On Sept. 24, the church gave American Catholics a reason to rejoice: Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was beatified in St. Louis. Yet the best way to honor this extraordinary evangelist is not simply to remember his television fame. It is to recover the truths he proclaimed and the errors he had the courage to confront.
With a blackboard, a cape and an unmistakable voice, Archbishop Sheen brought religious and moral questions into millions of American living rooms. His “Life Is Worth Living” brought him an Emmy and demonstrated that serious ideas could command public attention. Among the subjects he addressed repeatedly was communism.
With election season just around the corner, the American political landscape sees a rise in socialist candidates and a rise in socialism’s rhetoric. Socialism, communism and Marxism are inherently intertwined and all are intrinsically evil.
Communism’s deepest error, as Catholic teaching explains, is not merely its failure to produce prosperity. It is its false understanding of the human person. That is the theological question at the heart of Archbishop Sheen’s confrontation with atheistic materialism.
Does man possess a soul? Do rights precede government? Is moral truth something the state discovers or something it manufactures? Does human life have an eternal destination?
The church teaches that every person is created in God’s image and possesses a dignity no government can confer or revoke. Our worth does not depend upon productivity, possessions, social class or usefulness to political power. We belong ultimately to God.
Marxist materialism begins elsewhere. It interprets human life through material conditions and class relationships, denying the spiritual destiny Christianity proclaims. Pope John Paul II explained the resulting danger in “Centesimus Annus”: reducing the person to a component of the social organism subordinates individual dignity and moral responsibility to the system.
Archbishop Sheen’s surviving broadcast archive includes “Philosophy of Communism,” “The Russian Lullaby of Coexistence” and “The Man Who Knew Communism Best — Dostoevsky.” Their subjects invite Catholics to look beyond economics and examine competing visions of man, freedom and society.
Herein lies the political consequence. The church places limits upon government because government is not the source of ultimate truth. Julius Caesar may govern, enact laws and defend the nation. Caesar does not possess the human soul. A state demanding unlimited allegiance encounters something it cannot legitimately absorb: the person’s prior obligations to God.
The family likewise possesses responsibilities that precede the state, and the church’s mission does not derive its legitimacy from the ruling party. Neither exists merely to advance the ambitions of those who hold power.
Religious liberty therefore is not an incidental concern. It tests whether political authority recognizes limits upon itself. Communist persecution of clergy and believers, which Pope Pius XI condemned in “Divini Redemptoris,” exposed the collision between militant atheism and religious allegiance.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church condemns atheistic, totalitarian communism while also rejecting the absolute supremacy of the marketplace over human labor. A worker is not merely an instrument of production; neither is a person’s happiness adequately measured by consumption. Economic freedom and prosperity carry moral obligations toward families, workers and the poor.
Why does that distinction matter? Because replacing collectivist materialism with consumerist materialism does not recover the whole person. A society may reject Marx and still organize daily life as though wealth, appetite and status were our final ends. Prosperity is a good. It is not salvation.
At Archbishop Sheen’s beatification, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle emphasized his missionary concern for the poor. That concern was not a concession to communist ideology. It followed from the Gospel. Defending human dignity requires more than condemning a system that violates it; it requires loving the people whose dignity is at stake.
The same principle governs our treatment of ideological opponents. Error must be confronted, but the person embracing it remains someone Christ calls us to love. Christian witness seeks conversion, not humiliation. To oppose dehumanization by dehumanizing our opponents would surrender the very principle we claim to defend.
Archbishop Sheen’s warning therefore belongs in the present, not merely in a Cold War archive. Whenever human beings are valued principally as economic units, political constituencies or instruments of collective ambition, Catholics should ask what understanding of the person lies beneath those judgments.
Our answer must begin with Christ, not with the preferences of a political party. We should defend religious freedom, practice justice toward workers, protect vulnerable lives and refuse the temptation to make government, or material success, our highest good.
On the eve of Archbishop Sheen’s beatification, Pope Leo XIV encouraged Catholics to follow his example by finding new ways to proclaim the Gospel with joyful enthusiasm. That is the task before us: not nostalgic admiration, but renewed evangelization.
Archbishop Sheen did not answer atheism by becoming embarrassed about the church. He answered it by preaching the Gospel of Christ. We honor him best by doing the same.
No political ideology can redeem mankind. No economic system can satisfy the human soul. No government can replace God.
Blessed Archbishop Fulton John Sheen, pray for us!
Harden is a parishioner of St. Ambrose Church in Annandale.
