As America’s most visible Roman Catholic clergyman of the 20th century, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had a television audience that rivaled Milton Berle and “I Love Lucy.” He was said to be responsible for 42,000 conversions over his long career.
On Thursday afternoon, even more Catholics streamed into a stadium in St. Louis to see Archbishop Sheen, who died in 1979, move one step closer to sainthood. Before presiding over Mass at the ceremony, Cardinal Luis Tagle read a letter from Pope Leo XIV formally declaring Archbishop Sheen “blessed,” making him the first American-born bishop to receive the honor.
The Mass started with a procession that included some 1,000 priests and 90 bishops from around the country filing onto the stadium floor, as incense wafted into the rafters of the longtime home of the St. Louis Rams.
The festive but solemn ceremony took place at an auspicious moment for American Catholicism. Conversions are surging. In cities, the pews at Mass are often filled with Gen Z Catholics. And on the throne of St. Peter, 5,000 miles west of St. Louis, sits the first American pope. Like Archbishop Sheen, he is a son of Illinois.
Admirers came from all over the country on Thursday, some in their Sunday best and others in T-shirts emblazoned with the archbishop’s image. They extolled him as a man who preached Catholic doctrine unapologetically, but nonetheless appealed to an audience far beyond parish pews. He was, and still is, known as “America’s bishop.”
“In a time of a lot of change, he told it like it is,” said Thomas Bagley, 30, who traveled from Kansas City, Kan., for the event. “That’s something that we desperately need today.”
Beatification typically requires evidence of a miracle resulting from prayer to the person in question. In Archbishop Sheen’s case, the parents of a stillborn boy in the Diocese of Peoria, Ill., in 2010 prayed to him to intervene. The boy was revived after 61 minutes without a pulse and recovered completely.
Verifying the case included examining medical files, as well as interviewing medical experts and the doctors and nurses who were present at the boy’s birth.
The boy, James Fulton Engstrom, turned 16 this month. He participated in Thursday’s ceremony by accompanying a gold receptacle down the center aisle that held a relic associated with Archbishop Sheen, his jawbone. At a news conference on Thursday morning, James’s mother, Bonnie Engstrom, referred to him fondly as a normal “punk teenage boy” who was both nervous and excited about his moment in the spotlight.
Archbishop Sheen is a particular favorite of many American conservatives, who recall his outspoken opposition to global communism, which some compare to the rising popularity of socialism in the United States.
President Trump praised Archbishop Sheen in a statement on Thursday as a figure who stood “against the rising tide of anti-God extremism in American culture.”
Bishop Robert Barron, a conservative whom some Catholics compare to Archbishop Sheen, said the archbishop was “the most effective evangelist in America in the 20th century,” adding, he’s always been my model.”
Bishop Barron said a portrait of Archbishop Sheen hangs in the Minnesota studio of his media ministry, Word on Fire. He also owns a cape worn by Archbishop Sheen, a gift from another prelate.
Archbishop Sheen took a winding path to become “blessed.” He was buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, but his body later became the subject of a high-profile legal battle between two bishops, which ended in his remains being moved to his home diocese of Peoria in 2019.
Then his beatification was delayed for more than six years, caught up in legal investigations over how accusations of sexual abuse by clergy members were handled in New York State. Archbishop Sheen briefly led the Diocese of Rochester in the 1960s. Church officials eventually concluded he had never put children in harm’s way or covered up abuse.
Pope Leo approved his beatification in February.
Beatification is the step before canonization, the formal declaration of sainthood. There is no firm timeline for canonization, and not all “blesseds” become saints.
But Archbishop Sheen’s cause could advance relatively quickly. Monsignor Jason Gray, executive director of the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, said six other miracles attributed to the archbishop, including a person’s unnaturally swift recovery from stage 4 cancer, are already under investigation by the Vatican.
The beatification ceremony in St. Louis was the first such event in the United States since a much smaller one for the Rev. Michael J. McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, in Connecticut in 2020. The country’s first beatification took place in 2014.
At the height of Archbishop Sheen’s reach in the 1950s, 25 million people tuned in every week to watch him preaching and teaching in front of a simple blackboard scrawled with the letters “J.M.J.” for “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
Recordings and clips of Archbishop Sheen’s broadcasts, including his television show “Life Is Worth Living,” now have found a second life on YouTube, Instagram and podcasts. His authoritative rhetorical style and piercing, deep-set eyes seem to hold appeal in the social media age.
“He was the first Catholic influencer,” said Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, who attended the ceremony.
Archbishop Coakley was standing at the edge of an expo hall near the stadium that had been transformed into an extravaganza of Sheen ephemera, with vendors offering books, keychains, pins and socks. Large families and groups of young people waited in line to take photos with life-size cutouts of the archbishop in his signature magenta cape.
In the stadium, illuminated screens encouraged attendees to post dispatches with the hashtag #CelebrateSheen.
The post ‘America’s Bishop’ Was Beatified. 50,000 Catholics Showed Up. appeared first on New York Times.
