This Thursday is a big day for American Catholics. The first beatification to take place on U.S. soil in almost 10 years is happening in St. Louis, Missouri, in the afternoon. For those not familiar with the Vatican’s lexicon, a beatification is the penultimate step on the path to sainthood. To qualify, a person must have performed at least one miracle. (For canonization, the final step, two miracles must be verified.)
The man to be blessed this week is Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, who grew up a couple hours north, outside of Peoria, Illinois, where he was ordained a priest in 1919. By the ’50s, he was a household name. Whereas other preachers looked with suspicion on the new forms of evangelizing offered by the 20th century—namely, radio and television—Sheen embraced them.
He also, years later, inspired the man who is now one of our own era’s best-known multimedia bishops. It’s a pleasure to welcome Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Catholic media empire Word on Fire, back to our pages, to reflect on why Fulton J. Sheen could be on his way to becoming America’s next saint. —The Editors
From the very beginning of my work in evangelization through the media, Fulton J. Sheen—whom the Church is declaring “Blessed” this week—has been my model and inspiration. At Word on Fire, he is one of our principal patrons and heavenly friends. Yet I first discovered his pioneering work on radio and television in a rather roundabout way—and thereupon hangs a tale.
Sheen was born on May 8, 1895, in El Paso, Illinois, about 30 miles east of Peoria, and less than 200 miles north of St. Louis, where his beatification takes place on Thursday. After entering the seminary and being ordained to the priesthood, he was dispatched for further studies in Washington, D.C., and, later, Belgium. But despite his intellect, he was not destined for a long career in academia. In 1930, he began to host a nationally broadcast radio program called The Catholic Hour. That cultural outreach expanded in 1950, when Sheen was approached for a prime-time program on network television. Life Is Worth Living, which aired throughout the 1950s, was born.
At the height of Sheen’s powers, he had an audience of 30 million viewers every Tuesday night and was competing against the likes of Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, and Jackie Gleason. I remember once, when I was young, Sheen came up in conversation, and my father—an ardent Catholic and taciturn man—said from his chair, “I like what he said. I like the way he said it.” That laconic observation summed up how many Catholics of that generation felt about this great evangelist and intellectual. They looked at him with a great sense of pride and admiration.
But by the ’60s and ’70s, when I was coming of age as a young priest, Sheen—who died in 1979—had largely faded from the scene. There was a turning away from much of Catholic life before the Second Vatican Council of the early ’60s, and someone like Sheen—with his long cape, fiery oration, and theatrical gesticulation—would have been seen as an old-fashioned, preconciliar churchman. Thus, he was not, sadly, a major figure for my own generation.
Yet the next generation of Catholics, whom I taught at Mundelein Seminary—the so-called John Paul II generation of the ’80s and ’90s—rediscovered Sheen in a massive way, largely through replays of his Life Is Worth Living program on EWTN and, later, on YouTube. After decades of imbibing superficial and, frankly, namby-pamby preaching, these young Catholics responded—much like my parents’ generation—to Sheen’s substance and panache. Inspired by my students, I began listening to cassette tapes of Sheen’s talks while driving in the car and, eventually, watching him on YouTube. What I heard and saw was a master evangelist at work, and from then on, he became a personal inspiration to me.
While much more could be said about Sheen—his work for the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, his time as bishop in New York and later in Rochester—his evangelization through media remains the most distinctive aspect of his legacy. And that legacy remains, clearly, as relevant as ever before. So what particular lessons might we draw, in our own era of the internet, from his example? I should like to mention, however briefly, just three: his deep holiness, his sharp intellect, and his willingness to adapt to new media.
First, his holiness. The Church’s declaration of someone as “Blessed” follows a very careful and often very lengthy process, one that involves a critical examination of the person’s life and the confirmation of a miracle attributed to his or her prayers. (Sheen’s miracle—a baby delivered in cardiac arrest and brought back to life after being without a pulse for 61 minutes—is extraordinary.) But at the heart of beatification is a determination of that person’s holiness. And what makes a person holy, blessed, saintly? My suspicion is that Sheen himself would have answered that it is being a friend of Jesus Christ. Over and again, he insisted that Christianity is not an abstract philosophy or a set of convictions but rather a relationship to a living person.
Nowhere was Fulton Sheen’s friendship with Christ more apparent than in his practically lifelong dedication to the Holy Hour. Sheen was an accomplished man, but these Holy Hours were not primarily times of accomplishment; they were opportunities to bask in the presence of the Lord Jesus. Though it took some time, Sheen’s encouragement of the daily Holy Hour has now taken deep root in the lives of priests, seminarians, and lay faithful across the world. I will humbly admit that I learned the practice from my students at Mundelein Seminary, who witnessed powerfully to the efficaciousness of the hour before the Lord. I now savor the Holy Hour that I do in my private chapel every morning before commencing my workday.
Sheen was not only a prayerful man but also an exceptionally smart one. He was a doctor of theology from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain)—in fact, one of the rare recipients of UCLouvain’s prestigious agrégé degree—and his doctoral thesis, which bore the title The Spirit of Contemporary Philosophy and the Finite God, was later adapted as Sheen’s first book, boasting an introduction from none other than G.K. Chesterton. He was an assiduous student of St. Thomas Aquinas and a professor of philosophy and theology at The Catholic University of America. In short, he had a profound grasp of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
And these years of rich theological formation unfolded before Sheen commenced to evangelize through the media. He knew that it wasn’t enough—as we often think it is today—to be a Catholic, grab a microphone, and start teaching and preaching. Before hanging a shingle as a “Catholic evangelist,” one needs to be grounded in the great tradition and be gradually formed by it. If we want to have something to say, we first have to listen to the great thinkers of the Church who have gone before us. Sheen was a model of this healthy instinct.
Finally, Sheen had the courage and imagination to engage the culture through the popular media of his time. Many argued that this was folly—that the Christian message would be distorted, oversimplified, or compromised through the use of such methods. But Sheen forged ahead, appreciating radio and television as the 20th-century version of the parchment and ink and Roman roads that Saint Paul had used to propagate the Gospel. And Sheen didn’t simply step up to the microphone and speak in an arcane style that only his fellow academicians would understand; instead—without for a minute compromising on intellectual depth—he communicated in a clear and winsome manner, adapting his message to the medium. That combination of cultured depth and media savviness was dynamite.
This creative engagement with media also makes Fulton Sheen the saint of the new evangelization par excellence. In the ’60s, John XXIII conceived of Vatican II as a missionary council: Its purpose was to bring the light of Christ to the nations, to move the Church beyond its self-protective walls and to put it in contact with the wider society. Building on Vatican II’s call, in the ’80s John Paul II spoke of an evangelization that is “new in its enthusiasm, its methods, its expression.” Subsequent popes have continued to ring the changes on this theme. Sheen participated in the Second Vatican Council and took up its motifs with passion upon his return. But I believe that, through the entire course of his ministry, he also anticipated this central emphasis of a new evangelization.
Blesseds, like saints, are for the Church. Thus, anyone who seeks to be holy as God is holy, to be formed in the great tradition, and to dare to bring the Gospel to the culture using the media of our own time, will find in Fulton J. Sheen an intercessor, teacher, and heavenly friend.