Stories

By Monsignor Roger J. Landry

Today’s long-awaited news of the upcoming beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) brings enormous joy not just to the places where he ministered — Peoria, Westminster, Washington DC, New York and Rochester — but throughout the United States and the world. 

The most famous Catholic preacher in American history, Sheen providentially took advantage of the new pulpits of radio and television at their infancy to communicate with passion, joy and overflowing charisma the truths of the Catholic faith and of the gift of life. He combined that with prodigious skill as a writer — 66 books and tens of thousands of columns — as well as with much used audio retreats, talks and catechetical series, homilies and sermons that would pack churches and stadiums to overflowing. 

Thanks to EWTN’s regularly replaying his television programs, reprints of his books, and the digitizing of many of his audio works, he continues to have an enormous impact on the faith of Catholics across the country and globe.  

Sheen is already numbered among Augustine, Chrysostom, Bernard, Bossuet and Lacordaire as one of the most eloquent preachers of all time. His upcoming beatification — and we pray, one day, canonization — will not only ensure and intensify his continued influence in Catholic life but also help all those who will never emulate his oratory come to know and imitate what is imitable in his virtues. 

We can focus on what we all can learn from him about the two most fundamental aspects of the Christian life: holiness and mission, to be a faithful follower of Jesus and an ardent apostle, infectiously seeking to bring Jesus to others and others to him. 

Sheen was a devout disciple of Jesus. When Sheen won the Emmy in 1952, he quipped that he wanted to thank his writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Once, when he and actor Richard Burton both recited aloud Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” Burton commented to the moved crowds that while he knew the Psalm, Sheen knew the Shepherd. Anyone who reads his most famous book, Life of Christ, finishes knowing that Sheen was far more than a brilliant scholar of his Savior but a grateful friend who loved him as his pearl of great price. Likewise whoever listens to his famous Good Friday meditations on the Seven Last Words of Jesus can’t help but conclude that he knew the Lord from the inside. 

That love helps explain how Sheen became the greatest apostle of a Eucharistic holy hour — and greatest popularizer of the praying in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament — in Church history. On the day of his priestly ordination, Sheen made a commitment to make a Eucharistic holy each day of his priesthood and he was humbly grateful, as he wrote in his autobiography Treasure in Clay as his earthly life was about to end, that with God’s grace he had kept that commitment faithfully for 60 years. It’s so fitting that he, who spent much of life on his knees in adoration, and said, “The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white host,” died in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament on the last day of his priestly life. 

His intimate, personal relationship with Jesus, nourished by these daily divine audiences, as well as through the celebration of Mass, the prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary and other devotions, was, he said, the reason why he was able to accomplish anything and everything he did. 

“When I stand up to talk, people listen to me; they will follow what I have to say. Is it any power of mine? Of course not. St. Paul says, ‘What have you that you have not received and you who have received, why do you glory as if you had not?,’” he wrote in his 1974 book The Wisdom of the Saints. “But the secret of my power is that I have never in fifty-five years missed spending an hour in the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That’s where the power comes from. That’s where sermons are born. That’s where every good thought is conceived.” 

Attached to Christ the vine, Sheen the branch bore abundant fruit. He burst with the desire to help others come to know and love the Savior, too. 

He loved to teach the faith so that others might have confidence to believe and live it. He dedicated 25 years of his life to teaching theology and philosophy, and forming young Catholics and future scholars, at the Catholic University of America. He spent 20 years traveling from DC to New York to record radio proclaims explaining the faith to four million at a time. On television, to an audience of 30 million each week of Catholics, Protestants, Jews and non-believers, he taught why Life is Worth Living, using everything he could to open people to relationship with God: physics, biology, psychology, history, literature, philosophy, art and culture, fear and anxiety, work, family, friendship. His influence was one of the greatest factors in breaking down the anti-Catholic prejudice that was still then a sad feature of American life. 

He was likewise a zealous convert maker. He had great ardor for bringing people to salvation in Christ and guiding them upon the path of sanctification in the Church. He ran big classes in Washington DC and in New York City for those interested in the faith. Despite his many duties, he likewise carved out time to give one-on-one instruction, sometimes to the famous or infamous, most often to ordinary, sincere people who would ask. Those close to him estimated that he was responsible for tens of thousands of conversions. When Pope Pius XII asked him how many he had brought into the Church, Sheen replied he didn’t count, lest he think he made them rather than the Lord. 

His apostolic zeal was shown most notably in his 16 years (1950-1966) as the Vatican-appointed National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith in the United States, the most famous of the four pontifical mission societies. 

Appointed at 55, he poured all his gifts and energy into his two fundamental tasks: promoting a missionary identity and spirituality among American Catholics and helping to raise money for the missions of the Church. He founded Mission magazine 75 years ago to expose people to life in the missions, as well as World Mission Magazine to feature more in-depth articles and editorials by missionaries and theologians. He wrote two different mission syndicated columns a week for Catholic newspapers, in addition to a third on the Catholic faith. 

He traveled to the missions, to bring attention to them and get to know their concrete needs better. During his tenure, he raised about $200 million for the Church where it’s young, persecuted and poor, donating about $10 million from his own side jobs on television, radio and speeches. He spoke about the missions during the Second Vatican Council and served on the committee that produce Ad Gentes, the Council’s document on the missionary activity of the Church. Even in death he continued to prioritize the Church’s missionary work, leaving the copyright on all his books and audio recordings, as well as 40 percent of his estate, to the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. He whole life can be summarized by his identification as an apostle of Christ and a missionary for missionaries. 

When I was a teenager pondering a call to the priesthood, I would listen regularly in the car to cassettes of Sheen preaching retreats, mainly to priests, and was routinely ignited by his love for God and his denunciations of things that attacked the faith, like communism, libidinism, pop psychologies, false philosophies and various vices. Later I would read his two books on the priesthood — The Priest is Not His Own and Those Mysterious Priests — which became foundational to the way I viewed and view the priesthood. He was a priest’s priest who loved being a priest and who taught me and so many others how to be both priest and victim. 

That’s why it’s one of the great honors of my life that I have become his successor as the National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, which include the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, and have the sweet privilege to try to build on his legacy. 

Sheen’s process for beatification — paused twice for different reasons — has been a struggle for those devoted to him. In some way, however, those hiccups are fitting, because the pursuit of holiness was a struggle likewise for Sheen. He humbly admitted that he had to battle against pride, vanity, ambition and a love of material comforts. He likewise suffered from clerical envy, the machinations of powerful prelates against him, not to mention the consequences of heart troubles late in life, all of which helped to purify him. He was aware, as he entitled his autobiography, that he bore a treasure in a vessel of clay (2 Cor 4:7) and over time got to know both that treasure and that clay better. 

He didn’t think he was a saint, but he wanted to be and never gave up trying. He wrote in his autobiography, “God will judge me … by how much I reflected Him, not only in work but in word and life.” St. John Paul II, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1979, embraced him and expressed appreciation for the way he had done so: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus. You are a loyal son of the Church!” With today’s declaration, the Church not only reaffirms Sheen’s heroic attempts to reflect the Lord but his success. 

As the Church now focuses on Sheen’s holiness in anticipation of his beatification and beyond, Sheen, ever the missionary, would hope that it would bring attention not to him but to the One who made him holy. “The only argument that is left to convince others,” he said in the 1970s, “is holiness. The world has heard every other argument, and it is ready to reject them, all except one: holiness.” 

Holiness — his reflection in work, word and life of the Lord Jesus — is the most eloquent word the mellifluous Sheen ever preached. And it is the word that, happily, will echo now in the liturgy and memory of the Church until the end of time. 

*Monsignor Roger J. Landry is National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies. 

Note: This article was first published by the National Catholic Register and is republished here with permission.