Tuesday, July 30, 2024

July 30, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Catholic Activism

[This coming weekend, the great Martin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]

On a great example of art imitating and amplifying life.

For a December 2019 piece for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, I highlighted the inspiring Catholic activism of Dorothy Day. Day eventually played an important role in Martin Sheen’s own activist life, so I’d ask you to check out that column if you would and then come on back for two layers to Sheen’s relationship to Day and Catholic activism.

Welcome back! The Wikipedia page for Sheen claims that he “met Catholic activist Dorothy Day” while pursuing his youthful acting career with the Living Theatre company in New York City, but that seems to be an overstatement. As Sheen remembered it in this 2015 interview with Chicago Catholic, “He may have met Dorothy Day in 1959 or 1960 when he was a young man working for a pittance in an avant-garde theater in Greenwich Village and eating the free meal provided every night by the Catholic Worker. ‘They had a breadline, and you didn’t have to pay and you didn’t have to listen to a sermon, you just showed up five nights a week and you got a free supper,’ he said. ‘Now, I could have met Dorothy Day. I can’t say for sure because I went there for months and months, but I was only there for the food. Eventually, I came to a far better understanding of the Catholic Worker and it became a very powerful force in my life and a great source of inspiration and I’m still to this day very supportive of the Catholic Workers all over the United States.’”

So Sheen’s personal connection to Day and the Catholic Worker movement was a long arc, although no less (and perhaps in some ways even more) meaningful for it. But he also has an interesting artistic connection to the movement, through his performance as Peter Maurin in the 1996 independent film Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story (1996; Sheen’s West Wing co-star Moira Kelly plays Day). Maurin co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Day, and was in his own right a hugely important figure not just in that specific spiritual and activist tradition, but in the arc of 20th century American social and labor activism among other histories. As I know every reader of this blog knows well, I believe that cultural representations of our figures and histories offer one of the most compelling and successful ways to add them to our collective memories; few American figures need such adding more than Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and Martin Sheen offers us a cultural as well as biographical and activist way to better remember that pair.

Next SheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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