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For Rosemarie Costello, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was never a distant historical figure.

He was family.

Archbishop Sheen was a cousin of Costello’s paternal grandmother; the two had grown up together in Peoria and remained close their entire lives. That closeness passed down to the next generation, and then the next.

“I always felt, growing up, like he was another grandparent,” Costello said.

Archbishop Sheen even had a hand in bringing her parents together.

Her mother, Yolanda, was a college student at the College of Saint Elizabeth in New Jersey who would regularly donate to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith at a Sunday talk Archbishop Sheen gave at St. Aedan’s Church in Jersey City.

One day, he reached through the crowd, took her hand, and asked her name.

“I need to be with a little person who keeps giving me money every week,” he told her, according to Costello’s account.

He soon invited Yolanda to one of his television broadcasts—where, unbeknownst to her, he had also invited a young man named Tom, whom he introduced to her that day.

Both were originally from Illinois.

Archbishop Sheen later helped Tom find steady work in New York, and the friendship he had sparked between the two eventually blossomed into courtship.

Tom proposed to Yolanda in Archbishop Sheen’s own residential chapel, where she knelt on a prie-dieu that today stands in St. Catherine’s Cathedral, dedicated to the memory of Costello’s parents.

Archbishop Sheen later married the couple at the main altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and baptized each of their six children.

“Bishop Sheen was instrumental in everything in their lives,” Costello said.

He remained a regular presence at family gatherings for the rest of his life, often stopping by the Costello family’s home in St. Petersburg, Florida, during retreats or speaking engagements nearby.

Costello remembers him at the head of the dinner table, celebrating unannounced Masses quietly at her grandparents’ parish, and having long conversations in which he would ask the children what they were learning in religion class—always wanting to see their textbooks for himself.

“He always wore the collar, everywhere we went,” she said. “He was a famous priest, and he didn’t try to hide that. I think he firmly believed he needed to be a priest for everyone he met.”

That conviction extended well beyond the family table.

Costello recalled her mother’s oft-repeated line, spoken decades before Archbishop Sheen’s cause for canonization opened:

“Someday, Bishop Sheen is going to be a saint.”

Her mother later helped found a chapter supporting his sainthood cause, a torch Costello has carried in the years since her mother’s death.

Costello also remembers Archbishop Sheen’s enduring love for the missions as something inseparable from the man himself.

“It didn’t end when he wasn’t the head of the Propagation of the Faith anymore,” she said. “It was always in his heart.”

She recalled him teaching the family that those who suffer without yet knowing Christ are not outside his reach—that Christ is present, in some sense, even in suffering that has no name for him yet.

It is an idea, she said, that has stayed with her for a lifetime.

“You don’t fully appreciate it until you’re older,” Costello said of her childhood memories of Archbishop Sheen.

“But we adored him—and we also knew, even then, that we were adoring an extremely holy man.”

Click HERE to read the full issue of MISSION Magazine where this article was featured →
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/71285148/mission-magazine-dedicated-to-blessed-fulton-sheen