Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
Contributor biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Fulton John Sheen was born at El Paso, Illinois, on May 8, 1895, and died in New York on December 9, 1979. He was ordained in 1919, took a doctorate at Louvain, and taught philosophy at the Catholic University of America for more than twenty years.
He is best known for broadcasting. He was on radio from 1930, and from 1951 on prime-time American television with Life Is Worth Living, which he presented with a blackboard, no script and no studio audience prompts, opposite the biggest entertainers of the era. He was made an auxiliary bishop in 1951 and later Archbishop. His cause for canonization has been opened and he holds the title Venerable.
Beatification gives a person the title “Blessed” and permits public veneration within places or communities authorized by the Church. It is a step toward canonization, the formal declaration of sainthood.
Why the foreword exists
His foreword to our edition, The Centurions of Rome, was delivered as an address at West Point, to serving cadets.
That setting explains its character. He was speaking to young men entering a profession that requires the use of force, and he was not there to apologize for them. The address follows the centurions through the New Testament, from the one at Capernaum whose words are still repeated at every Mass, to Cornelius, the first gentile received into the Church, to Julius, who guarded Paul on the voyage to Rome.
Why it is in our catalog
The Centurions of Rome appears as the foreword to Mastery of the Military Mind.
Its argument is that the soldier's vocation was chosen deliberately rather than tolerated reluctantly, and that the men who held it in the Gospels are presented as examples rather than as exceptions. For a serving man, or anyone whose work involves authority over others, the point is direct: the work has a place in the moral order rather than sitting outside it.
Placed in front of Sun Tzu and Napoleon, it does something a foreword rarely does. It asks the question the two manuals do not: not how to win, but what the winning is for.
How to read it
Read it first, before the two treatises, and then again after. It is short, and it changes what the rest of the volume sounds like.
It was written to be spoken, and it carries the rhythm of an address rather than an essay. Read it aloud if you can, or at least at speaking pace. The repetitions are a speaker's repetitions and they work on the ear.
The question it leaves is worth carrying into the rest of the book: every centurion in the account is a man under orders who also gave them. Which of the two is being commended, and for what.
Pair it with
- Sun Tzu and Napoleon, the two treatises it introduces in the same volume.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, a commander writing about the same burden from outside the Christian tradition entirely.
- St. Thomas Aquinas, for the worked-out reasoning on when force is and is not just.
His principal works
He published more than sixty books across fifty years.
- God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, 1925. His doctoral work, and the book that made his academic name.
- The Life of All Living, 1929.
- The Seven Last Words, 1933.
- Philosophies at War, 1943.
- Peace of Soul, 1949.
- Life Is Worth Living, from 1953. Books drawn from the television series.
- The Life of Christ, 1958. Widely considered his major work.
- Treasure in Clay, 1980. His autobiography, published after his death.
General reference on Fulton J. Sheen. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions with Sheen's foreword