On November 1, 1950, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen left the classroom for a cramped brownstone at 109 East 38th Street in Manhattan.
Already known to millions as a professor, author, and radio preacher, Sheen would spend the next 16 years using those gifts to transform The Pontifical Mission Societies and broaden the missionary imagination of American Catholics.
The brownstone housed the Society’s national office, a chapel, living quarters, and about 30 employees. Monsignor Sheen moved into an apartment on the fourth floor, close to both the work and the Blessed Sacrament.
From those quarters, he would help turn American Catholicism outward.
Monsignor Sheen had been appointed National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies in September 1950, succeeding Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. McDonnell. He began the assignment in November and remained in the role until 1966.
The position gave a singular focus to the gifts he had spent decades developing. He would no longer teach in a university classroom, but he still understood himself as a teacher. The subject was now the Church’s universal mission.
The timing was urgent.
The world was still recovering from World War II. Communist governments were consolidating power in Europe and Asia. Missionaries and local Catholics faced persecution in China and elsewhere. Across Africa and Asia, new nations were emerging from colonial rule. The Church needed resources to form local clergy, build schools and clinics, care for the sick and proclaim the Gospel in communities undergoing enormous change.
Monsignor Sheen presented this need not as a remote concern for specialists, but as a responsibility shared by every baptized Catholic.
The Society for the Propagation of the Faith had been founded in France in 1822 through the initiative of Blessed Pauline Jaricot, a young laywoman who organized ordinary Catholics to pray for the missions and make small, regular sacrifices for their support. The first monies collected through this effort were sent to the Church in the United States. The Society eventually became part of a worldwide papal network that collected offerings and distributed them according to the needs of the Church in mission territories.
That structure mattered to Monsignor Sheen. He wanted Catholics to understand that the Society was not simply one charity among many, nor merely a vehicle for sponsoring a favored project. It expressed communion with the pope and solidarity with the entire missionary Church.
The offerings of ordinary people were gathered and entrusted to the Church for universal distribution. A gift made in an American parish could help train a seminarian, support a catechist, build a chapel, or keep a medical dispensary open in a place the donor might never see.
Monsignor Sheen’s achievement was to make that connection vivid.
He did not merely ask American Catholics to give to the missions. He helped them recognize that the missions belonged to them.
The brownstone on East 38th Street was crowded, but Monsignor Sheen did not treat his role as ceremonial. He lived where he worked and remained closely engaged in the office’s daily life.
When he was not traveling, he prayed with the staff and took an interest in those working with him. Two priest assistants generally helped manage the office and its responsibilities during his frequent absences.
Eventually, Bishop Sheen secured larger headquarters at 366 Fifth Avenue. The move reflected the growth of an organization whose national profile and financial reach were expanding rapidly.
His leadership combined administration, spiritual formation, and relentless communication. He used nearly every opportunity—on radio, television, in print, and before live audiences—to tell stories from the missions and invite support.
In doing so, Bishop Sheen made use of an advantage few national directors before or after him possessed: direct access to millions of American homes.
His broadcasts were not dedicated exclusively to missionary work. Bishop Sheen spoke about a wide range of spiritual, cultural, and moral questions. Yet the missions remained a regular part of his public apostolate. He described the Church’s schools, hospitals, orphanages, leprosy centers, and catechetical work, reminding listeners that missionaries served people regardless of whether they were Christian.
He translated institutional scale into human reality.
Rather than speaking only about vast needs, he told readers and listeners what a modest sacrifice could accomplish. A small donation might buy medicine, feed a child, educate a seminarian, or help a missionary reach an isolated community.
That approach reflected Pauline Jaricot’s original insight: the Church’s mission would be sustained not only by the wealthiest donors, but by large numbers of believers offering small sacrifices with love.
The response was extraordinary.
At the height of Bishop Sheen’s national prominence, the Society’s office reportedly received thousands of pieces of mail a day. Some envelopes contained substantial gifts. Others carried only a few coins from a child or a small sacrifice from a family.
The donors were not exclusively Catholic. Bishop Sheen’s broad appeal meant that non-Catholics who trusted him and were moved by the work he described also contributed.
During his tenure, annual support raised by the U.S. Society grew from approximately $3.5 million in 1950 to about $16 million in 1965. More than $200 million was raised during Bishop Sheen’s 16 years as national director, without adjusting for inflation. By 1965, Catholics in the United States were reportedly providing close to 60 percent of the worldwide missionary funding collected through the Church’s network.
The numbers reveal extraordinary growth, but they do not fully explain his success.
Bishop Sheen did not generally present support for the missions as an administrative obligation. He appealed to the imagination and the conscience. He wanted donors to see another person as a member of the same Body of Christ.
Missionary giving, in his presentation, was not pity flowing from the powerful to the powerless. It was an exchange within the Church. American Catholics offered material support; Catholics in mission territories offered a witness of faith, perseverance, and sacrifice from which the whole Church could learn.
One of Monsignor Sheen’s earliest and most lasting innovations was the transformation of the Society’s national publication.
In April–May 1951, the first issue of MISSION Magazine under his direction appeared. Monsignor Sheen gave the publication a more visual, direct, and engaging identity, combining photographs, maps, missionary reporting, theological reflections, statistics, and appeals for prayer and sacrifice.
The inaugural issue announced a demanding editorial purpose. The magazine would bring comfort to those who suffered, but it would also disturb the comfortable by making them aware of the needs of others.
Monsignor Sheen understood that missionary communication could not be reduced to institutional reports. Readers needed to encounter people.
The magazine showed children in schools, patients in mission hospitals, catechists carrying the faith to isolated communities, and priests and religious serving in difficult conditions. It explained what the Society did and how offerings were distributed. It paired large statistics with intimate stories and repeatedly invited readers to unite prayer with concrete sacrifice.
The editorial approach anticipated much of modern nonprofit storytelling, but its purpose was explicitly ecclesial. MISSION was not simply trying to attract donors. It was forming Catholics to understand themselves as members of a universal Church.
The publication soon became an important source of support in its own right, with issues generating more than $200,000 in donations from readers.
Bishop Sheen also launched WORLDMISSION, a companion journal that carried longer articles, reviews and reflections, many written by missionaries. Together, the two publications allowed the Society to speak both to a broad popular audience and to readers seeking deeper engagement with missionary questions.
Bishop Sheen’s vision was not limited to fundraising: he understood that prayer is at the center of every evangelization effort. With this in mind, he created the World Mission Rosary, whose five colors represent the major geographic regions of the world: green for Africa, red for the Americas, white for Europe, blue for Oceania, and yellow for Asia.
The idea was simple enough for a child to understand and expansive enough to express a theology of the universal Church. To pray one decade for each region was to place the whole world before God.
The rosary gave physical form to Bishop Sheen’s central message: Catholics should not pray only for people nearby or for needs they already understood. Christian prayer must cross continents.
By 1953, more than 250,000 World Mission Rosaries had been mailed to supporters of the Society.
The devotion became one of Bishop Sheen’s most enduring contributions to missionary spirituality. Decades later, the World Mission Rosary continues to be prayed in parishes, classrooms, and homes, teaching new generations to hold every continent within the same prayer.
Bishop Sheen’s appeals carried particular force because his personal giving matched his public preaching.
His books, lectures and broadcasts brought significant income. “Life Is Worth Living,” in particular, became one of the most successful religious television programs of its era. By 1952, he was receiving an astonishing $26,000 per episode—about $325,000 in 2026 dollars—and he donated all of it to charity, the bulk in support of the missions.
Bishop Sheen did not ask American Catholics to practice a sacrifice from which he exempted himself: the money earned through fame became a means of service.
Bishop Sheen did not promote missionary work only from New York. His role took him around the world, where he visited missionaries, local Catholics and institutions supported through the Society.
In 1960, he took part in a large evangelization initiative in Argentina, appearing on television, speaking at the University of Buenos Aires and celebrating Mass in both the cathedral and poorer neighborhoods.
Later that year, Bishop Sheen traveled to Africa, including Kenya and South Africa. He visited remote mission stations and a small hospital serving patients with little equipment and only minimal staffing. In apartheid South Africa, he visited a Black Catholic catechist despite the racial restrictions of the government.
Such journeys gave Bishop Sheen firsthand knowledge of what American offerings supported. They also reinforced his belief that missionary activity addressed the whole person.
The Church proclaimed Christ, but she also treated disease, educated children, cared for orphans and defended human dignity. These were not competing missions. They were expressions of the same Gospel.
Bishop Sheen carried this experience into the Second Vatican Council.
Pope John XXIII appointed him to preparatory work before the Council, and he later served on its commission dealing with the missions. Bishop Sheen attended all four sessions and contributed to discussions that culminated in Ad Gentes, the Council’s decree on missionary activity.
His proposals emphasized the Church’s identification with the poor, the responsibility of all bishops for the salvation of the world and the need for coordinated missionary action. He also argued that seminarians should receive practical pastoral formation among the sick, the poor, non-Catholics, fallen-away Catholics and prisoners. His 61-page intervention on the missions was the longest submitted by any American bishop on any topic at the Council.
Not every proposal Bishop Sheen advanced was accepted. Yet his contributions reflected the convictions he had spent years communicating in the United States: the Church is missionary by nature; no diocese exists only for itself; and evangelization demands prayer, courage, imagination and closeness to the poor.
When Pope Paul VI appointed Bishop Sheen to Rochester in 1966, his 16 years as national director came to an end.
The visible results were considerable. Missionary contributions from the United States had grown dramatically. MISSION Magazine had become an enduring instrument of education and support. The World Mission Rosary had entered Catholic devotional life. Millions of Americans had heard about the universal mission of the Church through Bishop Sheen’s preaching and broadcasting. The national office received an average of 8,000 to 10,000 letters a day with donations ranging from pennies to thousands of dollars.
But the deepest legacy could not be measured only in dollars, circulation or audience size.
Bishop Sheen changed the way many American Catholics imagined their place in the Church.
He taught them that belonging to a parish also meant belonging to Catholics in Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America. He showed them that prayer offered at home and sacrifice placed in a parish envelope could participate in the Great Commission. He made the missionary Church visible, personal and urgent.
He brought the missions into American homes.
More importantly, he helped bring American Catholics into the mission entrusted by Christ to the whole Church.
Click HERE to read the full issue of MISSION Magazine where this article was featured.
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