There’s a story of Fulton Sheen that has inspired me for a really long time about keeping the one thing the one thing. And it was, the message is, “God loves you.” That’s the message. The message is God loves us, God loves all of us, we are called to then love one another. And if that’s not primary and key, then why are we doing it?
Fulton Sheen wrestled with pride a lot. I think anybody in front of cameras or behind microphones or any sort of success, you’re going to wrestle with pride. You’re going to be like, “They know who I am.”
At conferences, it’s always, I have to constantly pray the “Litany of Humility,” which I call the Voldemort of prayers. It’s the prayer that should not be prayed because you know something’s going to happen. You’re going to get humbled, you’re going to get a flat tire, your flight’s going to get delayed, you’re going to have chocolate on your jacket. Something’s going to happen because people will stop you. And they know all these things about you, and you know nothing about them, and they want a photo. And you’re like, “Yeah, you should want a photo with me. Have you seen what I’ve done lately?”
But Fulton Sheen won an Emmy, beat out Lucille Ball for most popular TV personality in the 1950s. Receives his Emmy, walks up to the stage. There are no photos of Fulton Sheen with his Emmy. Did you know this? No. There are no photos of Fulton Sheen with his Emmy because it wasn’t a telecast at the time. And whatever photo would’ve been taken has been lost to the archives. Nobody can find any photos of Sheen holding his Emmy, and he was never photographed with it afterward because he walks up to the stage and he says, “I think it’s high time I thank my writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
The famous joke that Sheen made. That’s so funny.
A couple of days later, a nephew or a cousin, somebody visits him in New York at his brownstone, and the Emmy is sitting on a radiator. And the Emmy’s very heavy. I’ve held it. It’s very cool to hold a relic of that kind. But the Emmy is sitting on a radiator, and this person’s like, “Fulton, what are you doing?” And he’s like, “Oh, the radiator’s jiggly, and there’s a screw, and the Emmy’s heavy enough to hold it down.”
And I think about that all the time. He kept it in a closet. It wasn’t up on a shelf after that. It was an accolade. It was a thing. It was a successful thing. It was a marker of his success in this secular way.
But to him, the ultimate success was that he did a daily, unbroken Holy Hour and never missed it. No matter what, no matter where he was going, no matter what he was doing.
There’s this one story: his flight was delayed one time, and he gets into a place, and he still has to say his Mass. It’s 11:00 at night. So he said a 15-minute Mass and then adores the Blessed Sacrament and is like, “Okay, Lord, I did 45 minutes.” And the Lord’s like, “Not enough.” And so he had to go into the next morning.
And so then, of course, “Okay, well, I don’t have to do 45 minutes tomorrow because that 15, right?” Bargaining with God doesn’t usually work well. It usually doesn’t work, right?
And I think it’s notable that the miracle of Fulton Sheen was a little boy born without signs of life, returns to life 61 minutes after he was born. So it’s as if Fulton was praying his Holy Hour in Heaven, and at minute 61, James Fulton is alive.
The marker of secular success, the money that Fulton Sheen made, that he just gave away. The stuff that he gave away. Because he kept the one thing the one thing. He kept the right thing the right thing. He understood this is not about anything that anybody’s ever going to say about me. It’s, did they know that God loves them?
And I think for success in the secular world, which sometimes comes by way of the wealth that we accumulate, okay, then what are you going to do with that? Are you going to go make a lasting impact?
Or even just, “My kids stayed Catholic.” That’s a mark of success for parents today. “My kids love the Church.”
My mom and dad could look at you and say, “I’ve got one nun, and I’ve got one gal who talks about Catholicism on CNN.” My mom and dad were successful in raising two Catholic kids. And if you look at them and say, “What’d you do, Marie and Garland?” they’d say, “We went to Mass a lot.”
And it’s not to be falsely humble. It’s to say it’s not necessarily our own prowess or skill. It’s in looking at the Lord and saying, “What would You have me do? And help me to do it well.”
And I think an attitude of docility, even with success, “Okay, what’s next? What else? How else can I help? How else can I translate that love of God?” is really the only way to stay grounded in it.
And when it comes to speaking about the faith, that’s what I do for a living. It’s what signs my paycheck at the end of every month, is determined on, did people actually listen to what I had to say about Jesus?
But I like to say, and I try to remind myself frequently, would I still talk this much about Jesus if there was no microphone? If it was just a conversation with a person that I encountered?
Not in a weird way. I’m not going to walk into the Grand Ole Opry and flash a Bible around and say, “Repent, the Gospel is at hand.”
— Katie Prejean McGrady