Famed radio and TV priest Fulton Sheen to be beatified in St. Louis, a step away from sainthood
by Peter Smith · The Washington TimesST. LOUIS — Decades after he was a fixture on American TV screens, the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen is back in a familiar place: the media spotlight.
Tens of thousands of Catholic devotees converged Thursday on St. Louis for a formal ceremony of beatification, in which the prelate was designated Blessed Fulton Sheen — one step away from sainthood.
The afternoon ceremony took place at the Dome at America’s Center after years of delays. The stadium was chosen for the site because there wasn’t a venue large enough in his home Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, to accommodate the anticipated number of attendees.
About 50,000 tickets were distributed, according to organizers with the diocese and the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, which advocates for his sainthood. By early morning, the downtown streets were filled with pilgrims, many of them priests in clerical garb and nuns in habits. Scores of bishops, a thousand priests and hundreds of religious order members, seminarians and deacons were expected.
A temporary altar was set up on the stage in the indoor stadium, backed by photos — including Sheen’s tomb at the Peoria cathedral, now a destination for pilgrims.
The event honors a prelate who was once a regular presence in the living rooms of millions of Americans — including that of the future Pope Leo XIV, who says he watched the broadcasts of his fellow Illinois native while growing up in Chicago.
Sheen was a pioneering radio priest who quickly adopted the new medium of television in the 1950s, when he began hosting the program, “Life is Worth Living.” Dressed in a cassock, cape and skullcap, he stood at a chalkboard and delivered moral and religious lessons without a narrow Catholic focus.
The show competed favorably against entertainers Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra on other networks. In an Emmy acceptance speech, Sheen thanked his writers — Gospel scribes Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He’s been called America’s first televangelist.
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“Archbishop Sheen was a beacon of faith, hope, and love who shone through radio and television for decades,” Pope Leo said in a June speech to directors of The Pontifical Mission Societies, which Sheen headed in the U.S. for 16 years. “I myself witnessed his evangelization efforts as I was growing up.”
Sheen was born in 1895 in the small town of El Paso, Illinois, and raised in Peoria. After becoming a priest and earning a doctorate in philosophy, he had a short pastorate in Peoria before becoming a professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington.
He became known both for his academic lectures and his plainspoken addresses from the pulpit and the studio, first on radio and then on TV. He often signed off with the benediction, “God love you.”
Sheen appeared in a Time magazine cover article. He guided celebrities and others converting to Catholicism.
He met with popes and spoke at the reformist Second Vatican Council. He railed against communism, though he opposed the Vietnam War.
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Sheen raised funds and traveled the world on behalf of Catholic missions. He served as a bishop in New York state, retiring as an archbishop. After his death at 84, he was buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York until his niece won a court battle in 2019 to move his body to Peoria’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception.
It’s there, where Sheen had been a young altar server and was later ordained a priest, that pilgrims now place crucifixes and other items on his marble tomb, giving them status as relics.
To qualify for beatification, the Vatican normally requires one miracle attributable to the faithful seeking the candidate’s heavenly prayers.
The late Pope Francis approved the beatification, attributing to Sheen the resuscitation of an infant born in 2010 without a pulse and revived only after lengthy efforts by medical workers. The Peoria-area child, the now-teenaged James Fulton Engstrom, is slated to present relics of Sheen at the ceremony, accompanied by his family, who had sought Sheen’s intercession for healing.
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His mother, Bonnie Engstrom, said Thursday’s ceremony would feel like a “foretaste of heaven.”
She and her husband taught each of their eight children to have a devotion to their patron saint, giving them the sense that they have a heavenly “squad” cheering them on. They chose Sheen for James’ patron after discovering the prelate’s old videos, adding that his Midwestern-accented voice reminded her of her grandfather and great-grandfather. “He’s like a local boy,” she said at a morning news conference.
James, who just turned 16, has a devotion to Sheen, but he’s largely avoiding the media spotlight. “He’s a delightful young man, but he’s still just a teenage boy, and he needs to be given the space and the grace to have his own journey of life,” Engstrom said. “He didn’t ask for any of this.”
She said she’d been praying to Sheen throughout the pregnancy, and “it was just a very natural thing in the hardest hour of our life” to seek his prayers. James was born at home without a pulse and rushed to the hospital — where workers who were attempting to resuscitate him were about to declare him deceased — when his heart began beating normally, Engstrom and other witnesses said.
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