The Sound of Breaking Glass

I recently read a story I can’t stop thinking about.

In 1903 a young boy in central Illinois was serving as an altar server at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois. And this wasn’t any ordinary service. The local bishop was present to lead the service that day.

One of the young boy’s jobs was to carry the ornate, very expensive, glass cruet that held the wine used during the ceremony. All was going fine until he lost his grip on the cruet and it crashed onto the hard marble floor and broke into pieces. Later in life, the boy, then a grown man, wrote that no atomic explosion could compare to the sound of a cruet smashing on marble in a silent cathedral.

Frozen in fear, he looked up at the bishop expecting a severe scolding. But to the young altar server’s good fortune, the kind bishop simply smiled at him and said, “Someday you will be just as I am.”

Around this same time, as the story has long been told, another young boy across the ocean in Austria-Hungary also dropped the cruet during a church service. Unfortunately, the pastor got very upset with him, scolded him severely, and told him to leave and never come back.

Who is the Boy?

The boy from Illinois was Fulton J. Sheen. He’d eventually become known as Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. And while he was a Catholic bishop, he was loved by many non-Catholics as well. His groundbreaking television program, Life Is Worth Living, reached an estimated 30 million viewers each week, and a huge share of that audience was not Catholic. To say Fulton Sheen, who incidentally will be beatified tomorrow (September 24, 2026), made an impact on the world is an incredible understatement.

Sadly, the same happy ending cannot be said for the boy who was scolded for his mistake and told never to come back. He’d also go on to make an impact on the world. The difference is that he grew up to be a violent communist dictator responsible for much pain, hardship, and death.

Our Words Have Power

As I reflected on this story, I kept thinking about how relevant it is to anyone tasked with leadership responsibility. Our words and actions have incredible power. To whom much is given, much will be required.

Here’s what strikes me most. Neither the kind bishop or upset pastor were reacting to a broken cruet. They were reacting to a boy. One saw a mistake. The other saw a vocation.

We talk a lot in continuous improvement about making problems visible. But problems only become visible when people believe it’s safe to surface them. Every time a leader reacts to a defect by going after the person who found it, a little more of the truth goes underground. Not because people are dishonest, but because they’re human, and they learned in about a half second what happens when the glass hits the marble.

So the next time someone “drops a cruet” in front of you, remember that your reaction is teaching far more than your last training session did. What are you teaching?

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