A few weeks ago, the Vatican announced that Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) would be beatified later this year. Beatification is the final step one goes through before being declared a canonized saint. It is an infallible declaration by the Church that someone from its ranks has been received into Heaven. Fulton Sheen was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria, IL in 1919 and later became a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of American in Washington, D.C. Even more than a brilliant philosopher and theologian, Fulton Sheen was an exceptional communicator and teacher of the Catholic faith. For years, he hosted a wildly popular radio show and then a television show, for which he won an Emmy in 1952. In his acceptance speech he thanked his writers: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” There are many stories of Sheen helping lost souls enter the Church, and he was deeply involved in missionary efforts throughout the world. He served as an auxiliary bishop in New York until 1966 when he was made the bishop of Rochester, NY. But his time there was very difficult, and he resigned from the position after only three years. During his visit to New York in 1979, Pope John Paul II warmly embraced Sheen at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, telling the elderly archbishop: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a loyal son of the Church.”
The words of John Paul II must have been very consoling to Sheen. For, as popular as he had been in the 1940s & 1950s, by the 1970s he was thought by many in the Church to be old-fashioned and mostly irrelevant. Bishop Robert Barron has said that when he was in seminary formation, no one listened to Fulton Sheen anymore. But when Barron became the rector of Mundelein Seminary in Chicago in 2012, he discovered that Sheen was wildly popular among the seminarians. He often heard them speaking about making daily “holy hours,” times of prayer in the presence of the Eucharist. This was a devotion that Fulton Sheen unfailingly promoted during the many retreats he preached to clergy. “No soul ever fell away from God without giving up prayer,” he would say. “The first step downward in the average soul is the giving up of the practice of prayer, the breaking of the circuit with divinity, and the proclamation of one’s own self-sufficiency.”
When I entered seminary in the fall of 2008, I remember coming across a mountain of Fulton Sheen recordings on cassette tapes in the seminary library. So, I dusted off my old Walkman and I listened to him as I exercised on the ancient stair machine in the seminary basement. His talks on theology, the Mass, prayer, Marian devotion, and priesthood, among other things, were excellent. And they were always centered on the person of Christ Jesus, whom Sheen passionately loved. This comes through especially in his book The Life of Christ, which I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to grow in knowledge and love for Our Lord. Sheen once said: “A person is great not by the ferocity of his hatred of evil, but by the intensity of his love for God.” By this measure, Fulton Sheen was a great man indeed.
posted 2/21/26
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 