The Anti-Nationalist Patriotism of Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Abstract

Scholars today regard Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen as a supporting player in the American efforts to drum up support for the Cold War; however, this view limits Sheen’s influence to the years he spent on television hosting his program, Life Is Worth Living (1952–1957). Yet, by the time Sheen left his program, he had been part of public discussions of religion and American politics for almost thirty years. Before his 1930 debut as an authoritative Catholic voice in America, Sheen had become a decorated Catholic scholar, both in his home country and in Europe, earning him a papal audience and broad support in the American Catholic hierarchy. His early contributions to public discussion were sophisticated adaptations of Leonine Catholic social teaching to American circumstances. Critical to his teachings was his view of the American people as the source for political legitimacy. In this respect, he defied the more reactionary clergy of Europe; however, Sheen’s views were vital to his efforts to distinguish why America had a just war against the totalitarian governments of the Axis powers but also a duty to spare people who were as likely to be victims of the regime as they were supporters. Sheen carried this distinction into the Cold War, in which he called for Americans to support the Russian people by opposing totalitarian government there. Therefore, Sheen never advocated the “us vs. them” nationalism so common among Cold War propaganda, which is consistent with his initial opposition to the Vietnam War and his only partial reconsideration of that opposition later.

1. Introduction: “Take Up Their Cross”

During the Life Is Worth Living episode “The Glory of Being American”, Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen pronounced:

[Americans] are something like Simon of Cyrene. Remember? Here was this man from Africa, for Cyrene was in Africa, who on Good Friday, stationed himself along a roadway, the roadway to Calvary. He was just curious as any man is curious about a fellow man going to death. And as he stood there, the long arm of the Roman law reached out to him, and the Roman law said to him, “Take up that Cross. Carry it!” He did not want to do it, but he carried it. After a while, the burden became sweet, and the oak light. And so it is with America. Here, the great part of the world laboring under communism and in danger of being consumed by it is on this terrible roadway of modern politics, and Providence is laying its hand on the shoulder of America and saying to America, “Take up their Cross. Carry it!” And we’re carrying a nobler cross than we know, and even a nobler cross than we deserve”.

(Sheen 1953)1

What at first appears to be a traditional extrapolation on Sacred Scripture was in fact a significant variation from the dominant theme of American Christian nationalism. Sheen spoke on his program at the height of his popularity, and he was well known as a patriotic American Catholic who defended the country against the threat of communism.

Yet, in his defense of America, he did not appeal to the United States as a redeemer nation. Far from being a redeemer, America was a bystander pulled out of the crowd and thrust into the role of the “arsenal for democracy” and the “pantry to the world”, ultimately in service to a cause America did not start but had to serve all the same (Sheen 1953, p. 268). Sheen’s refusal to identify America as a redeemer nation corresponds to his lifelong opposition to nationalism, which he regarded as an improper relationship between people and their country. For Sheen, a people naturally form a community and create a government as an instrument to serve the common good, that is, civil peace. For the government to have any authority beyond what the people grant is akin to a carpenter obeying her hammer. In Sheen’s view, nationalists argue the reverse, that the nation supersedes the people and demands their obedience. To this, Sheen strenuously objected, arguing that this kind of nationalism formed the foundation of fascism, which, in addition to Nazism and communism, were the three manifestations of totalitarianism spawned from a disordered relationship between the people and their country.

In this paper, I argue that Sheen was an advocate for a patriotic American anti-nationalism. Such a formulation seems contradictory; however, the terms hold specific meanings that separate a person’s fidelity to a rightly ordered government in service to the common good (patriotism) and a totalitarian state demanding collective obedience to the state imposition of the “common good” (nationalism). To illustrate Sheen’s line of thought, this essay will first cover recently published literature on the issue of nationalism, as well as work on Sheen. Next, the piece surveys Sheen’s contemporary scene, in which many Catholic majority nations had adopted nationalist interpretations of Catholicism that facilitated collaboration with fascist leaderships. Finally, I provide an exploration of Sheen’s efforts to use American Catholic republicanism to chart an alternate course from clerico-fascism.

This paper is a work of intellectual history with an eye toward contemporary politics, in which one finds a resurgent Christian nationalism both among American Protestants and Catholics. While sources for this essay include some references to Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living, most will be from his written work, which is usually written either for scholars or for an educated, reading public. It is worth mentioning that Sheen was not merely a scholar but a priest; hence, he did not confine himself to scholarly work but sought to evangelize in ways that were intellectually serious but also popularly accessible.

One final preliminary issue is: Why Sheen? The answer is that Sheen was one of the most popular American Catholics for much of the twentieth century and, during his peak of popularity, one of the most respected people in the country. He counted among his friends Pope Pius XII and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He helped convert leading Americans such as Clare Boothe Luce and, through his writing, Cardinal Avery Dulles. His popularity stemmed, in part, from his articulation of an updated American Catholic republicanism at a time when, as shown below, Catholics in America and abroad were drifting into illiberal politics (Patterson 2022, pp. 81–93). Sheen’s alternative retained a firm Christian foundation but resisted the appeal to totalitarian state power as the basis for government. Rather, he appealed to the human person as a rights-bearer with corresponding duties to family, country, and God.

2. Nationalism Reconsidered

Historically, the role of America as “redeemer nation” identifies America with the role of a political savior in the way Jesus Christ is the spiritual savior of humanity (Tuveson [1968] 1980; Handy [1971] 1984; Morone 2003; Rubboli 2007; Murphy 2009; Hunter 2010; Herzog 2011; Byrd 2013; Wilsey 2015; Restad 2015; Hollinger 2017; Gorski 2017). These treatments of America as a redeemer nation link up with an ongoing discussion in political theory over nationalism. In this debate, there is much disagreement over whether nationalism is a good thing. In the past few years, critics and scholars have published many books condemning “Christian nationalism”, largely in terms of white evangelical Protestantism, although some, such as Damon Linker, also targeted conservative American Catholics (Hedges 2006; Linker 2007; Goldberg 2007; Whitehead and Perry 2020; Gorski and Perry 2022; Miller 2022). In language more familiar to political scientists, Christian nationalism is an ideology that combines the ultranationalist and leadership focus of fascism but roots it in a peculiar interpretation of religious fundamentalism (Heywood 2012).

However, Yoram Hazony has found reason to defend a moderate, religiously inspired form of nationalism inspired by Victorian Great Britain and contemporary Israel. Hazony defines nationalism as “a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference” (Hazony 2018). Goldman, in his critique of Hazony, focuses on how America lacks an internal coherence that Hazony’s nationalism presumes—but not for lack of trying. Goldman observes that American nationalists have sought three ideas of the American nation as a source for common national identity:

Covenant. Creed. Crucible. These are recurring symbols by which Americans have tried to make sense of our differences—and our similarities. The first presents Americans as an essentially Anglo-Protestant people. Inspired by the Hebrew Bible, it places our beginnings in a special relationship between the English settlers of the Atlantic Coast and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

If the covenant emphasizes religion, the creed focuses on political philosophy. Here, America is defined by fundamental principles. Above all, it champions the equal individual rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence. America is defined less by who lives here than by the correspondence between its institutions and these universal ideals.

The crucible perspective accepts more conventional standards of nationality but projects them into the future. Americans might not yet be a cohesive people like English, German, or French. Through an ongoing process of mixing, however, we could one day achieve a comparable level of incorporation.

(Goldman 2021)

As John D. Wilsey has shown, these versions of nationalism have often produced efforts to identify those included and excluded from what is truly “American” and, thus, members of an “exceptional” race or class, or some other form of social division (Wilsey 2015). In the past, many regarded these divisions as bound up in American domestic politics; however, recently, scholars such as Hilde Eliassen Restad have reframed the domestic politics of American expansion across the western frontier as international politics with tremendous bearing on the domestic politics of the nation (Restad 2015). The expansion entailed the introduction of new ethnic minorities from the secured territories, as well as new contact with others, such as East Asian populations migrating to California, which in turn renewed the debate over who was truly American. Events on the international stage have historically affected the answer to this question, such as the treatment of German-Americans during the First World War and Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.

Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen does not fit within these categories, which should come as no surprise. Sheen was the heir to a republicanism that had predominated among American Catholics since before the American Founding but lacked the same broad influence as nineteenth-century American Protestant hegemony, which only began to ebb during the 1920s. Even then, the subsequent “Judeo-Christian consensus” incorporated Catholic views but only under the guise of consolidating a religious unity in opposition to totalitarianism abroad. Certainly, Sheen opposed totalitarianism, but, as the opening vignette illustrated, for reasons quite apart from the Protestant-inflected “redeemer nation”. Indeed, Sheen was explicitly anti-fascist yet patriotic, Christian yet critical. His example illustrates the need for greater precision in distinguishing between Christian nationalism and patriotism. Indeed, for contemporary political scientists, Sheen resists categorizations such as those found in Andrew Heywood’s typology, sharing in socialist critiques of capitalism, liberal critiques of conservatism, and religious critiques of conservatism (Heywood 2012).

To explain Sheen’s Catholic republicanism requires some familiarity with the man himself. Sheen is one of the three most important American Catholic priests of the twentieth century; however, only modest amounts of scholarship on him exists (Lynch 1998; Reeves 2001; Riley 2004; Sherwood 2010; Patterson 2019; Farney 2022). Perhaps because of the recent cause for his canonization, some scholars have taken a renewed look at Sheen’s work; however, there remain two major obstacles to taking Sheen seriously. The first is that Sheen died in 1979—before many younger scholars may have heard of him. The second, more serious problem is that Sheen presented his views in a variety of formats, including on an Emmy-award winning television program, Life Is Worth Living (1951–1957). This popular format is how most Americans know who Sheen is, and his programs were often self-consciously corny and popular in content. For those who know him only from television, one could be excused to think that Sheen was to Catholicism what Lawrence Welk was to classical music.

However understandable this view might be, it is wrong. Sheen was born Peter John Sheen on 8 May 1895, in Peoria, Illinois. Taking his mother’s maiden name “Fulton” as his first name, he excelled in all his academic pursuits. By the end of his formal education, Sheen was one of the most academically decorated Catholic theologians in America. He spent the 1920s attending the Catholic University of American and the Catholic University of Louvain. At Louvain, he pursued a special advanced doctorate, the Agrégé en Philosophie, and during this period, he became friends with Pope Pius XI and the future Pius XII. After earning the agrégé with the highest possible marks, he opted not to join the Louvain faculty, to which he was entitled, but rather returned to the United States after a short stint in the UK to join the faculty at the Catholic University of America. Soon after returning, Sheen joined the National Conference of Catholic Men in their production of a radio program intended to defend American Catholics from charges of disloyalty. More specifically, the 1928 Presidential election had featured the first Catholic to run, the Democratic nominee Al Smith. Called The Catholic Hour, Sheen was one of its breakout stars. While giving radio addresses, Sheen remained an active scholar, publishing academic texts, articles, and more popular articles for America and Commonweal.

In 1951, he was consecrated a bishop to serve as Director for the Propagation of the Faith, a role that required him to oversee the Church’s missionaries across the globe. In addition, he used the position to continue his broadcast ministry and publish widely under the supervision of his superior, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. During this period, Sheen aired Life Is Worth Living until a dispute with Spellman led to his eventual quitting the show and, in 1965, a “promotion” to Bishop of Rochester that was, in effect, Spellman punishing Sheen. Sheen retired from the position before three years passed because his talents were not in diocesan administration, and he spent the remainder of his life writing, speaking, and holding retreats, as well as twice attempting and failing to bring a television show back to air. In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited New York and, at Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, singled him out in the crowded church, hoisted the old bishop to his feet, and embraced him, calling him a “loyal son of the Church”. Two months later, on 9 December 1979, Sheen died in his New York City apartment before the Blessed Sacrament.

3. Catholic Nationalism, Fascism, and the International Scene

Sheen began his media career at a time when, internationally, Catholic nationalism was on the rise. Roman Catholicism and nationalism have a long, dark past together (Mazower 2000; Paxton 2004; Spektorowski 2003; Moradiellos 2018; Chappel 2018; Gallagher 2020; Shortall 2021; Gonçalves and Neto 2022). Catholic nationalist leaders adopted fascist ideology and symbolism to demonstrate their opposition to liberals, socialists, and communists. In so doing, they identified the Church with the nation and the nation with the dictator and his party. Since the development of the nation-state system after the Treaty of Westphalia, governments have sought to define their nations in terms of a common race, culture, ideology, or religious tradition—or some combination thereof. These terms set a narrative for inclusion and exclusion, wherein the state could exercise its monopoly on violence against the excluded, whether to drive them out of the nation, force them into conforming to the national narrative, or simply as a convenient threat against which to unite an otherwise divided nation. Catholic nationalisms frequently identified Jews, Freemasons, liberals, communists, and socialists as persons for exclusion. Often, narratives identified some of these groups as collaborating in a conspiracy to undermine the nation and the Catholic faith.

The first such effort was by Abbé Augustine Buerrel, a French Jesuit priest and contemporary of the French Revolution. His 1793 “history” of the French Revolution, titled Histoire du Clergé pendant la Revolution Française, identified the French Lodge, Bavarian Illuminati, and certain Enlightenment figures as secretly collaborating against throne and altar. Léo Taxil (pseudonym for Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès) expanded on the conspiracy theory by introducing the concept of “Palladianism”, in which Jews and Freemasons conspired to undermine the Catholic Church. Taxil’s conspiracy theory was a hoax that he hoped would humiliate the prominent religious and political authorities who believed him; however, the theory took on a life of its own even after Taxil’s revelation that he had made the whole thing up (Harris 2007; D’Arcy 2013). All of this came to a head during the Dreyfus Affair, especially through Charles Maurras and his Action Française party. Maurras, an atheist until a deathbed conversion, sought to root French nationalism in Catholicism, military power, and monarchism by concentrating national hatred onto the Jews as the source of all French problems (Paxton 2004). Versions of these conspiracies inspired paranoia in Spanish Catholicism that then crossed the Atlantic into Latin America, where nations such as Brazil and Argentina during the 1930s began to foment anti-Semitism (Bertonha 2000), supporting emerging Catholic nationalist movements behind fascist regimes (Hilton 1972; Williams 1974; Spektorowski 2003; Gonçalves and Neto 2022). Similar ideas found a home among the minority of German Catholics and, to a lesser extent, Catholics in Austria and Portugal (Griffin 2015; Loff 2015). Across these countries, Catholics fused their faith with a sense national destiny advanced by the dictatorship.

As Catholic nationalists conspired with fascist parties in Catholic countries, American Catholics experienced a somewhat muffled division. Many retained some of the old European prejudices fomented over the nineteenth century. Others, however, found in America an alternative in which the free exercise of religion allowed for the practice of the faith in peaceful coexistence, or even in cooperation, with people of good will. Such good will was not always in great supply; however, by this period, American Catholics had become sufficiently numerous and, in places, sufficiently powerful to contest those who might operate against their interests (Hennessy 2007). An example of the first category was the audience for Fr. Charles Coughlin. Coughlin was a popular radio priest who began broadcasting in 1926. Airing from Detroit, Michigan, Coughlin started his radio program to defend Catholic social teaching and, eventually, the politics of Frank D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Coughlin, however, became increasingly hostile toward FDR as he incorporated more fascist influences in his programs, which eventually descended into outright anti-Semitic isolationism.

While other Catholic fascisms were militaristic and expansionistic, Coughlin’s was isolationist precisely because other fascist parties in other nations hoped to deter Americans from intervening in their affairs, and Coughlin was useful in promoting a religious front for efforts at establishing a fascist party in America to that end. Additionally, on the radio, starting in 1928, was Sheen, who represented an anti-totalitarian, philo-Semitic Catholicism born out of the Americanism of the previous generations of Catholic clergy (Patterson 2022). During the Spanish Civil War, Coughlin and Sheen agreed on American non-intervention. Both vociferously condemned the Spanish republicans for their anti-clerical violence, although Sheen expressed much less enthusiasm for Francisco Franco than Coughlin (Riley 2004, pp. 105–12; Clements 2021). During this period, Coughlin was more popular than Sheen; however, this tide turned as the Second World War broke out. Their mutual animosity toward anti-clerical communist states rapidly spread a gulf between Sheen’s and Coughlin’s views, with Sheen becoming rapidly more popular than Coughlin. While Coughlin peaked in 1931, after which the Columbia Broadcasting Station (CBS) removed him from their programming because of his increasingly extreme politics, Sheen was on top by the start of 1940. By the end of the year, Coughlin was off the air (Marcus 1972; Boyea 1995). Sheen was the de facto voice of American Catholics.

4. Sheen’s Catholic Anti-Nationalism

Sheen rejected nationalism. He identified the concept of a divine nation with the ideology of fascism, wherein the state itself wields its spiritual power and primarily through conquest. For the same reason, he vigorously preached against Nazism as a conflation of a divine race and the nation, as well as an organizer for armed conquest and the dissolution of inferior races occupying the living spaces rightfully belonging to the strong. Sheen, however, equated these ideologies with communism because its idolatry of the state. Communists pretended as though their movements were international, yet the Soviet Union was very much a state and one that grounded its legitimacy on promulgating a world revolution that would ultimately accrue greater power to the Soviets in Moscow and not the international proletariat. Moreover, by the 1930s, the Soviets were fighting their “Great Patriotic War”. For Sheen, the false religion of all totalitarian ideologies always amounted to the “double cross” against the very people of the states these ideologies claimed to represent, as the initial surge of nationalism in the name of opposing an external threat always devolved into the purges of internal enemies that frustrated the ambitions of the state’s political leaders.

Therefore, Sheen preached that Americans must not be nationalists if that means adopting a totalizing vision of the spiritual role of the state. Sheen proclaimed:

And that brings us to the point we want to prove: That there is no such thing as living without a cross.

We are free only to choose between crosses. Will it be the Cross of Christ which redeems us from our sins, or will it be the Double-Cross, the Swastika, the hammer and sickle, the fasces?

Why are we a troubled nation today? Why do we live in fear-we who defined freedom as the right to do whatever we pleased; we who have no altars in our churches, no discipline in our schools, and no sacrifices in our lives? We fear because our false freedom and license and apostasy from God has caught up with as, as it did with the Prodigal [Son].

(Sheen 1941a, p. 82)

Rather than the “double cross”, Americans had to embrace the cross, namely the recognition that the human home is ultimately in the eternal life to come and not in this world.

Communism, fascism, and Nazism differed in their core principles but, for Sheen, were ideologically the same in operation. They were dictatorships. Sheen insisted:

[An] error we have to avoid…is the false liberty of Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Fascism or Communism which says that liberty means obedience to the will of a Dictator. Dictators saw that man had to have some ideal or purpose outside himself, but instead of making this purpose the development of human personality, they imposed as a goal, race as in Nazism, the State as in Fascism, and the class as in Communism. A totality thus took the place of personality. The idea is right in insisting that freedom has a purpose, but it is wrong in dictating the wrong purpose; namely, the omnipotent state.

(Sheen 1940, p. 26)

Upon obeying the external value, what Sheen calls the “totality”, the subjects of a totalitarian regime immediately find the freedom to serve this totality to be a double cross. The hope that the state might liberate humankind from the cross of Christ would, instead, lead to grinding oppression under military force and secret police. The cause for the failure is placing the source of “freedom in the collectivity instead of in man” or the mistaken identification of “freedom with what men do, instead of with what man is” (Sheen 1940, pp. 26–27). Hence, persons dissolve into mere collective machinery in the service to the goals the dictator sets, wherein a man is free to serve the nation “so long as he acts as a piston, but if he asserts that man is more than a piston and is free to choose not to be a piston in the engine of the State, he is purged as a ‘wrecker’” (Sheen 1940, p. 27). Regardless of whether a dictator used fascism, Nazism, or communism, the result was always to subjugate persons to an idea a dictator presents as a solution to lure the people into choosing him over Christ’s cross; however, the dictator’s double cross offers no redemption—only violence and misery.

In contrast to the double cross of dictatorships, Sheen advocated not for the nation to which all owe obedience but the patria that provides a common good of human liberty ordered to our duties to one another. Citizens of a patria experience a love of country, or patriotism that flows from a sense of gratitude for the homeland they inherited from the previous generation. Sheen’s vision of patria was tied to an older, medieval view of social life. At Louvain, Sheen had learned from neo-Thomism, and he adapted his study of St. Thomas Aquinas to the political conditions of America (Reeves 2001, pp. 10–39; Riley 2004, pp. 1–28). Aquinas regarded patriotism as a particular virtue of pietas. One is a patriot of one’s family, one’s neighbors, one’s city, and one’s country (Sheen [1938] 2016, p. 64). A patriotic citizen loves all of these natural institutions and the persons within them. “Love” here is not a blind attachment. Instead, it is to wish good for these communities for their own sake. In other words, one would put personal interests aside for a common good within the family, neighborhood, city, and country. Sheen insisted: “Though the State exists for man and not man for the State, love of country is in the Christian concept a form of the virtue of pietas” (Sheen 1940, p. 175).

Sheen described patriotism as having negative and positive aspects (Sheen 1940, p. 175). By “negative” and “positive”, he did not mean “bad” and “good” but a negation of bad governments and an affirmation of good governments (Sheen 1940, p. 176). To determine whether someone or some organization is truly patriotic required proof of their negation of fascism, Nazism, and communism (Sheen 1940, p. 176). However, such negation is not enough. A person or organization must also affirm the natural right of the laborer to work for a just wage, the natural right of the citizen to free political institutions, and most of all, the natural right of individuals to be “thankful also for our religious blessings and the right to adore God according to the dictates of our conscience” (Sheen 1940, p. 180). To pursue the common good in whichever context can be quite difficult, as families, neighborhoods, cities, and countries can often be composed of people who want the wrong thing or seek the wrong means of pursuing a genuine good. Hence, for one to pursue the common good often meant suffering the attacks of one’s own people for their own sake, as Sheen would explain Christ had done by suffering on the cross for all of humankind. Sheen understood American patriotism in terms of defending hard truths against majoritarian impulses (Sheen 1940, pp. 144–46).

5. Sheen’s Personalism

Sheen grounded his view of Catholic social thought in the nature of the human person, or in the political philosophy of “personalism” (Kengor 2017). Personalism emerged as the response of Catholic political philosophers wrestling with the rise of totalitarian governments and secular political ideologies. Early on, leftwing ideology provoked a reactionary ideology thought necessary to combat it, as discussed below, but these efforts reduced Catholic political philosophy to an instrument of rightwing totalitarianism. In response, figures such as Jacques Martian, Yves Simon, and Emmanuel Mounier formulated a political philosophy that began not with institutions or regimes but in the person these institutions and regimes were supposed to serve. Sheen clearly kept up with the developments in personalism and deployed its arguments in his own writing. Curiously, he avoided invoking Catholic personalists by name, and it is unclear how close he was with leading personalists. Even more curiously was how a Louvain-trained neo-Thomist became a personalist. Such questions are beyond the scope of this paper, but no doubt the starting point would be Sheen’s teacher at the Catholic University of America, Fr. John A. Ryan (Reeves 2001, pp. 39–56; Riley 2004, pp. 3–9).

Sheen explained that the person was first and foremost ordered to a spiritual life in which one finds salvation through the grace bestowed by the sacraments of the Church. All persons should seek such salvation, as the Great Commission called the faithful to preach the gospel, especially the clergy. Both the free exercise of spiritual life and the Great Commission required any temporal power, such as the state, to avoid any intervention in the Church or individual consciences. Human salvation is not only the highest good but also the common good, as in it is a good that satisfies the true calling of every person, from which all may benefit without any cost to anyone else. There is no cost because the source of human salvation is in God’s grace, and God’s grace is without limits except for the willingness of a person to receive it (Sheen 1941b, pp. 122–27).

Sheen began with the person desiring God and finding him in the grace the Church provides. This grace not only saves the person but renders them virtuous for human affairs, including governing. To add to this grace, the Church serves the role of a moral and spiritual teacher. Persons learn the truth about the world from the Church, such as our obligations to each other and the place we have as citizens in our communities, whether local or national (Sheen 1940, pp. 138–41). On the surface, this account seems to instrumentalize the Church as a mere spiritualized civic association which provides the benefit of well-formed citizens; however, for Sheen, it is really the reverse. The role of government is to preserve peace and economic justice as the common good for all citizens. The government is the instrument for protecting the Church, and the Church provides benefits because it does the work of building up God’s Kingdom on earth (Sheen [1938] 2016, p. 64).

Essential to forming good citizens is freedom. A free people can choose the common good, whether the spiritual common good of human salvation or the temporal good of peace (Sheen 1940, pp. 184–88). They choose the former by receiving the sacraments and living holy lives. They choose the latter by joining together to consent to government. This consent is not a contractarian consent similar to that of the English Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke or Thomas Hobbes, because Sheen has no use for the idea of a “state of nature”. Being a neo-Thomist, Sheen regarded human communities as natural to the human person; however, the community is not the same as the government of that community. Governments require consent because a well-formed people desire peace that only governments can provide; yet, governments cannot exist without a community to form it. Therefore, the government is an effect of a natural community forming, not the cause, as it is for Locke and Hobbes (Sheen 1940, pp. 141–45).

The consent that shapes governments is rooted in the nature of the human person and the common good of the community. The personal capacity to consent comes from the rational exercise of the will. Reason, in these circumstances, benefits from Church formation where these communities are Christian; hence, they can more readily serve the common good of peace because of the sanctity one receives from grace, although these communities form governments regardless of whether the Church is there to form the people (Sheen 1940, pp. 161–62). The choice of consent can be formal or informal, meaning by written constitution or by custom. What was more important to Sheen was to identify the sources of both human reason and will—namely the human soul that God gave each person. The soul is spiritual and has a greater authority over the material instrument of government. Because government depends on the spiritual power of the human soul and the human soul is a divine gift, no government under any circumstances can preempt the popular consent that brought the government into being. Of course, the government can use its due authority to promulgate, enforce, and adjudicate laws, but it may not override the terms set by the people (Sheen 1940, pp. 163–75).

For this reason, Sheen repudiated the idea of nationalism while elevating the virtue of patriotism. Nationalists, for him, were necessarily totalitarian (Sheen 1940, pp. 35–36). They identified the government as the state, which was superior to the individual persons and ordered their lives. The inter-war Catholic nationalists and integralists in Europe and Latin America were attracted to fascism in part because they sought in state power the ability to crush their enemies in liberals, socialists, communists, Jews, Freemasons, and Protestants, or some combination thereof. For Sheen, they had things backwards. For Catholics to be good citizens required them identify in all fellow citizens God-given rationality and freedom, regardless of whether these citizens are Catholic. On the spiritual level, Catholics are to serve the Great Commission of spreading to their fellow citizens in the hope that they might be led to salvation in the Church. There could be no forced conversions or use of force against non-Catholics because of their refusal of conversion. Sheen was especially emphatic in his defense of the Jews, who were “the roots of the Christian tradition and who religiously are one with the Christian in the adoration of God and the acceptance of the moral law as the reflection of the eternal reason of God” (Sheen 1943). To hold the nation as some superior force to coerce “enemies of the Church” was to violate the very divine stamp in the human soul and bring the Church down to the dingy business of indiscriminate violence.

The ideology of the nation is something that Sheen particularly associates with fascism. Fascism, for Sheen, cannot exist without some large-scale threat, whether the imagined conspiracies against the Jews or the very real threat communism posed not only to the Church but anyone unfortunate to live under it. Where communism arose, the reaction to it was some kind fascism, since communism was supposed to be, according to Marxist theory, an “international” phenomenon because the proletariat were a class that crossed national borders. People turned to fascism to meet communist violence with nationalist violence; however, the problem is not communism alone but its violence (Sheen 1940, pp. 176–79, 199–206; 1941a, pp. 62–76). Hence, during the Second World War, Sheen called people away from violence as a sufficient solution to the problem of fighting the Axis Powers, since what Americans should seek is the salvation of the suffering people living under totalitarian regimes (Sheen 1940, pp. 70–78; 1941a, pp. 77–91; 1941b, pp. 70–78). For this reason, Sheen also opposed the American alliance with the Soviet Union, as there was no just way for the American government to ally with a Russia committed to the dissolution of the Church and the immiseration of those people under Soviet control (Sheen 1941b, pp. 76–78). When the war ended, Sheen’s opposition to communism was decidedly unlike the integralist positions found in Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal. On the contrary, Sheen insisted that a free people and a free Church form the only moral and legitimate basis to the Soviet threat to human dignity.

Here then, we can now understand the opening passage of this article. When describing America’s role in the Cold War, Sheen compared the United States to St. Simon the Cyrene. Simon was the man who helped Jesus Christ carry the cross to Calvary. Simon stood on the side of the road watching the procession, only to be chosen by Providence to serve a small role in carrying the burden that would lead to human salvation. That burden was, for Simon, a literal cross. America’s was figurative. Sheen first called America the “arsenal of democracy” but, after the war, the “pantry to the world”, from which America would bestow its material blessings and relief to suffering peoples to alleviate them from hunger but also draw them away from the “double cross” of communism that promised bread with a forked tongue (Sheen 1941a, pp. 77–91). Under no circumstances would Sheen identify America or any nation with the “Redeemer”. No nation could ever be more than like Simon, since the source of human salvation was Jesus Christ and His Church, and for a nation to serve the Church like Simon required it to accept the cross and follow in Christ’s footsteps.

6. Sheen Was Not a Cold Warrior

In an episode of Firing Line hosted by New Conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr., Sheen defended his position condemning the Vietnam conflict in Christian terms. Much of the debate centered around how best to approach war—whether from that of American political interest or from Christian charity. Buckley found himself pushing for a continued opposition to communism across the world but Sheen resisted. Instead, because Vietnam was such an inferior power, he insisted on the prioritization of dialogue, ministry, and international aid as the best methods for preventing the spread of communism, since not only did they deter ideological spread but provided material and spiritual assistance to the people in difficult parts of the world (Buckley and Sheen 1970). Buckley seemed curious and perhaps a little frustrated that Sheen remained as anti-communist as ever but opposed military intervention against it.

Sheen’s anti-communism has given him the reputation of being part of a broader conservative Cold War movement; however, he remained in many ways at odds with an emerging New Conservatism during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. An examination of Sheen’s work provides a clear reason: Sheen repudiated liberalism in nearly all forms and was a constant critic of capitalism as an economic system that created the economic conditions for communism (Sheen 1940, pp. 12–36, 49–61; 1948, p. 49). This is not to say that Sheen was soft on communism but that he retained what he called a “primacy of the spiritual” in how both citizens and government leaders should address domestic and international affairs (Sheen [1932] 1956, pp. 70–74).

While Sheen supported the development of defensive military technology and an anti-Soviet NATO alliance, he stressed that true peace came not through the force of arms but in the improvement of American religious life. He called on Americans to pray, attend religious services, and perform works of corporeal mercy. He also counselled against vices such as pornography, alcoholism, and greed. On this last point, Sheen proved to be deeply critical of capitalism, for Sheen regarded it as having bad tendencies in theory and practice. In theory, capitalism treated the worker the way liberalism treated the citizen—not as persons but as an interchangeable units in a broader theory of social control. Whereas liberals sought to defend the state from Church interference, capitalists sought to protect markets from the same. Specifically, capitalists sought to protect wealth against the interests of workers, and Sheen saw this as both unjust and imprudent. It was unjust because workers deserved a just wage for the value their labor brought to a profitable firm; however, capitalist management often froze out workers from inclusion on firm decisions, meaning workers suffered from exploitation and mistreatment.

This consequence was imprudent, since workers were more numerous than capitalists and their managers. Under conditions of exploitation, the large number of workers would be open to communist appeals to seize the means of production, exterminate capitalists, and hand government over to a Soviet party that would systemize the exploitation in a way that capitalists could only dream of. For this reason, Sheen saw immoral capitalism as simply a prelude to communism. The only alternative for capitalists was to heed the moral and spiritual teachings of the Church not only in their style of management but in their institutions of firm decision making (Sheen 1940, pp. 127–29).

Finally, even though Sheen was an anti-communist, he was not anti-Russian. Sheen frequently spoke of the great Russian Orthodox Christian tradition as the real future for the Russian people. He wore a pectoral cross once worn by a Russian Orthodox bishop. He regularly peppered his speeches and writings with appeals to great Russian literary writers, especially in Communism and the Conscience of the West (Sheen 1948, pp. 30–45; 1964, pp. 156–65). Far from sharpening the friend–enemy distinction between the free West and the Warsaw Pact, Sheen insisted his audience recognize that the majority of people living under communism had with the same spiritual needs as everyone else. Sheen’s call for spiritual discipline was, in part, intended to correct against the nationalist impulse for hatred of one’s enemies. Sheen counseled the gospel command to love one’s enemies, the Soviets, and to not regard ordinary Russians and others suffering under communism as enemies at all.

7. Sheen’s Place in the Study of Nationalism

Sheen is a confounding figure in recent works on nationalism. Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism treats the Catholic tradition as one that tends toward empire (Hazony 2018). Sheen, on the contrary, was an early proponent of the Catholic Church as a divinely grounded association that operated only very distantly from the official power of any government, in large part because Sheen understood that empires demanded too much compromise from the Church. Rather, he favored a Church that could directly minister to the people who grounded the governments in the manner outlined by Alexis de Tocqueville, with the result being an indirect influence of spiritual and moral teachings on both the citizens and their government.

As for American nationalism, Goldman (2021) outlines three religious foundations for American civic religion: covenant, crucible, and creed. Being Catholic, Sheen had little use for the idea of America as a nation covenanted with God in the manner outlined by early American Protestant dissenters and their later generations. Certainly, for Sheen, God directed the United States to operate in the world, but as the agent of God’s work on earth with the Church, not with America or any other nation. For Goldman, the crucible was the melting together of myriad influences into a single American people whose self-expression was found in national action; Sheen’s antipathy for nationalism of this variety is already outlined above, and especially discordant for Sheen would be the idea of melting the Church into other influences for the purposes of the nation. Such a process is, for Sheen, precisely backwards.

The closest approximation of Sheen’s view is the creed; however, even here, Sheen is a bit of an awkward fit. The American creed is supposed to be one of individual liberty, natural rights, and democracy. The foundation for these is the civil religion, such as the one outlined by Robert Bellah in his seminal 1967 article on the subject (Bellah 1967). For Sheen, the civil religion is certainly a valuable resource for Americans to find inspiration from heroic and ordinary people who committed themselves to the common good. Moreover, Sheen advocated for an alliance of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Americans to support religious liberty because governments exist most of all to protect the spiritual wellbeing of citizens. However, the American creed, for Sheen, relied on the revealed truths of the Christian religion. America as a country had its own traditions and figures, as any nation would; however, a patriotic love of country would ultimately rest on how these traditions fostered virtue and how its figures represented such virtue.

For Sheen, one such figure was Abraham Lincoln, a classic figure of the civil religion (Sheen 1964, pp. 84–86). Despite not being Catholic or even much of a Christian, Lincoln was still, for Sheen, an example of moral statesmanship during a crisis. In short, Sheen’s approach to the American creed was that it was particular to the universal moral and spiritual truth of the Christian religion, meaning that one could not stop with the American creed itself but seek out the eternal grounds for its preservation and even refinement. What Sheen would not tolerate was the denigration of great traditions and figures because of their shortcomings because such behavior lacked the virtue of patriotism. The only proper response to these shortcomings was to eliminate them through one’s own public service, knowing full well that all such efforts will fall short this side of God’s kingdom (Sheen [1938] 2016, pp. 84–86). In other words, America could never be the redeemer but only carry his cross for a time.

8. Conclusions: Patriotism and the Unity of Religious Persons

To conclude, Sheen’s view of patriotism was anti-nationalist. The nation owes its legitimacy to the consent of the people; hence, no nation could place its role ahead of the people the government exists to serve. Indeed, Sheen regarded excessive attachment to the nation over the common good as a precondition for fascist government, which he saw as condemned by the Catholic Church. He demanded a patriotism linked to religious faith, most of all in Catholic Christianity, and one that supported the moral and spiritual development of a people capable of self-government. This patriotism was not simply one of private conduct but placed distinct obligations on public institutions, namely for governments to institute good laws and businesses to reserve time for spiritual devotion.

While Sheen is well known for his popular spiritual guidance, he was also a serious theologian whose work on Church and state issues remains unjustly neglected. This neglect might be from his reputation as an unserious Catholic televangelist, one which I have attempted to overturn here. Another might be that he was a relic of the world before the Second Vatican Council. Such a view ignores that Sheen served on the Council, specifically with those overseeing missionary work. His interventions demonstrate that he was very much in favor of moving away from a colonial to an indigenous model among missionary groups, meaning he was a “modernizer” rather than a reactionary (Sheen 1965a, 1965b). Most likely contributing to this problem is that Sheen’s interventions at the Second Vatican Council were mostly in Latin and were never published. Returning to his academic and political writings is of great service not only to those seeking to understand the role of Catholicism in mid-century American politics but also for Catholics and other like-minded citizens who want to find a way to preserve an America where, to paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville, the spirit of liberty and religion work toward the common good.

For scholars studying Christian nationalism, especially in America, it is important to consider more deeply the positions religious leaders take when calling for patriotism. On the surface, flag-waving and rosary gripping may look like a cynical effort to mobilize religion for the sake of national interest; however, Sheen is one among many examples of religious leaders who demanded putting the gospel before country. While, for the sake of clarity, this essay describes Sheen as “anti-nationalist”, he was not merely a critic; he offered, on the contrary, a comprehensive vision of how governments serve the people and how the people must serve each other—one that begins in the pews on the Sabbath. As Sheen famously said in Communism and the Conscience of the West:

Jews, Protestants and Catholics alike, and all men of good will, are realizing that the world is serving their souls with an awful summons—the summons to heroic efforts at spiritualization. An alliance among Jews, Protestants and Catholics is not necessary to fight against an external enemy, for our “wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in high places”. (Ephesians 6:12) Neither is a unity of religion we plead for, for that is impossible when purchased at the cost of the unity of the truth. But we plead for a unity of religious peoples, wherein each marches separately according to the light of his conscience, but strikes together for the moral betterment of the world; a unity through prayer, not hate… We may not be able to meet in the same pew—would to God that we could—but we can meet on our knees.

(Sheen 1948, p. 46)

Sheen’s Christian patriotism was not Christian nationalism, at least not of the kind criticized by scholars such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez or Randall Balmer (Du Mez 2020; Balmer 2021). Sheen was not interested in the Church seizing political power and imposing religious doctrine; rather, he wished for citizens of all countries to seek spiritual happiness. He firmly believed that the Catholic Church was the proper home for such a search, but the Church had to preach to the people and bring them in, not police their lives. This crucial difference requires closer attention as American Christianity receives a new wave of scholarship.