Why Everybody Watched Bishop Sheen, by John Willson

The irony of the prosperous decade of the 1950s is that the most popular person on the most visible proof of that prosperity—television—was a Catholic Bishop: “America’s Bishop,” Fulton J. Sheen, who rejected feel-good, dishwater Christianity and instead boldly proclaimed the truth to his audience, 70% of whom were non-Catholic.

Happiness, says the wicked Ambrose Bierce, is an “agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” (The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911). There was so much misery in the world (at least misery that most people could agree was misery) from about 1930-1945 that, if Bierce were correct, one would expect to find more expressions of happiness than leap off the pages and images of post-WWII American culture.

The 1950s, so maligned by ignorant generations who didn’t live it, gave us the best picture of the contradictions the ambiguous idea of prosperity offered the world, perhaps in the history of what we still call Western Civilization. Progressives hated the decade, being so stupid as not to see what Elvis and Marilyn and Arthur Miller and Tennessee and Marlon—and yes, their anti-hero, Tail Gunner Joe, handed them to take apart politically what the American Century had offered. …