America's Bishop

The American Catholic Church's most charismatic presence over several decades, Sheen was also its chief evangelist. Among his thousands of converts were celebrities such as Clare Booth Luce and Henry Ford II, and former communists Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley. Reeves discusses these conversions and Sheen's close friendship with J Edgar Hoover, and details for the first time the struggle between Sheen and his chief rival, Francis Cardinal Spellman, a battle of ecclesiastical titans that led all the way to the Pope and to Sheen's final humiliation and exile. The result of interviews with dozens of Sheen's friends, family members and church colleagues and the unearthing of important new material at the Sheen Archives in Rochester, New York, 'Fulton J Sheen' is the first in depth portrait of this flamboyant churchman and intellectual, and a social history of Catholicism in America during the twentieth century.

Thomas C. Reeves has written and edited a dozen books