Corrigan's Forgotten School of Apologetics—and Which Corrigan, Forgotten

In Fulton Sheen’s Treasure in Clay,, he reports an incident which he dates to the late 1920s or perhaps early 1930s.

Going back to the early days of teaching, after the presidential campaign of 1928, when there was much bigotry against the Catholic Church, the bishops decided that there should be a School of Apologetics started at the Catholic University. I was asked by the rector, Bishop Corrigan, to draw up a plan for such courses. I drew it in the form of a pyramid, placing at the base of the pyramid such subjects as journalism, media, communications, psychology of religion, and then on the top the more theological subjects which were related to the defense of the Church. The rector accepted the proposal and asked me to find professors. I was granted permission to choose the professors from Europe. I further inquired: “Do I have the authority to tell them they are hired?” “Yes, if you find those that you believe are qualified.” “What is to be their salary?” This was agreed upon. I went to Europe and I found about ten learned professors from England, France and Germany—all of whom spoke English—as the future staff of the School of Apologetics.

I wired the rector and told him of the ones whom I had chosen, and asked him to communicate with them and bid them to come as professors. By August they had not received any word from the rector, nor even in September. I was then deluged with telegrams from these professors: “What has happened to the proposal? Are we coming to the university?” Seeing that the rector had done nothing to engage them, I sent a wire to all of the professors saying that I had exceeded my authority and begged their pardon.

The next year the rector called me in again and said: “I want you to be head of a new School of Apologetics.” I said: “I beg to be excused,” knowing he had forgotten the incident the year before. The School of Apologetics never came into being.

The challenge here is deciphering which Bishop Corrigan Sheen is talking about. One Bishop Corrigan (Owen Patrick Bernard Corrigan) was vicar general, auxiliary of the Archdiocese, and trustee of Catholic University. He died in 1929 at the age of 80. Another Corrigan (Joseph Moran Corrigan) was rector of Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia until 1936, when he became rector of the Catholic University of America. He was not consecrated a bishop until 1940 and died just two years later. It seems most likely that Sheen is referring to the latter Corrigan, and is compressing the timeline between the rise of anti-Catholicism and the need for a school of apologetics, much as if someone in the future were to write, in the 2060s, something like “after the presidential campaign of 2016, when anti-immigrant sentiment in the country began to rise precipitously, the bishops decided that there should be a new defense made of immigrants to the United States and so began a project [which in reality only kicked off in, e.g., 2024].” I don’t mean anything by that example, I’m just trying to make sense of Sheen’s timeline on this story, considering it is rather interesting, in particular as it relates to his own apostolate as a public apologist. Additionally, it also seems likely that this took before Corrigan was named a bishop but Sheen is referring to him anachronistically as “Bishop Corrigan” much as if I referred to Sheen at this period in his life as “Bishop Sheen.” Well, it seems that everyone's memory might be a little faulty here, and there are simply limits to telling stories from the past in a digestible manner.