Fulton Sheen & Religious Broadcasting

Mark Tooley: Hello, this is Mark Tooley president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy here in Washington DC with the pleasure today of talking to Dr. Kirk Farney, Vice President for Alumni Relations at Wheaton College who has a new book out that we’re going to discuss: Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology and the Radio Ministries of Fulton Sheen and Walter Maier. I think those of us of a certain age will know who Bishop Fulton Sheen was, a legendary Catholic bishop, radio broadcaster and television star in the 1950s and 1960s. The other personality Walter Maier was on The Lutheran Radio Hour for a couple of decades but not as familiar to most of us.

Kirk Farney: That’s part of the reason why his story needs to be told. When he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in January of 1950 at the age of 56, he was by far the largest religious broadcaster on the globe. In all countries all the way around the globe there were 20 million people tuning in a week to hear him, and The Lutheran Hour remains the longest continuously running religious broadcast. But it was Walter Maier who was a true national celebrity at that time, and even Lutherans today by and large have forgotten the man and certainly aren’t aware of the impact that he and then of course Fulton Sheen on The Catholic Hour had.

Mark Tooley: It would be hard pressed to name a national Lutheran personality today, wouldn’t we?

Kirk Farney: You would think that Lutherans would remember one of the few that was a true national personality! His son, Paul Maier, who is an aging scholar in his 90s and was very helpful in the book, is a scholar in and pretty well known in Missouri Synod Lutheran circles, but Walter Maier dying at such a young age got a lot of attention at that time but then it faded off.

Mark Tooley: Kirk, why did you write this book and what relevance does it have today for Christians in the public square of America, particularly in the media?

Kirk Farney: It was a bit of a circuitous route to get to this topic; it didn’t take me long to get there but it went through some circles. I decided in 2008 to leave a 26-year career on wall street and pursue a PhD in American Religious History at Notre Dame under Mark Knoll and one of the things that at that time with the economy in a terrible situation, I contemplated what might I be able to write on for a dissertation that would touch my love of theology as well as contemporary issues, in particular issues having to do with how a marketplace was affecting a society and national calamity and the like. And so, the natural place to start was what did preachers preach about regarding the great depression during the Great Depression; were they preaching jeremiads, were they preaching the Social Gospel, were they preaching eternal matters? What was it that they were focusing on, and one of the easiest places to get sermons from that period were some of the network radio preachers because they published their sermons at the end of each radio season? So, I started reading Walter Maier’s sermons which began on network radio in 1930 and Fulton Sheen’s sermons which began on a different network in 1930. I started finding these amazing parallels in way they talked about theological issues, as well as found amazing parallels in their personal biographical stories which I don’t think anyone had noticed before and with all of that it was really amazing to study this confluence of national calamity the emergence of mass media being radio, which was becoming popular so quickly and evolution within the pastoral office and these guys really accomplished something remarkable during this era so that really got my attention. So I started focusing on just them because you have this Lutheran and Catholic in 1930 which were two significant religious groups in America but were both for the most part on the periphery of the mainstream Christian landscape at that time, and I just really wanted to study what it was that they said, the most important and the most fascinating part of that and the key part of this book is the substantive topics that they wove into their sermons, and the theological substance as well as contemporary application without ever getting into politics or anything like that that could be really divisive. And they pulled off something that was really rather remarkable.

Mark Tooley: I assume that both were more mainstream and more upbeat about American democracy than was the notorious Father Charles Coughlin back in the 1930s.

Kirk Farney: Yes, he was in a category all of his own and he of course as time went on became more severe and more harsh and more anti-Semitic and vocal about all kinds of things. And Fulton Sheen in particular would sometimes be asked about Father Coughlin in Detroit and kind of stepped back and just made it very clear without being explicitly critical of his fellow Catholic priests that I’m talking about matters that are a bit different than that and certainly did not go into the political arena other than that both Maier and Sheen were very vocal anti-Communists, but they did not talk about public policy issues or elections or anything like that at all.

Mark Tooley: Now it would be my understanding that in the mid-20th century there was somewhat of a transition in American religious life and that the traditional distrust that existed between Protestants and Lutherans perhaps began to subside. Perhaps there was greater ecumenism in the wake of World War II. Is that accurate and was that reflected in the lives of these two broadcasters?

Kirk Farney: It’s not entirely linear but there certainly was a trajectory if you think about when Fulton Sheen went on The Catholic Hour in 1930 that was on NBC, he was so well spoken and spoke in an ecumenical enough way that he attracted many non-Catholic listeners. But if you think about it,1930 is still only two years after the Al Smith run for the presidency, which brought out so much vocal, and in many cases, vitriolic, anti-Catholicism so he really stepped into that and in my mind, Fulton Sheen was probably the number one reason why Americans came to see Catholics as their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s not to say they all did but he certainly put an American, amiable face on Catholicism, and the theology that he was preaching on the radio made people who were not Catholic realize wow, he’s not sounding as different from what my Presbyterian pastor or my Methodist preacher or whomever was saying last Sunday. So, I think he closed that gap. Lutherans on the other hand, especially Missouri Synod Lutherans which is what Walter Maier was, were much more sectarian in the way they approached their ecclesial relationships. And so, while there wasn’t anti-Lutheranism per se, there was in World War I in that many Lutherans were Germans, and so there was a lot of emotion around that, but there wasn’t anti-Lutheranism as such particularly, but the Lutherans were kind of off to the side and not attracting a lot of attention. So, Walter Maier comes in and makes it a very American sounding, American Protestant sounding, even Evangelical sounding platform, and is attracting a lot of attention from people across the denominational spectra, as well as people who are not churched.

Mark Tooley: Now, the rise of specifically Evangelical media did not really occur until after World War II, so it’s really looking into a passage to see a Mainline Protestant or a Lutheran to have had such a large public presence as Maier did in the 1930s, isn’t it?

Kirk Farney: It really is a very unique thing and what’s so amazing is Walter Maier certainly had law Gospel elements that a typical Lutheran pastor or preacher would have had. But he was really hitting on topics like the atonement and the authority of Scripture and sanctification and national sin. He did do Jeremiads from time to time and really brought that together in a way that Evangelicals and even fundamentalists at that time, and there probably wasn’t as distinct a definitional split at that time as we would have now embraced; he was very well liked within those circles. Clarence Jones put him on the radio in Ecuador to reach part of the world just because he thought he had such a conservative, dynamic, theological message. He was well received in those committees. He was well received by Ray Edmond who was the president of Wheaton College and was invited to speak at Wheaton College a number of times. As a matter of fact, when he died in January of 1950, he was supposed to be a banquet speaker at Wheaton College in February of that year but died unexpectedly. He had a personal relationship with Billy Graham because Billy Graham thought so highly of his radio broadcast, he reached out to him before Billy Graham had any celebrity or name recognition at all while he was still a pastor in Western Springs, Illinois. He invited Walter Maier to come and speak to a men’s prayer breakfast and they developed a relationship there. He had these touch points with what we would classify as Evangelicals in some way and was so well received by them that they wanted to give him more visibility within the American Christian community; they felt like both they felt like Walter Maier spoke very clearly and authoritatively against some of the modernist trends within mainline denominations and within the academy at that time and Fulton Sheen was equally uh vocal about some forms of modernism and the risks there to biblical authority and to the authority of the church. Mark Tooley: Presumably, both men had their critics. Who were they and what were their critiques? Kirk Farney: I spent more time than I probably could even tally in trying to find critics. They had critics, but they were not terribly vocal. There were a few places where they received some unexpected criticism from. One was within their own faith communities. There were certain Missouri Synod Lutherans who felt that Walter Maier wasn’t quite Lutheran enough in his radio broadcast because he would invite people to accept Christ; there was very proactive language there which a strict Lutheran might consider to be synergistic language as far as divine election is concerned. Sometimes there would be certain very conservative confessional Lutherans who would voice concern to him or to the president of the denomination that it seems like there’s not a distinctive enough Lutheran message there. That was by far the minority of Lutherans; in general, especially the people of the pews, responded very well that they had this celebrity out there who was bringing people to Christ and who was preaching such strong sermons, and they took a lot of personal satisfaction in that. Fulton Sheen sometimes received criticism within the Church for perhaps not being Catholic enough, but especially received criticism from a few professors at the Catholic University of America where he was a faculty member. He was this young, brilliant guy who was going all around the country doing speaking engagements, he’s on the radio every year, he’s a genuine celebrity. And there’s some indication that there were a few faculty members who felt like he would be better off spending his time in Washington at CUA being a professor. There were a few people that that were concerned that he was having too much success. Harold Ockenga wrote a column at one point criticizing Sheen for the inroads he was making in areas where Ockenga felt like Protestants should be playing that role and exercised or expressed caution to the people that he was writing to about the effectiveness of Sheen. He was acknowledging Fulton Sheen is extremely effective and as Protestants we should be concerned about that, but the criticisms were not terribly vocal.

Mark Tooley: This is perhaps outside the purview of your book, but Sheen as mentioned earlier made a successful transition into television I guess the force of his charismatic personality made that possible. Would Maier have been able to do that or was there a Protestant version of Sheen who was able to do that?

Kirk Farney: Well, it’s worth speculating. I’ve talked to Walter Maier’s son Paul about that very thing. Walter actually did a couple of preaching broadcasts on television in 1949, so he definitely saw the benefit of embracing that new technological avenue and I think he probably would have been quite successful there. His style was quite different than Sheens; he was a hard-hitting preacher and even though Walter Maier was an Old Testament professor with a Harvard PhD, when he spoke in front of the radio microphone it was a sermon. Fulton Sheen sometimes sounded a bit more lecture-like, though they had warmth, humor, and were very inviting. I think the television piece would have been potentially there for Walter Maier, especially given that he was so well known nationally. Now Fulton Sheen embraced the television move; he was on The Catholic Hour radio program until 1952, then transitioned over to his own program on the Dumont television network and they put him up against Milton Berle because they assumed nobody was going to get an audience if you were up against Milton Berle, who was so popular on television. In a fairly short period of time Fulton Sheen amazingly was had higher ratings than Milton Berle and won an Emmy for his religious broadcast in the early 50s for being the best television personality, beating out Arthur Godfrey, Edward R. Murrow, Lucille Ball, and Milton Berle among others.

Mark Tooley: Both men largely stayed away from politics but in having millions of listeners by definition they had influence that certainly politicians and others must have sought them out to benefit from their influence.

Kirk Farney: They had friends within politics. The Indiana governor at that time was a very active Lutheran and Walter Maier was friends with him and I believe he was a Republican Fulton Sheen was a very close personal friend of Al Smith’s who had run for president in 1928 and they remained friends. They traveled to Europe together and the like but even with that you never heard him say anything on the radio that would indicate how you should vote. The only public policy commentary that I remember either of them making is after World War II there was a period when the U.S Department of Agriculture was destroying a certain crop some sort of crop to get the prices back up, and Walter Maier railed about that in one of his weekly talks saying how dare we have people in Europe starving in a post-war setting and we’re destroying food here. I spent a year of my life reading almost every sermon these two guys preached for 20 years and cataloging topics and I don’t recall any other specific public policy commentary other than that one.

Mark Tooley: I know that Sheen in the 50s was certainly outspokenly anti-Communist. I assume Maier’s views would have been similar and that both would have opposed Hitlerism and the Nazis in the late 1930s.

Kirk Farney: They both were extremely vocal on Communism and they did it without talking about a specific public policy or candidate issue but they just kept railing that this a godless force and it’s going to have an impact on the world if we don’t pray about it and if we don’t do our part in being in being active Christians in in our daily walks and as a nation if we don’t shun the national sin if you will, and make it more inviting for an outside force to come in and cause harm. I can’t tell you the exact moment when in the 1930s Walter Maier or Fulton Sheen would have suddenly realized this Fascism thing is on a dangerous trajectory and we have to be very aware of this and warn people; they did eventually do that rather vocally. But the interesting thing is and what I find fascinating about this is that people were tuning in and listening to it week after week, and they [Sheen and Maier] were not afraid to point out the evils of our foes if you will, but they were equally willing to point out the sinfulness of the American people individually as well as a nation. Even in the Depression they were not bashful about saying perhaps the reason that this terrible scourge has hit our country is because we as a country have turned from God. They would talk about individual sins; they would talk about corporate sins and that we need to repent, and we need to turn to God. We see that in the Great Depression, we also see it in World War II and after that in the beginning of the Cold War where they are willing to point out what they consider to be the evils of the enemy, but they were always cautioning the listeners to understand we’re not perfect people as well and we have plenty to repent for here and to try to make right with God. Both of them interestingly actually called for national days of humiliation. Abraham Lincoln called for days of humiliation in in the Civil War and days of humiliation go back to Puritan New England in the 17th century, but these guys were actually calling for that in the midst of World War II, in particular that perhaps we as a nation need to go to our knees on a certain day and ask God’s forgiveness.

Mark Tooley: Did either one of them have any relationship with Reinhold Niebuhr?

Kirk Farney: Not that I have ever found; They certainly were aware of him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he and Fulton Sheen crossed paths at some point. Walter Maier and Niebuhr were such active partakers of what was going on in the news and science and at the academy that they would have files on different religious leaders, political leaders, physicians, etc., and I don’t recall seeing one on Niebuhr in particular. But Walter Maier’s files, which are still at the Concordia Historical Institute in St Louis, and there are files in there on religious leaders, business leaders, banana production, rheumatism credit unions, etc. He had files on everything and then he would weave those pieces of information into discernments that were very scriptural but would be applied to some issue that the country was facing at that time.

Mark Tooley: What did they think of each other?

Kirk Farney: I was hoping that somewhere along the line I would find correspondence between them, but I have never found it. The closest I’ve come is Walter Maier had a file on Fulton Sheen’s celebrity converts. If you know the history of Fulton Sheen, he converted a number of fairly well-known people, including the president of the American Communist Party at one point to Catholicism, Clare Boothe Luce. Walter Maier had a file on when Sheen converted Henry Ford II, and Walter Maier circled certain parts of the articles about that. I asked both Walter Maier’s son and the archivists at the Sheen Archives, but they were not aware of any correspondence. I did find in the early 60s a letter from Fulton Sheen to Eugene Birderman, who was in the national religious broadcasters and had been Walter Maier’s right hand man if you will while Walter Maier was still in ministry congratulating him on all of the contributions Lutheran media had made to the Christian cause in the United States but that’s as close as I came.

Mark Tooley: And then finally, is there anyone today who resembles either man?

Kirk Farney: There are people who are playing the same role in certain cases perhaps, but they were so unique in such a unique time. The Saturday Evening Post, Time magazine Newsweek always talked about Maier’s rapid delivery like him being a machine gunner when he was speaking, or they would refer to him as the Billy Sunday of the radio or Joe Lewis going in for the knockout when he was preaching. I don’t think that style would work particularly well today. They both gave erudite sermons but they were put at a pedestrian level and well received at that level, but the style and the in-your-face sorts of comments that Walter Maier would make in a sermon about would not work as well today than it did then because 20 million people a week tuned in to hear Fulton Sheen was amazing in that, for much of America, especially when he started on the radio, Catholics were “the other” to the American Protestant hegemony. He starts to make Catholicism much more acceptable, at least as brothers and sisters in Christ. What’s really interesting though is that in 1952 when he goes on television he now comes out and you see he is in full, regalia first as a monsignor and then was elevated to bishop, and so he from the head to toe on television is wearing his cape and he’s wearing his ecclesiastical garb and if you didn’t know he was a Catholic before you certainly knew he was by the way he appeared on television. Yet because he had this wit, this warmth, these piercing eyes, this absolutely inviting voice, he really drew people in, and I think that was the right person at the right place at the right time for that to happen. That was a different role than what we see needed probably today.

Mark Tooley: Kirk could you hold up a copy of your book?

Kirk Farney: I can. Here it is. It will be released on the 21^st, Ministers of a New Medium, 21st of June and I’ve been pleased with the feedback I have gotten on it so far and I hope others are blessed by it.

Mark Tooley: Kirk Farney, author of Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology and the Radio Ministries of Fulton Sheen and Walter Maier. Thank you very much for an enjoyable conversation.

Kirk Farney: My pleasure, thank you for having me.