By Michael Motes

Over a quarter of a century spanned the only two official visits by the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen to Georgia. The first, made in 1951, is as fresh in the minds of those who were on hand to greet the nation’s best-known Catholic minister as if it took place yesterday.

The event was the state meeting of the Catholic Laymen’s Association, hosted that year by then extremely small Saint Mary’s parish in Rome.

Father Patrick C. Connell, now Chaplain at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home, had recently been assigned as pastor of Saint Mary’s and recalls the events leading up to the visit of then Bishop Sheen.

“In the fall of 1950,” remembers Father Connell, “Father James Grady, pastor of Saint Mary’s and a Colonel in the Army Reserve, was recalled to active duty and I was assigned as administrator of the parish in Rome.

“Plans were being made for the upcoming Catholic Laymen’s Association meeting that Saint Mary’s would host and a committee from the association met with the priests in the rectory to plan for the October convention Sunday.

“The question of a speaker of note came up. It was suggested by committee member Marshall Wellborn that to satisfy the number of Catholics that would come to the convention, and to direct the association’s message to the greatest possible number of non-Catholics, that a speaker be asked who was considered ‘at the top.’

“Such a person was then Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who for decades had been nationally known from his Radio Catholic Hour talks and his TV weekly broadcasts.”

Father Connell continued to say that the suggestion made by Mr. Wellborn was met with great enthusiasm and it was suggested that the idea be conveyed to then Auxiliary Bishop Francis Hyland of the Savannah-Atlanta Diocese.

When Mr. Wellborn informed the bishop of the ambitious program planned by the Laymen’s Association, the prelate said that he personally would deliver the invitation to Bishop Sheen, whom he planned to meet soon in New York.

Arriving at Bishop Sheen’s New York office, Bishop Hyland spoke of the far-flung missions of Georgia and invited Bishop Sheen, as National Director of the Society for the propagation of the Faith, to the October convention in Georgia.

Bishop Sheen asked the date, turned to his calendar and stated, “I’ll be there.” It was as simple as that!

Arriving in Atlanta fresh from a pilgrimage to Fatima, Bishop Sheen gave early morning Mass-goers at the Cathedral of Christ the King quite a surprise when, completely unannounced, he gave the homily at the 8 a.m. Mass the day that he later motored to Rome for the convention.

Mr. Wellborn, then an investment banker living in Rome and now retired in Atlanta, vividly recalls meeting Archbishop Sheen upon his arrival in Rome. A motorcade led by the late Hughes Spalding, Sr. had accompanied the famed orator from Atlanta.

“I was impressed immediately by the Bishop’s piercing eyes,” recalls Wellborn. “He was a tremendously imposing man, yet so kind and gentle. We met in the lobby of the auditorium where he was to speak and a group of children, having seen him on television, were gathered around trying to photograph him. He turned to one little girl and said, ‘You can’t see very well in here, let’s go outside and get our pictures made.’ With that, he excused himself and pleased the children by posing with them to their heart’s delight.”

Wellborn further recalled that the guest speaker regaled his audience with his opening remarks. Fearing that he would be late for his guest appearance, Bishop Sheen had dressed in the robes of his rank, brilliantly lined in red silk, for a pre-convention luncheon with a group of officers of the Laymen’s Association.

After taking the luncheon orders of the bishop’s companions, the waitress turned to Bishop Sheen, obviously unaware of neither who he was nor what his robes indicated, and asked, “Well, Cock Robin, what will you have?”

For two hours, Bishop Sheen enthralled his audience, which tremendously overfilled the Municipal Auditorium in Rome, the vast majority of whom were non-Catholic.

“There were very few Catholics in Rome at the time,” recalls Madeleine Cornell, the former Madeleine Birdsong of Rome, and now receptionist at the Catholic Center in Atlanta.

She was just out of high school at the time of Bishop’s Sheen’s visit and her younger brother, Grover Birdsong now of Washington, D.C. served as an altar boy to assist the famous visitor to Rome.

“I remember how excited everyone in the whole area was – both the Catholics and the non-Catholics alike. The Catholic population probably would not have filled the first three rows of the auditorium, but it was jammed for Bishop Sheen and everyone was spellbound by his remarks,” she said.

Following his introduction by the late Bishop Gerald P. O’Hara, Archbishop-Bishop of the Savannah-Atlanta Diocese, Bishop Sheen told his audience that the Christian world should pray for the conversion of Russia “as the surest means of obtaining world peace.”

He asserted that “peace could come to this world tomorrow if only we could get Russians to love the Lord.” He also complimented the Georgia Laymen’s Association by saying, “No laymen’s association in the United States has done so effective a job of creating good will as has yours. It has added to the prestige of Georgia.”

When Archbishop Sheen returned to Georgia many years later it was at the invitation of the Hibernian Benevolent Society to be guest speaker at their Saint Patrick’s Day banquet on March 17, 1977, in Savannah.

At the urging of Bishop Raymond Lessard of Savannah, Archbishop Sheen stayed over to address gatherings of the Savannah diocese’s youth, priests and religious and to give a public address the following day.

Speaking to over 5,000 at the Savannah Civic Arena, the prelate’s talk dealt with the three kinds of love as described by the three Greek words – Eros, Philla and Agape.

After describing Eros as “any kind of good human love,” Archbishop Sheen said, “Along came Freud and everything changed. Now you never hear of Eros, but you hear of the erotic. Freud changed Eros into sex, and love in America today is pretty much identified with sex. This is a degeneration of what love really is. The result is that we have a tremendous amount of pornography.”

Using the dramatic gestures that so many millions witnessed for years on their television sets, Archbishop Sheen held his Savannah audience captive by saying, “We have become so carnal minded, and so quickly, that one wonders if we will not go into a rapid decline as every other civilization did which became carnal.”

The thoughts that Archbishop Sheen left with his Savannah audience, as he had done in Rome many years before, are fresh in the minds of all those who were fortunate enough to witness one of his two visits to the state. But millions of others can remember the dynamic Christian through his media appearances and the many volumes he left behind as an ever-lasting legacy of faith.