The Church and I

In this 1974 book, Frank Sheed presents a narrative which is half auto biography, half history of the Catholic Church in the 20th century. Sheed came to England from his native Australia in 1920 as a enthusiastic but unevenly catechized young Catholic and became one of the key organizers of the Catholic Evidence Guild, a lay group dedicated to presenting rigorous defenses of Catholic teaching in public speaking areas such as parks and street corners. In the process, he learned a great deal of theology, and in a manner suited towards providing rigorous explanations still accessible to the common man. He also learned a great deal about the state of catechesis and spirituality in the Catholic Church at that time. He and his wife, Maisie Ward, founded the Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward, and in the process became friends with and publishers of many of the authors of the Catholic literary/intellectual revival of the 1920s through the 1950s, including Belloc, Chesterton, Waugh, Knox and many others. Writing in 1974, as the chaos that followed the implementation of Vatican II was at its height, Sheed writes this history very much from the point of view of trying to answer: How could it all have fallen apart so quickly? He conveys both the incredible excitement and optimism of the Catholic communities in the English-speaking world in the first half of the last century, and also the danger points which should have warned people that more difficult times were coming. This is an inciteful book by an orthodox and faithful Catholic, and provides a unique set of insights into the history of the Church immediately before and after the council.