SEBASTIAN | Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had a powerful way of communicating. He made his radio listeners and TV viewers feel as if he were speaking to them personally, and his popular blessings were for them individually. For Bruce Verdrager, a Jewish man who attends Mass at St. Sebastian Parish with his Catholic wife, Tina, contact with Archbishop Sheen was even more special and intimate.
Living in Bronx, New York, for 50 years, then retiring to Vermont to become an innkeeper before really retiring to Vero Beach six years ago, Verdrager enjoys telling how he received multiple blessings from Archbishop Sheen. He recently told his pastor, Father Antony Pulikal, about his personal connection to the renowned media archbishop, who is set to be beatified Thursday, Sept. 24, in St. Louis.
As Verdrager explains it, in the 1960s his father was a vice president of public relations in the cigarette division of American Tobacco Co., and his father became friends with Msgr. Joseph Dunne, then-chaplain for the New York City Police Department. In a PR move, Verdrager and his father attended annual Communion breakfasts for the NYPD, city fire and sanitation departments and would arrange to have free cigars or cigarettes placed at each seat.
In those days, he said, each Communion breakfast attracted up to 18,000 people. Following Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the public servants marched in a parade to a nearby hotel that could accommodate the large groups.
Verdrager, who will turn 80 in October, quit college after a year, which meant that he was eligible to be drafted into the military. It was the mid-‘60s and the United States was rapidly increasing its military presence in South Vietnam. Everyone feared being drafted and sent to fight in the Vietnam War.
He was drafted, then volunteered to enter the Marines, with boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. After Msgr. Dunne was informed of his upcoming deployment, the chaplain told Verdrager’s father, “Next Sunday, Bishop Sheen is going to be handling the blessings at St. Patrick’s, and then walk up Fifth Avenue with all these guys to the hotel, and he will be doing the sermon and all that at the hotel. Why don’t you meet me at St. Patrick’s, and I will get you in to see Bishop Sheen privately, and he can bless your son.”
“And that’s what happened the following Sunday,” Verdrager said. Before the breakfast prayers, Archbishop Sheen announced “his Jewish brethren sitting in the audience, who were responsible for the cigarettes and cigars, his son is going into the Marines. ‘I blessed him this morning, and I’m going to bless him again right now.’ And that’s what he did.”
Verdrager entered the Marines the following Tuesday, but then something “miraculous” occurred. A pilonidal cyst at the base of his tailbone, on which he had had surgery to fix, began bleeding
during boot camp. He was sent to a medical facility for a few days, but the doctors “decided that it was not repairable. They didn’t give medical discharges during the time of the war, but I ended up with an honorable discharge from the United States Marines with no benefits. So, I’m not really a veteran. I never went through full basic training.”
Back home in New York, his father invited him to attend the next Communion breakfast. Verdrager said he had a bandage on the cyst, but there was no pain.
“So, we go to the Communion breakfast, and Msgr. Dunne comes down from the dais to the round tables right in front, which we were honorably allowed to sit at with lots of famous people over the course of all these breakfasts,” Verdrager said. “And he says, ‘What are you doing here?’ And my father and I told him what happened, and he said, ‘Well, that’s like a miracle. Coincidentally, Bishop Sheen will be here in about a half-hour.’
“We went to these breakfasts early to make sure the tables were set with the cigarettes and the cigars. That was my father’s idea of supervising it. And he (the monsignor) said, ‘I will tell Bishop Sheen.’ So, about 45 minutes later, everybody started filling in, ... Bishop Sheen now walks up onto the dais. Msgr. Dunne leans over and whispers in his ear, which we could not hear,” Verdrager said.
When the event began a few minutes later, “Bishop Sheen stands up and he says, ‘I’m going to do the sermon today, but for all you people out there that aren’t real believers, several weeks ago I blessed this young man who was going into the Marines and hopefully going to be OK during the course of the war. But to prove that God can do miracles, he’s sitting right here,’” Verdrager recalled. “And they made my father and I stand up, and everybody applauded.”
Archbishop Sheen asked his father if he wanted to say anything, and he told him, “I only wanted him safe. I didn’t need him home.”
At the end of the breakfast, Verdrager said he got to talk with the archbishop again, “and I said, ‘Obviously, your blessing worked.’ It was quite an honor, because I’m Jewish, to be blessed by a Catholic bishop. It’s a big deal. I was very proud of that.”
He has told the story “probably a thousand times because I’m proud of it,” he said, and everyone of a certain age — Catholics, other Christians, non-Christians or people with no particular faith tradition — have fond memories of Archbishop Sheen, who died in 1979 at age 84. The approximately 30 million viewers of Archbishop Sheen’s television program, “Life Is Worth Living,” were drawn to his wit and humor, commanding presence and ability to grab an audience’s attention and not let go. He also is credited with counseling and helping to convert thousands to Catholicism.
Many years later, when he was an innkeeper, he told the Archbishop Sheen story to Bishop Paul Sanchez of Brooklyn, who had dinner at Verdrager’s inn during a visit to Vermont. He said Bishop Sanchez told him, “I’m going to bless you and your wife because it would be an honor to bless the same people that were blessed by Bishop Sheen.’ So, he stood up and put his arms on my wife and
I. We have a picture of it somewhere, and my claim to fame in life is that I’m Jewish and I’ve been personally blessed by two Catholic bishops.” For information on St. Sebastian Parish, visit www.stsebastian.com and follow on Facebook. For more on Archbishop Sheen’s beatification, go to www.celebratesheen.com.
