hoover dated 12 January 1943. A man in Michigan had heard Sheen the previous Sunday. He said the sermon condemned the German government so strongly that Nazi sympathizers in America would “boil with rage.” He asked the FBI to contact Sheen — not to arrest him, but to see who got angry, and so find “public enemies.”
In the same period others complained about Sheen’s attacks on Moscow. Two worries, one folder: Nazis who hated the sermon, and officials who disliked attacks on an ally.
What the FBI found
Agents kept speeches and newspaper cuttings. They also noted ordinary facts: Sheen rose early, made a Holy Hour every morning, liked chocolate ice cream, once avoided a speeding ticket by talking to the officer. There was no crime and no foreign control.
How it ended
After the war the Soviet Union was no longer an ally. Hoover changed his mind. Sheen went from a man to watch to a man to invite. They wrote to each other for years. Sheen spoke to FBI agents. In 1953 he told viewers about a man who had claimed to be a refugee with secret Communist papers. Sheen called the Bureau. They confirmed the man was a known Communist and asked Sheen to leave the case to them.
The file was released after Sheen died in 1979. It is in the FBI Vault.
In one sentence
The FBI noticed Sheen because he condemned both Nazism and communism while Washington still needed Stalin. They found a priest, not a threat. In the Cold War they used him as a voice against communism.
That is the fact. It does not make him a secret agent, and it does not stain the beatification. It shows what he would not do: stay quiet about Marxism because it was inconvenient for the government of the day.
Source: The FBI file is public. FBI Vault, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, file 94-4-6389.
https://vault.fbi.gov/Bishop%20Fulton%20Sheen
