Poetry

Colliers; a young actor named Ramon Estevez changed his name to Martin Sheen, in the celebrity bishop’s honor and with his permission.

By 1957, however, Sheen was off the air and on the slide into obscurity that would mark the last 22 years of his life. In part, Sheen was a victim of his archrival, the iron-willed and truculent Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who abruptly forced Sheen off TV by notifying ABC that the bishop no longer had his permission to preach on the air. Spellman was undoubtedly envious of Sheen’s popularity; the relationship between the two had quickly become acrimonious, and culminated in a quarrel that went all the way up to the Vatican. Sheen, once a sought-after Lenten speaker in New York churches, was suddenly persona non grata. There had earlier been talk that he would be made a cardinal, but his progress up the ladder of clerical advancement was now clearly at an end—and so was the kind of Catholic culture that he represented.

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Colliers; a young actor named Ramon Estevez changed his name to Martin Sheen, in the celebrity bishop’s honor and with his permission.

By 1957, however, Sheen was off the air and on the slide into obscurity that would mark the last 22 years of his life. In part, Sheen was a victim of his archrival, the iron-willed and truculent Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who abruptly forced Sheen off TV by notifying ABC that the bishop no longer had his permission to preach on the air. Spellman was undoubtedly envious of Sheen’s popularity; the relationship between the two had quickly become acrimonious, and culminated in a quarrel that went all the way up to the Vatican. Sheen, once a sought-after Lenten speaker in New York churches, was suddenly persona non grata. There had earlier been talk that he would be made a cardinal, but his progress up the ladder of clerical advancement was now clearly at an end—and so was the kind of Catholic culture that he represented.