America's Bishop

by Thomas C. Reeves

The American Catholic Church’s most charismatic presence over several decades, Fulton 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 friendship with J. Edgar Hoover, and details for the first time the struggle between Sheen and his chief rival, Francis Cardinal Spellman, a battle that led all the way to the Pope and to Sheen’s final humiliation and exile. America’s Bishop is the first in-depth portrait of this flamboyant churchman and intellectual, and a social history of Catholicism in America during the twentieth century.