Far be it from me to diss the almost St Carlo Acutis. If ever there was a man for the times, he is it. A fervour for evangelising, a passion for the Eucharist, and an openness to innovation are qualities that all lay people need.
However, we shouldn’t forget the old-fashioned kind of evangelising, the kind that spread the Faith literally from a soapbox.
This July will mark the 100th anniversary of the Catholic Evidence Guild’s soapbox oratory in The Domain, near the NSW Art Gallery.
It was launched by a young layman, who was studying law at the University of Sydney, Frank Sheed.
Sheed went on to spend most of his life in England, where he married Masie Ward and founded the Sheed & Ward publishing house. He was as brilliant a writer as he was a debater. He wrote numerous books, some of which are classics, To Know Christ Jesus (1962) and Theology and Sanity (1947).
If it weren’t for the fact that his gig was Catholic apologetics, he would be counted amongst the best of 20th Australian prose stylists.
Back to the Domain.
Speakers still hold forth there on Sunday afternoons, but a hundred years ago, it was a bear pit, a ferocious jousting match of wit and invective. A good Domain speaker had “lungs of leather and a throat of brass”, observed a journalist in the late 1950s.
Sheed’s own father had become a rabid Marxist after listening to speakers in the Domain. He “used his great gift for invective on priests and parsons alike as ‘black-coated confidence men’,” Sheed recalled.
Sheed earned his spurs in London and when he returned to Sydney, he set up a branch of the Catholic Evidence Guild.
According to an article in a 1925 newspaper, “there are to be found, on every Sunday, over 2000 around the Catholic platform listening to an explanation of Catholic doctrine. This work, which has met with such marked success, is novel in New South Wales and, we believe, in Australia.”
The novelty was not the soapbox, but the person on the soapbox – a layman (or woman), no less. Hitherto, only clerics had held forth.
Orating for an hour and a half or so while perched on a soapbox or a ladder was no job for a snowflake. It must been difficult to keep the thread of an argument in explaining complex issues like the credibility of the Gospels.
One of Sheed’s hecklers in London told him: “Either you’re paid to say these things or you’re mentally defective – and I can’t imagine anybody paying you.” Once he had a bad cough and someone yelled out: “Excuse me, sir. I think there’s something wrong with your throat. If I were you, I’d get it cut.”
Sheed tutored many others in this combative evangelisation, always advising them to be charitable and to moderate exasperation or anger when provoked. Sometimes their patience was tested to the limit.
One of his speakers was explaining the sacrament of confession when “a rather ghastly woman” shouted: “Your priests send young men from the confessional to make love to me.” To which the speaker said: “I didn’t know they gave such severe penances nowadays.”
“We didn’t find it in our hearts to censure him,” Sheed recalled in his autobiography, The Church and I (1974).
What was the point of this verbal jousting? There were occasional conversions, some of them quite spectacular. But for the most part, the crowds remained unbelieving or indifferent. What it did, though, was create a thoroughly modern approach to evangelisation which met people where they were.
“And with all the noise and confusion and mockery and lost tempers of the outdoors, we learned to get true dialogue,” Sheed wrote. Sheed and his followers were, in a way, the forerunners of Carlo Acutis.
Who are the modern counterparts of Frank Sheed, The Catholic Weekly asked Professor James Franklin, the editor of the Australian Catholic Historical Society.
“Well, that sort of public thing is done now through social media and other online work,” he said. “Carlo Acutis’s website on Eucharistic miracles was an inspiration and pretty good, especially considering his age. Anyone can edit Wikipedia articles to insert some Catholic content where appropriate, e.g. adding the churches in the Wikipedia article on any town or suburb.”
And to recover Sheed’s zeal? “People just have to get off their bums,” said Franklin. “Or actually, onto their bums which is where online stuff is written.”