One of my favorite anecdotes, though clearly a fabrication, involves Jascha Heifetz and Mischa Elman who, in their time, were two of the world’s greatest violinists. On one occasion, the maître d’ of their favorite restaurant escorted them to a table where a letter addressed to “the world’s greatest violinist” lay waiting for them. Jascha said, “This must be for you, Mischa”. His counterpart said, “No, Jascha, this must be for you.” The two continued this respectful volley until finally one of them opened the envelope. To their embarrassment, the letter began with the salutation, “Dear Fritz”.
We may imagine what truth is on the basis of our egoistic preferences. But in order to find out what the truth really is, we must take the necessary steps to discover it on an objective plane. In other words, we must open the letter. And how difficult that can be given the strength of our egos! Yet, as Saint John Paul has stated, the truth has its own “splendor” and will be recognized as such if only we can open our eyes to see it. The truth, though often avoided with a passion, lies waiting for us, as accessible as the letter on a table.
Speaking of Fritz Kreisler, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen extolled him as “not only the world’s greatest violinist [but] he was also a learned man . . . When I would quote a text from the Old Testament, he would read it in Hebrew; when I would quote a text from the New Testament, Fritz would read it in Greek.” The initial meeting of these two extraordinary personalities was fortuitous, if not providential. Sheen had been asked to visit and offer consolation to a man who had recently lost his wife. The man was not home, but the good bishop asked the elevator operator if he knew who lived in the other apartment on the same floor of this fashionable two-story Manhattan apartment house along the East River. The occupants were Fritz and Harriet Kreisler. Sheen rang the doorbell and introduced himself. A conversation ensued and both the esteemed violinist and his wife agreed to being instructed in the Catholic faith. After two months, they received Communion.
An enduring friendship was established. Kreisler composed a waltz that Bishop Sheen used to introduce his TV program. Sheen spoke at Kreisler’s seventy-fifth and eightieth birthday celebrations, and delivered the eulogy in 1962 at the violinist’s funeral. In his autobiography, “Treasures in Clay,” Archbishop Sheen emphasizes that he should not be looked upon as a convert-maker. “I am only,” he writes, “a porter who opens the door; it is the Lord Who walks in and does the carpentry and the masonry and the rebuilding from the inside.” The metaphor is most apt. The truth is present, in a letter, in a heart, in a room, or in a book, waiting to be opened.
The stories surrounding Bishop Sheen opening the door for Catholic converts are numerous. After the distinguished playwright and congresswoman Clare Booth Luce became a Catholic, through the assistance of Bishop Sheen, she made the following statement about why she entered the Church that appeared in McCall’s magazine (April 1947): “Well, I suppose that the over-all reason, the only one that includes all the others and, therefore, one might say the real reason is that upon careful examination, Catholic doctrine seemed to me the solid objective Truth.” Concerning her mentor, Mrs. Luce had this to say: “I never knew a teacher who could be at once so patient and so unyielding, so poetical, so practical, so inventive and so orthodox.”
Another conversion story involves Gretta Palmer, a prominent freelance journalist who regarded herself as an atheist. In 1947, Look magazine assigned her to interview Bishop Sheen and his converts. Her relationship with Sheen opened her eyes, her mind and her soul. Miss Palmer began reading G. K. Chesterton and a wide assortment of books written both for and against the Church of Rome. Her “atheist’s cell,” as she identified her predicament, began to crumble. Sheen instructed her and received her into the Church. As a Catholic, she wrote and lectured about her conversion. She had a new name for “The cramped and narrow universe in which I lived my life until a year ago. The name of it is Hell.” The former non-believer came to know the Church in its breadth and wisdom. “I found,” she wrote, that there is no fact or hypothesis or modern physics or astronomy which cannot be comfortably accommodated inside the ample arms of the Church. . . . Many men have abandoned Rome because they wished to worship at the altar of man’s self-sufficient intellect; nobody ever left the Church because the best in him could not find fulfillment there.”
At the end of his autobiography, Archbishop Sheen makes the comment that at one time, souls came to a belief in God by meditating on the order of the universe. “Today” (the 1970s), according to Sheen, souls come to the Church by the disorder within themselves. This may be true. But the fact remains: the Truth that is needed remains both available and accessible. The world needs more porters, like Archbishop Sheen, who have specialized in opening hearts and souls to vistas that people had been seeking, but for whatever reason, had been avoiding.
The truth may be hiding, but it is hiding as proximate to us as a letter is hiding within an envelope.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
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