On Thursday morning, the White House published a presidential message praising Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen for taking the Gospel to "a world threatened by the titanic forces of communism." That evening, President Trump raised a glass to Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state dinner in the East Room. The message also says Sheen converted "communist leaders" to the Catholic faith. It never names them, so we looked them up. One ran the Communist Party's own newspaper.

Two White House Releases, One Thursday

September 24 was a crowded day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Xi was in the middle of his first visit to Washington in more than a decade, and the White House had rolled out the full state-visit treatment. That same morning, the White House posted the Presidential Message on the Beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, timed to the Mass in St. Louis where the Church formally declared the famous TV priest "Blessed."

A few hours later, the First Lady's office released the menu and program for the Xi state dinner "this evening." The two releases sit a few entries apart on the White House's Briefings and Statements page. Each got its own news cycle. Read side by side, they make an unusual pair.

What the Message Actually Says About Communism

The message, written in the President's voice and signed off as "Melania and I," is not a boilerplate condolence card. It spends most of its length on Sheen's television career and his fight against communism. It describes him, chalk and blackboard in hand, "boldly bringing the teachings of Christianity to a world threatened by the titanic forces of communism."

It goes on to say his program converted thousands of Americans, a group the message says included "communist leaders." It also quotes Sheen from his 1960s show warning about a "new type of violence that's sweeping our country, our schools, and our streets," and it closes by praying that his example will "lift our Nation upward and ever higher to God."

Who Were the "Communist Leaders" Sheen Brought Into the Church?

The White House didn't name them, but the historical record does. The best known is Louis F. Budenz. According to his biography, Budenz joined the Communist Party USA in 1935, became managing editor of the party's Daily Worker newspaper, and sat on the party's National Committee. In 1945 he renounced communism and returned to the Catholic Church "under the guidance of Bishop Fulton Sheen," a conversion Time magazine covered at the time.

What Budenz did next is the part that matters. By his own estimate he spent about 3,000 hours explaining the party's inner workings to the FBI, and he testified 33 times before congressional committees. He was a government witness in the 1949 Smith Act trial of the Communist Party's top leadership, Dennis v. United States.

The second is Bella Dodd. She served on the Communist Party's National Committee in 1944 and ran its legislative operation in New York, according to her biography. The party expelled her in 1949. On April 8, 1952, after weekly instruction from Sheen, she rejoined the Catholic Church at St. Patrick's Cathedral. A year later she told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee how the party had worked its way into teachers' unions and schools. She spent the rest of her life as an anti-communist, and ran for Congress in 1968 on the Conservative Party line.

So "communist leaders" is not a figure of speech. Sheen personally catechized a former editor of the party's flagship paper and a former member of its governing committee. Both went on to testify against the movement they had helped run.

That Evening, a Toast to "Different Systems"

Hours after that message went up, Trump welcomed Xi and Madame Peng Liyuan to the East Room. The dinner opened with a toast of Schramsberg sparkling wine, which the White House said honored the "Toast to Peace" between President Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.

In his toast, Trump said, "President Xi and I both understand we represent different systems, but the ties between our people endure, and we've never gotten along better," as the Associated Press reported. Earlier that day he called their relationship "a truly great friendship," and outside the gates protesters chanted "Free Hong Kong" and "Free Tibet," according to ABC News.

Trump's phrase "different systems" is the diplomatic version of what the Sheen message says outright. Nobody in the East Room pretended the two governments share a philosophy. The White House simply put its view of communism in writing on the same day it hosted the leader of the world's largest communist party, and it did not soften the language to suit the guest list.

The Priest Who Beat Milton Berle in Prime Time

The message says Sheen's ratings topped Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra. That checks out. Life Is Worth Living debuted on the DuMont network in February 1952 in the Tuesday 8 p.m. slot, opposite Berle's Texaco Star Theater and Sinatra's CBS show. Sinatra's program was canceled that spring. Berle took it in stride: "If I'm going to be eased off the top by anyone, it's better that I lose to the One for whom Bishop Sheen is speaking," he told Time.

Sheen won the Emmy for Most Outstanding Personality in 1952 and thanked "my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." His show drew as many as 30 million viewers a week, most of them not Catholic. His 1948 book was titled Communism and the Conscience of the West. In February 1953 he read the burial scene from Julius Caesar on air with the names of Soviet leaders swapped in, ending with the line that "Stalin must one day meet his judgment." Stalin suffered a stroke days later and was dead within the week.

What the White House Quoted From the 1960s

The message's most pointed passage comes from Sheen's later syndicated series, The Fulton Sheen Program, which ran from 1961 to 1968. In it, Sheen described a violence that "involves destruction of everything that is in the past," and a nation full of people crying "Down with schools. Down with the churches." Then he asked, "Can you build anything down?" and answered his own question: "You cannot."

We could not locate a full transcript of that episode to confirm the wording independently, so we are relying on the White House's own rendering of it. The choice of passage is telling on its own. Out of decades of broadcasts, the administration picked the one about a movement that wants to tear down schools, churches and the police.

Why This Message Is Worth Reading in Full

About 50,000 people filled The Dome at America's Center for the beatification Mass, according to organizers cited by OSV News, with close to 90 bishops and some 1,000 priests. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle read Pope Leo XIV's decree. The miracle behind it was the 2010 revival of a stillborn baby, James Fulton Engstrom, who carried Sheen's relic in the procession. Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria closed by asking everyone to pray for Sheen's canonization.

The White House says Sheen is the first American-born bishop ever beatified. It also chose to honor him with a message about his fight against communism on the one day this year when China's leader was at the dinner table. Presidential messages usually get skimmed and forgotten. This one names a movement, lists the ground it lost to a priest with a piece of chalk, and asks the country to look "up." Budenz and Dodd would have recognized the argument.

Top photo: The Rev. Fulton J. Sheen in an early studio portrait. (Harris and Ewing, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)