Less than a month after soon-to-be-blessed Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is beatified in St. Louis, Catholics around the world will mark another milestone closely connected to his life.
On Oct. 18, 2026, the Church will celebrate the 100th World Mission Sunday.
Established by Pope Pius XI in 1926 at the request of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, World Mission Sunday sets aside the second-to-last Sunday of October for Catholics everywhere to pray, reflect and give for the Church’s missionary work. Pope Leo XIV has chosen “One in Christ, united in mission” as the theme for its centenary.
For Archbishop Sheen, World Mission Sunday was never simply an annual collection.
During his 16 years as national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in the United States, he helped teach American Catholics that the missions belonged to them — not because everyone could travel overseas, but because every baptized person shares in Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations.
His extraordinary success did more than raise money.
It helped make America missionary.
World Mission Sunday is the Catholic Church’s annual worldwide day of prayer and giving for the missions.
Pope Leo XIV has described it as a day that, for a century, has been devoted to prayer, reflection and financial support for evangelization, particularly where the Gospel is only beginning to take root and where local Churches remain young.
The offerings collected around the world support missionary dioceses through the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, one of the four Pontifical Mission Societies.
But the day is about more than fundraising.
In his 2026 message, Pope Leo writes that mission flows from union with Christ and communion with one another. “The more united we are in Christ,” he says, “the better able we will be to carry out together the mission that he entrusts to us.”
That vision would have been immediately recognizable to Archbishop Sheen.
In November 1950, Monsignor Sheen left his long career at The Catholic University of America to become national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith.
He was already one of America’s best-known Catholic preachers.
But the new assignment gave his gifts a particular purpose: helping Catholics in the United States see the Church beyond the boundaries of their own parish, diocese and country.
At the time, the Society operated from a brownstone on East 38th Street in Manhattan, where about 30 employees worked in offices crowded together with a chapel and living quarters. Monsignor Sheen moved into an apartment in the same building.
From there, he began an extraordinary campaign of preaching, writing, broadcasting, traveling and fundraising.
He used nearly every opportunity to speak about missionaries and the communities they served. His appeals reached Catholics through parish pulpits, radio, television and the mail — and the response could be overwhelming.
At the height of his fundraising work, more than 10,000 letters a day sometimes arrived at the national office. They contained everything from significant checks to coins sent by children. Some gifts even came from non-Catholics moved by the missionary needs Bishop Sheen described.
The numbers tell part of the story.
Father Anthony D. Andreassi, C.O., writes that during Bishop Sheen’s tenure from 1950 to 1966, he oversaw the raising of more than $200 million for the missions. Annual contributions grew from approximately $3.5 million in 1950 to $16 million in 1965, and by the end of his tenure Catholics in the United States were providing close to 60 percent of worldwide missionary funding through the Society.
Much of that support was connected to World Mission Sunday, whose annual collection Bishop Sheen promoted nationwide. But his aim was larger than producing one successful Sunday each October.
He wanted Catholics to develop a missionary conscience.
Missionary generosity, in his vision, was not simply philanthropy. It was an expression of belonging to the Body of Christ.
Christians suffering or evangelizing on another continent were not strangers.
They were family.
One of Bishop Sheen’s most lasting innovations was transforming the Society’s magazine.
He renamed and redesigned the publication as MISSION, using photographs, vivid missionary stories and more accessible writing to bring readers face-to-face with the Church around the world.
The publication had been losing money. Under Bishop Sheen’s leadership, Father Andreassi writes, it began generating significant donations from readers.
But the magazine’s importance cannot be measured only financially.
It gave missionary giving a human face.
A contribution to the Society was no longer merely money sent to a distant institution. Readers could see the priest building a parish, the religious sister treating the sick, the catechist walking from village to village, or the children encountering the Gospel for the first time.
Bishop Sheen understood intuitively that people are more likely to pray and sacrifice for someone they can see.
MISSION Magazine helped them see.
Bishop Sheen also created one of the Society’s most enduring devotional tools: the World Mission Rosary.
Its five colors represent different regions of the world, allowing Catholics to pray intentionally for the Church on every continent.
The idea spread quickly. By 1953, more than 250,000 World Mission Rosaries had been mailed to friends and supporters of the Society.
The rosary captured something essential about Bishop Sheen’s missionary vision.
Not everyone could travel to Africa, Asia, Oceania or Latin America.
Everyone could pray.
And prayer itself was missionary work.
His staff experienced that conviction firsthand. Former employees remembered pausing during the workday to pray together and being introduced to visiting missionaries so that the people behind the letters, appeals and donations would never become abstractions.
Mission had faces.
Bishop Sheen repeatedly presented the missions as part of the ordinary Christian vocation.
He believed Catholics could not regard evangelization as the specialized work of priests, religious or people willing to leave home for distant countries.
The entire Church is missionary.
That conviction eventually appeared in a wider ecclesial context at the Second Vatican Council, where Bishop Sheen participated in the commission responsible for missionary activity.
During the work that led to Ad Gentes, he argued for stronger worldwide coordination of evangelization and supported the affirmation that bishops were responsible not merely for their own dioceses, but for the salvation of the whole world.
The same principle applied to lay Catholics.
Some would go.
Others would pray.
Others would give.
All belonged to the mission.
The timing is remarkable.
Archbishop Sheen will be beatified on Sept. 24. Less than four weeks later, Catholics will celebrate the centenary of World Mission Sunday on Oct. 18.
Pope Leo XIV, who has said that he himself was a “witness of [Archbishop Sheen’s] evangelization when I was growing up,” has called 2026 a year “rich in missionary milestones” and has invited Catholics to live an authentic spirituality of missionary unity centered on Christ.
His theme — “One in Christ, united in mission” — expresses something Bishop Sheen spent years trying to teach.
A century after the first World Mission Sunday, that work continues.
Today, The Pontifical Mission Societies helps sustain 1,130 mission dioceses, supporting catechists, seminarians, religious sisters, parishes and communities where the Church is young, growing, poor or persecuted.
The geography has changed since Bishop Sheen sat at his desk in Manhattan.
The call has not.
There may be no more fitting tribute to Archbishop Sheen in the weeks after his beatification than to do what he spent 16 years asking American Catholics to do:
Archbishop Sheen understood that missionary support changes more than the person receiving it.
It changes the giver.
It enlarges our understanding of the Church.
It teaches us to recognize brothers and sisters we may never meet in this life.
And it reminds us that Christ’s command to “go” belongs even to those whose missionary journey begins from a pew at home.
This Oct. 18, Catholics throughout the world will celebrate the 100th World Mission Sunday.
Pray the World Mission Rosary, learn about the missionaries your prayers and gifts sustain, and join Pope Leo XIV in helping carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Learn more about World Mission Sunday 2026 and how to participate here.
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