In a year filled with self-destruction, the only safe hero was a dead hero

THIS has been the year of the self-destructing hero.

2004 was filled with figures, whether from sport like Cian O’Connor, or politics, like David Blunkett, who might have been expected to end up in those photo-studded People of the Year lists covered in acclaim, but who managed, within a matter of weeks, to establish that if they didn’t quite have feet of clay, there was a fair amount of clay (at best) surrounding their extremities.

This year, the only safe hero is a dead hero. Indeed, in some cases, death confirms hero status as nothing else can, in these amnesic times. Take actors. If Christopher Reeve had died before he came off that horse, his death would have defined him forever as a minor actor of exceptional good looks. Coming off that horse was a crippling catastrophe that allowed him to be much more significant.

Post accident, he wrote a fine autobiography, made the world aware of stem-cell research and its possibilities and invested his money in trainers and therapists dedicated to delivering on his dream of walking again.

Reeve’s campaigning irritated many in the disability movement. His fame allowed him to become the definitive spokesperson for people with disabilities, even though his personal experience meant that he was necessarily narrow in his concerns. Reeve wanted a cure. Nothing more, nothing less. He was not interested in the workings of the Americans with Disabilities Act or any other issues his sponsorship might have assisted.

Indeed, it has been suggested that Reeve’s relentlessly public promotion of any therapeutic approach likely to get him out of his wheelchair was disrespectful of those who use wheelchairs all their lives and have no prospect of rehabilitation.

This view holds that guys like Reeve, when crippled by accident, never accept what they consciously or unconsciously regard as the second-class status of the person with a disability, and spend the rest of their lives, not to mention their fame and money, seeking re-admission into the world of the whole and undamaged, thereby reinforcing the imputed second-class status of the people they have inadvertently joined.

Another way of looking at it, of course, is that expecting Reeve to relinquish his able-bodied mindset is like saying: “OK, mate, not only does your new disability constrain you physically, it’s going to constrain you attitudinally, too.”

Reeve didn’t see it that way. His freedom to select and personify was greatly helped by his fame, his family and his wealth. But the very fact that he lived out his wheelchair years the way he did adds to his significance: he made us think about aspects of human freedom and self-definition in a way we otherwise might not have done.

That’s why Christopher Reeve is one of my two People of the Year, whereas the much better actor Marlon Brando, who snuffed it in the summer, isn’t. Brando was a great actor with half-arsed notions who kidded himself that he was vindicating the rights of the oppressed. He was a clever, chaotic fake who spent two-thirds of his life cannibalising the first third. For half his life (the years following ‘Last Tango in Paris’) he was grossly, even grotesquely overweight, yet managed to live to be 80. So he can’t even serve, post mortem, as a poster-boy for the anti-obesity movement.

In cinematic terms, Brando matters and Reeve doesn’t. In human terms, the reverse is true.

But at least Reeve is or was famous, worldwide. My second Person of the Year pick isn’t famous in contemporary Ireland at all, partly because he’s dead a long time. Even when he was alive, Bishop Fulton Sheen wasn’t well known in Ireland. In 2004, his significance lies in the fact that he’s being fast-tracked to saint-hood.

Fulton Sheen was a figure of almost theatrical magnificence, all pink watered-silk cummerbunds, floor-sweeping robes and ambassadorial good looks. He was also the first - and arguably the only - Catholic clergyman to understand and deliver on the huge potential offered by television. He was a star in the US long before Ireland had its own television station. More importantly, he still IS a star. Channel-hop at night in the US and you’re likely, sooner or later, to happen on a mitred bishop holding forth, since the tapes of Sheen from 30 and 40 years back are constantly re-run. They’re also for sale on DVD and hugely popular. That’s a hell of an achievement, for a man who died more than a quarter of a century ago.

SHEEN talked to a TV camera as if it was another human being and never accepted the idea that to be successful on mass media required you to baby-talk your audience with banalities. Sheen was an entertainer, but not JUST an entertainer. He used the TV studio to create intellectual drama, to pose questions and present paradoxes. Unlike most TV presenters, who are convinced that if they pause for breath, their ratings will drop like a stone, Sheen had the arrogance not just to pause, but to demand that his audience pause with him and consider what he’d just said. He explored complex concepts in a medium that loves the simple and the concrete.

This year, it has been announced that the Pope wants to make him a saint: one of the many elevated to sainthood during the current papacy.

“By the mid-1990s, John Paul had presided over the making of almost a thousand saints and blessed, more than the number of those canonised and beatified by all the popes put together since Pope Urban VIII started the formal process in the 1620s,” writes John Cornwell in his newly-published The Pontiff in Winter.

Cornwell points out that, whereas in the past it used to take decades, if not centuries, for a candidate to progress through the various stages to sainthood, the present Pope has fast-tracked the process so that sainthood for someone like Fulton Sheen could happen within the life-time of the TV bishop’s contemporaries. The fast-tracking includes abolition of the Devil’s Advocate role, which required a prominent canon lawyer to argue against the sanctification of the candidate and rake up all the bad stuff about him or her.

The Pope’s fast-track to sainthood is filled with controversy. It tends to favour the officer class, since religious orders and groups like Opus Dei who see the PR payoff for having their founder sanctified usually have the money to support the process and the motivation to do so. The Redemptorists, among others, question the value of sudden saint-creation. A sophisticated secular world wonders what is the point of creating more saints for nobody to pay any attention to. Fans of John Paul II see it as demonstrating his sensitivity to the times we’re in, which favour the instant over the long-term. Who else, they ask, could get the modern world to devote a thought to the sainthood issue?

My interest in it is small and venal. As a cub reporter in RTÉ, I once met Fulton Sheen briefly, in a corridor, on one of his visits to Ireland. Which gives me a unique opportunity.

When the saints go marching in, I might actually KNOW one of them. Personally.