Une Minute avec Marie
Faire connaître et aimer Marie
During the Christmas season of 1936, a prominent member of the Communist Party USA, Louis Budenz, took aim at the Catholic Church’s position on Communism. In that month’s issue of the Worker, an article written by Budenz posed a series of questions directed at the Catholic Church and Monsignor Sheen. Explain your criticism of communism, Budenz asked. Sheen responded.
Sheen wanted nothing to do with the politics of it all. His message was simple: religious freedom must reign. He pounded that message home in speeches and sermons on the radio. A communist society, he hammered, is no place for a Catholic.
Budenz was confused by the church’s stance. [...] He asked to meet with the Church leader. “In hopes that they could win me over to their cause,” is how Sheen would later describe it.
Of course, the monsignor said yes. [...] In their later years, both men fondly recalled their “odd” meeting at the Hotel Commodore that day. Despite opening with small talk, the insouciant greetings soon turned serious. The conversation drifted to the parallels of communism and fascism, something Bundez vehemently denied. “There is this merit in the communist view that does not inhere in fascism,” Budenz angrily contended. “Communism has within it the promise of democracy and the end of dictatorship in its doctrine of the withering away of the state.”
In Sheen’s own recollections, Budenz’s bickering about communist and fascist differences was inconsequential. There was only one objective in the monsignor’s mind. “I told him I did not want to talk about communism,” Sheen later wrote. “I wanted to talk about his soul.”
The next few minutes became solidly etched in Budenz’s mind. He remembered it vividly even years later as the moment that eventually changed his life. Describing Sheen’s restraint at first Budenz said, “He was not disposed to contradict me. That would have only aroused my personal pride and enticed me to further argument.”
“What he did instead,” Budenz reflects, “took me totally by surprise.”
Sheen rose and pushed aside the cutlery on the table. He bent forward and “waved his hand in argumentation.” In a voice snarling with contempt, he said: “Let us now talk of the Blessed Virgin.”
Budenz froze with fear. “It was an ‘electrifying moment,’” he later described. According to Budenz, Sheen spent the next few minutes talking “of the miracle of Lourdes, with the promises of Our Lady, the prayers of the church, and the conversion of Russia through her grace.”
Budenz was transfixed. He later confessed: “In the course of my varied career, I have met many magnetic men and women, have conferred with governors, and senators, have stood in court twenty-one times as a result of labor disputes – breathlessly awaited the verdict and each time experienced the triumph of acquittal – but never has my soul been swept by love and reverence as it was that April evening.”
The two men departed that day and would not meet or associate again for another nine years.
Bundez battled his own personal convictions at that time, but could not shake the power of one simple statement; the last words Sheen spoke before departing. “I will always pray for you because you have never fully lost the faith,” the monsignor said.
Nine years later, Budenz wrote Sheen a letter. “I’m returning to the Catholic Church,” he said, “and bringing my family with me.” Sheen welcomed him back without regrets. In 1945, Budenz confessed his sins and Sheen baptized him.