Be Careful with Your Celebrity

I see that you are again one of the speakers at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress in Anaheim in late February. You’ve been a “headliner” at big Catholic gatherings like L.A. Congress for several decades. Have you ever thought of yourself as a Catholic celebrity?

I once gave a conference on the topic of “From Saints to People Magazine,” where I talked about growing up being taught the lives of the saints, and how that has changed today into our looking at the famous faces in People magazine.

There’s a fundamental culture shift, or ethos, where our celebrities are now the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the achievers. Cultural icons are pop stars and athlete stars. I just saw the other day that we have a new “sexiest man in the world.” I think we’ve moved to an ethos where celebrity means those things. We’ve moved a bit from substance to appearance.

When I was a kid, the heroes fed to me were very different from what’s fed today. They had to have a persona of being humble, and also moral. I suppose journalists knew that certain athletes were playboys, but what was presented to us was always clean and monogamous.

The heroes of movies were all presented as moral and decent. Integrity and humility were essential, and valued.

So things have changed a lot?

Well, yes. Nelson Rockefeller couldn’t win the Republican presidential nomination throughout the 1960s because he was divorced. The cultural and sexual revolution of the late sixties turned all of that around.

When I was in high school, the most popular show on television was Bonanza. The Cartwright Family were pretty much the lives of ordinary saints. Wholesome and good and honest, always. Only a decade later, and throughout the 1980s, it was Dallas: the rich and terrible Ewing Family.

I remember being shocked as a kid when Muhammad Ali said, “I’m the greatest.” Celebrities used to have to at least pretend to be humble. That got to be accepted and then almost expected—that they’d flaunt the big ego even if they didn’t want to.

The public persona of a celebrity needed to be that they had everything, even if those people didn’t feel it themselves.

What about celebrities in the Catholic Church in the Sixties?

Fulton Sheen comes first to mind. He was intelligent, all-Church, all-Catholic, solid doctrine and solid piety, and very extraverted, a talented speaker.

On Sunday afternoons, as kids, we had to listen to Sheen on the radio. He was a symbol, as much as anything else—as if “this is what a Catholic should look like, sound like, be like”—that’s how we felt as kids. And that’s how kids respond to celebrities.

Do you think young people—or anyone else—responds to Church celebrities the same way today?

There used to be a certain adulation for celebrities. That is probably gone. But today they still are people who stand in for us, who “anchor” for us what a Catholic is and means. People say, “This guy really speaks for me.”

Is there a Fulton Sheen today?

When I was a kid in Canada, we had one network TV channel, and everybody got the same news. Today we have hundreds of channels and a Tower of Babel sort of diversity of places to get news and opinions. Today, we have different celebrities for different islands in the Church.

What about the “industry” of Christian celebrities, that you’ve also been a part of?

The reason why anyone in the Church with a public platform goes out there, and seeks audiences, is not for popularity-sake; it’s to get the message out. A very talented songwriter once said to me, “When you’re young, you’re going out there and sort of making love to yourself. When you get more sophisticated, you’re making love to the audience. And when you get to a greater depth and maturity, you’re making love to the song.”

Why am I doing it? It needs to be about the song. About the message.

The audience sometimes has its own feelings, doesn’t it?

Yes, you know that an audience is sizing you up. They are thinking, is he stupid? Does he know what he’s talking about? And you want to demonstrate that you’re there for a reason.

And then there are people with a great message who don’t have the standing to be there to give what they so obviously have, to that audience. That’s always unfortunate. I read bloggers who have much to say, but very few people to whom to say it.

So, you have to be careful with your celebrity.

You have to bring your personality in, but then you can’t let it be about your personality. But you also can’t be unconscious about the fact that they are “sizing you up”—or you’ll do terribly. That’s the struggle. To be in and out of the equation at the same time. So that it doesn’t become about your own person, your own charisms.

I have a personal example of the danger of looking up to Church celebrities. As an editor and book publisher I enthusiastically promoted the work of Jean Vanier. I put “He’s a living saint” in the marketing copy. And then look what happened.

I have the same example. I wrote the preface for one of Jean Vanier’s last books.

Is there another example in your life?

I used to listen to many hours of lectures of the psychologist Robert L. Moore, and respected him very much. He was one of my spiritual mentors. I invited him to speak here at Oblate Theological Seminary. But he ended up killing his wife and killing himself. He had a mental breakdown.

When I heard that he died like that—I needed oxygen when I got the news. I still pray for him everyday.

So, is there a balance between looking up to people, and not idolizing them too much?

When you over-idolize somebody, then when the slightest thing happens, you’re going to demonize them. Once they are idolized, and they fail, they have to be erased.

To me, Henri Nouwen is a saint for our times, because in all his struggles he was honest. He was a celibate who would sometimes fall in love, and get therapy and spiritual direction to deal with it, but then he also wrote about it. He wrote about this in his books.

Nouwen shows that the spiritual life is not simple. Sometimes you look at a model like Mother Teresa and you say, How can she do that?! Nouwen failed, and then shared his failings.

I dedicated my book, The Holy Longing to Henri because he teaches us how to pray when we don’t know how.