Collection: Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 1895 to 1979, was an American bishop who held a prime-time television audience through the 1950s against the best entertainers of the day, working without a script in front of a blackboard. Before that he taught philosophy. He was, by trade, a man who could hold a room.

He appears here as the author of the foreword to Mastery of the Military Mind. The address is The Centurions of Rome, delivered at West Point, and in it he works through the Roman officers named in the New Testament, from the centurion at Capernaum to Cornelius and Julius, and argues that the soldier's tradition was chosen deliberately rather than tolerated.

It sets the frame for the four strategic texts that follow. A serving man is told his trade has a place in the moral order, not in spite of it.