The church and I

by Frank Sheed

A memoir.

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Francis Joseph Sheed was an Australian-born lawyer, Catholic writer, publisher, speaker, and lay theologian. He and his wife Maisie Ward were famous in their day as the names behind the imprint Sheed & Ward and as forceful public lecturers in the Catholic Evidence Guild.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written with humour and with a real love for the Church, warts and all.

[Glen Asbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first Frank Sheed read…and now I want every book he ever wrote. He was clever, intelligent, and an amazingly prosaic and witty communicator of deep truths…the deepest: the truths of the Catholic Faith.

[Martin Moleski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my second reading of this memoire; I read it in the 1970s when it was first published. Sheed is one of my heroes, and his book, Theology and Sanity, helped me to survive novitiate. A reading group asked my opinion about Sheed, and I got him confused with Jacques Maritain, who seemed to have drifted away from orthodox Catholicism in Peasant of the Garonne. While Sheed asks some questions about Humanae vitae and the possibility of ordaining women as priests, he does so within a framework of reverence for the ordinary Magisterium of the Church. The publishing company he founded with his wife, Sheed and Ward, drifted into dissent in later years, but the early works are a treasury of apologetic material.