The Church and I:

By Frank Sheed

Reviewed for The Remnant By Vincent Chiarello

No other Catholic publishing house in the U. S. achieved the reputation and success in promoting Catholic books as did Sheed and Ward, the surnames of its founders: Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. Created in London in 1926, its " stable" of authors included not only Belloc and Chesterton, but the Dominican theologian, Fr. Vincent McNabb; Fr. Ronald Knox; the Thomist philosopher, Etienne Gilson, and the " philosopher of history," Christopher Dawson. In 1933, while keeping an office in London, the firm moved its headquarters to New York City, which was to prove a wise move in more ways than one, and where its reputation grew rapidly. Sadly, post- Vatican II Catholics saw little reason to buy Catholic books, and riven by serious financial problems, the venerable publishing house was sold: in 1985, to the National Catholic Reporter, then the Priests of the Sacred Heart, and, finally, in 2002, the name of the publishing house of Sheed and Ward was sold to Rowman and Littlefield, a publisher whose offerings, to put it mildly, do not emphasize Church teachings.

The origins of the now defunct Sheed and Ward (hereafter: S& W) are intriguing, and there is no better person to describe that beginning and its subsequent role in Catholic life than Frank Sheed, whose memoir,

The Church and I, recounts those events and the players who created and developed the publishing house in a world that that has long since disappeared.

Author Sheed emphasizes at the outset of his quasi-auto-biographical book that he endeavors to relate those events which, "...have some bearing on my growth of knowledge of the Church." By book’s end, clearly the reader will agree that his knowledge, and, I might add, his love, of the Church were boundless.

When Francis Joseph "Frank" Sheed was born "into religious conflict" in Sydney, Australia, on March 20, 1897, the British Empire was at its zenith, surpassing in size even that of Ancient Rome. Across five continents, "the sun never set on the British Empire." His "religious conflict" came about when his Presbyterian father, originally from Scotland, along with his Presbyterian grandparents, would take him and his brother to Methodist Sunday services – which was nearest the Sheed house - but neither he nor his brother participated in it. It was his mother, Mary Maloney, born in Ireland, who saw to it that, despite the urging of her husband and his family, Frank and his brother would be raised in a Catholic household.

To be Catholic in Australia in the early 20th century was not an easy task, for embedded in the Australian way of life were many of the institutional prejudices levied against Catholics carried over from England. For example, there were requirements that prevented the poor from entering the university, which was one way of preventing Irish Catholics from admission. That was to change in 1910, and in so doing change the life of Frank Sheed in ways that he could never have imagined. Sheed: "The State was our residence, we lived there. But the Church was our homeland, and about the Church we had a "siege mentality."

If there was one aspect of Catholic Australian life in this period that was rarely addressed, it was the mindset of Catholics living in the British Empire during its height, for, as explained by Wilfrid Ward, who later became Sheed’s father-in-law, the religious wars in the century following the English break with Rome witnessed the Church "adapting" to a new way of life, a life that was often under siege. "In a siege the one virtue is discipline, and the one consideration is the defense of the walls." The Church responded to the immediate threats that jeopardized its existence, but the fundamental tenets of the Church did not receive the usual degree of attention.

Sheed would recognize this deficiency in a short time.

That statement was also applicable to the Australian Catholic Church at that time, separated from Rome by thousands of miles of ocean, and not directly tethered to the events in Europe. Sheed: "...we did not know much about what went on in the Vatican. The one extra-Australian Catholic fact known to all of us was the conversion of Newman in the previous century."

But if distant Rome was separated from Sydney by geography, and a sense of a "siege mentality" existed among young Australian Catholics, there were still models to be followed. The two literary figures that best brought the Church’s message from Europe to Australia, in ways that no others did, were: "Belloc, born in the Church, and Chesterton, not yet a Catholic, but as good as..." A Jesuit friend added Tertulian and Origen, but Sheed, seeking to fill in the gaps of his Catholic education, made a fateful decision: suspend his study after two years at Sydney University’s law school, and go to England. That trip was to be a momentous change in his life, and that of countless others as well.

Arriving in England on November 5, 1920, he traveled to London in the midst of the annual celebration of the Guy Fawkes Day, and the failure to blow up the British Parliament. Sheed notes that Belloc insisted that it was a plot, engineered by Minister Robert Cecil, to destroy the last remnants of the Catholic Church in England. His visit put him in contact with an organization that would change the course of his life: the Catholic Evidence Guild, founded in the Westminster Diocese of London in 1918, near the end of the First World War. By 1930, there would be more than 25 Guild branches throughout England, and in one year, there were 13,000 conversions.

As Fate (Providence?) would have it, having nothing better to do one evening, Sheed attended a concert whose purpose was to raise money for an organization, "I had never heard of." (In that regard he was, and is, not alone: neither had I.) With no thought of joining them, Sheed attended one of the Guild’s "training classes," where Jack Jonas, "one of the best outdoor speakers I have ever heard" called on the members in the audience to answer the questions that were put to Jonas at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Sheed volunteered, and Jonas, "...

cut me to pieces." But in so doing, Jonas had "hooked" Sheed, for the Australian recognized that, "It was a superb demonstration, to me wholly convincing, of my ignorance of the Faith." Unknown to him at the time, his new life and future had begun.

Sheed was hounded by his nescience in Church matters: "I came back for more. I attended the classes, I became a speaker...In those four years, I read practically nothing that had not a bearing on the Faith. I lived, breathe, ate, slept, theology." All of this was also hard work: "At my first Guild class my ignorance of the Faith was stripped bare for me to see. In the next months I was to have four other firsts – my first outdoor effort, my first lost crowd, my first retreat, my first defeat by a heckler. All very educational." But this was Spring Training for Sheed; his next level of achievement would put him in the major leagues, at least in theory.

After several months of attending classes and reading intensely, Sheed appeared before two priests, who listened to a lecture given by the newly minted Guild speaker, and heckled him "hard." At the conclusion, these clerics gave their imprimatur for him to be classified as "an experienced" speaker. Still, he could not foresee all of the complications and varieties of questioners who would show up. At Hyde Park one Sunday, in a fifteen minute speech discussing the Incarnation (the rest of the hour was usually allotted to answering questions from an often very hostile audience), Sheed recognized that both he and his main heckler, "were out of our depth."

In the crowd he spied a Catholic priest, and after Sheed had come down from the speakers’ platform, he asked the cleric: "Didn’t I make a mess of it?" The cleric responded with the monosyllabic, "Yes." The taciturn cleric was Cardinal Merry del Val, Papal Secretary of State.

Fortunately, His Eminence had also heard other speakers, and was instrumental in helping grant to the Guild the canonical status of catechists.

Although Sheed insists that, "conversions were not our immediate concern," one incident is notable: "From our lunch hour meeting on Tower Hill, a few yards from the spot where Thomas More was beheaded, two hecklers later joined the Church and went on to become Cistercians." He is neither immodest nor inaccurate when he claims the members of the Guild, "...were the best instructed body of laymen in the Church’s history."

To pay his bills – Guild speakers were not paid – he got a job as Organizing Secretary of the Catholic Truth Society, but aside from living frugally, outdoor speaking could be dangerous, too: years later, while speaking in Hyde Park, Sheed fell off a platform and was carried unconscious to a hospital. He survived. But his perseverance would pay high rewards: "All that I have done in the fifty-three years since (1920) bears the mark of the Catholic Evidence Guild: some of it would be incomprehensible without the refashioning my whole self underwent in it."

In 1926, after returning to Australia to finish his law degree two years earlier, but proposing marriage before he left, Frank Sheed married Maisie Ward in a ceremony on the Isle of Wight presided over by Bishop Cotter, a fervent Irish Republican. Most of Ward’s family, although noted Catholics, were staunch Unionists...except Maisie Ward. Once again, the wheels of history began to turn, for it was in that year that "the curious life" of S& W began.

Originally, the publishing house would have borne only the name of Ward, for such an enterprise was first conceived by Maisie’s brother, Leo, but he then sought, and failed, to adopt to Jesuit rigors, and had a nervous breakdown in the process. Would Leo Ward then seek to renew his interest in a Catholic publishing house? He did not, for when he recovered his strength, he once again sought the life of a priest, and this time was accepted as a parish or secular priest.

(More about Leo Ward later.) With Leo no longer interested, the marriage of Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward sealed the agreement: henceforth, the publishing house of S& W came into existence. I am puzzled, though, by the order of words on the masthead, since the Wards were

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V. Chiarello/

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The Catholic Intellectual Revival,

well-established Catholics in England: her grandfather had been given the title of Doctor of Philosophy by the Vatican; her father, who had popularized the phrase "siege mentality" regarding the Church’s mindset, had supported the "blazing light" Cardinal Newman displayed in seeking more effective ways of doctrinal teaching.

On the other hand, Frank Sheed was, relatively speaking, "the new boy on the block." Fortunately for the publishers, one of England’s best known literary figures was eager to join the "stable" of the new firm from the outset: Hilaire Belloc.

That wish was both fortunate and important to the newly found publishing house. Sheed: "Belloc’s fighting rendered the Catholic body great service in the early years of the century – forcing the outside world to listen, nerving Catholics to stand up and declare themselves." But the timing of the establishing of the company was also fortunate: the "Catholic Intellectual Revival" was now showing signs of great promise.

Both Joseph Pearce and Patrick Allit, of Emory University, have written about the English "literary converts" who moved over to Rome during the period the 1920s.

Sheed emphasizes this point: It is easily demonstrated that conversions, "...in numbers which could not be matched in any previous century and have not been matched in in the half century since."

And this: "Converts, one imagines, can be hardly ten per cent of the Catholic body: that eighty per cent of the first-rate writers should come from this ten per cent, seems to argue either a monstrous articulateness in the converts, or a monstrous inarticulateness in the born Catholics."

Sheed was to continue to make that claim long after the establishment of S& W, something confirmed in a message to me by Fr. Peter Milward, S.J., resident in Japan. He wrote: "...many years ago, I helped to show Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward round Tokyo, following in the footsteps of her brother Leo Ward, who had come as a missionary to Japan but died on the way home. Then I took the opportunity of asking Frank why there were so fewer Catholic authors nowadays, and he replied it was because there were fewer converts." Need I mention that author Joseph Pearce is a convert? Sheed’s chapter on Catholic converts,

is one of the most interesting and informative sections of the book.

The chapter, "Publishing in America," describes how the relatively new organization of S& W was to find a patron without whom the entire operation would have folded: John Moody, the founder of Moody Investment Services, without whom Sheed insists, "...we could not have survived our first year." S& W’s founders had decided that they would discard the axiom, "...that a Catholic publisher could not exist without selling Church goods, those being statues, altarpieces or vestments, or even textbooks. We wanted to get Christ’s revelation out of the classroom into the living room..." But a major problem loomed: Sheed readily admits that his business skills were non-existent: "...at Sydney High School in 1913, if we had had to choose the boy least likely to succeed in business, I’d have every vote, including my own." But problems also existed for S& W across the sea, too. War in Europe had started, and their London office would not be spared. In late December, 1940, the first aerial bombardment (the Blitz) of London by German bombers, "...

destroyed our offices, and I doubt if a sheet of paper survived." But the organization did, for following the war, S& W vaulted into unrivaled prominence in the Catholic publishing world.

Yet with that prominence came problems that the publishers had never imagined, including, among other thorny issues, how to deal with "the demand of priests and nuns for discounts from booksellers."

Sheed found his earlier conclusion that, "publishing is a simple proposition," to be totally untrue. What likely saved the house’s viability from early bankruptcy was, in addition to the authors previously mentioned, and the financial guidance from John Moody, the inclusion of "trans-Atlantic writers," such as Francois Mauriac, of

God and Mammon

fame, and the French priest/writer, Fr. Leo Trese.

Today, the names of many of those who wrote for S& W no longer bring a response from Catholic readers, but for those of a certain age – mine – the name S& W is, and will continue to be, the

primus inter pares

of Catholic publishing house.

One author and admirer, who referred to them as "Soapbox Catholics," wrote of the couple: "Long before Vatican II, Frank Sheed and his wife, Maisie Ward, were hard at work building the church.

They did it in ways that many may have found unconventional, but which we today might call pioneering. As street-corner evangelists, theological commentators, and successful publishers, Sheed and Ward blazed new trails and opened new opportunities for everyday people to give witness to their faith and proclaim to the world that God matters."

Sheed is a very good story-teller, but a reader may claim that, by Traditional standards, today he would be called a Church "Progressive." Yet, he notes that the 1960s saw the end of the Catholic "euphoria begun in the 1920s," and that he and others were incensed at the talk of an Anglican reunion with Rome.

One strong reaction against the proposed "rapprochement" included an English monk who, seeing an Anglican saying Mass at the Grotto in Lourdes, literally threw him off the altar. It is simply impossible to separate that change from the baleful effects of Vatican II.

This is a very readable book. ■