I heard that Archbishop Fulton Sheen will soon be beatified. I love his writings and would be very interested to know something about his life.
Fulton Sheen was born on 8 May 1895, in El Paso, Illinois, the oldest of four sons of Newton and Delia Sheen. He was baptised Peter John, but he came to prefer the name Fulton, his mother’s maiden name.
The family later moved to Peoria, Illinois, where Fulton graduated from high school in 1913 with valedictorian honours. Feeling called to the priesthood, he entered St Paul Seminary in St Paul, Minnesota, and was ordained a priest for the diocese of Peoria in 1919.
He then studied at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., followed by studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where he obtained a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1923.
His doctoral thesis, titled “The Spirit of Contemporary Philosophy and the Finite God”, earned him the distinction of being the first American to win the Cardinal Mercier Prize for the best philosophical treatise. From Leuven, Sheen went to Rome in 1924 to attend the Pontifical Angelicum College.
Although both Columbia University and Oxford offered him positions to teach philosophy, his bishop asked Fr Sheen to return to Peoria in 1926, and appointed him assistant priest in St Patrick’s, a poor parish in Peoria. After nine months, Bishop Dunne, seeing his spirit of obedience, told him he could then teach at the Catholic University of America.
Fr Sheen chose instead to teach theology at St Edmund’s College, in Ware, England, where he met Fr Ronald Knox. In 1928 he returned to the U.S., where he taught philosophy at the Catholic University of America until 1950.
In 1950, Fr Sheen became the national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, raising millions of dollars over the next 16 years for missionary work all over the world.
In 1951 Pope Pius XII appointed him auxiliary bishop of New York, and in 1966 Pope Paul VI named him bishop of Rochester, New York. He resigned three years later, whereupon Pope Paul VI named him archbishop of the titular see of Newport, Wales.
He began his outstanding media career in 1930 with a popular Sunday-night radio broadcast titled “The Catholic Hour”. The program brought in up to six thousand letters from listeners each week, and by 1950 it had some four million listeners.
In 1952 Bishop Sheen began a weekly television program called “Life is Worth Living”, in which he spoke extemporaneously before a live audience. It was scheduled in a prime-time slot on Tuesday nights at 8pm, where it competed with such celebrities as comedian Milton Berle on NBC and Frank Sinatra on CBS. It quickly became extremely popular, bringing in some 8500 letters each week.
In 1952 Sheen won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Personality. The program ran until 1957, with as many as 30 million viewers each week, most of them non-Catholics. The program resumed in 1961 as “The Fulton Sheen Program”, running until 1968. Archbishop Sheen was also a prolific author, writing 73 books, many of which are still in print, and numerous articles.
Over the years Archbishop Sheen was responsible for the conversion of many well-known people, including politician Clare Boothe Luce, car maker Henry Ford II, Communist union organiser Bella Dodd, and violinist Fritz Kreisler.
From 1977 on he underwent a number of surgeries that sapped his strength. He died on 9 December 1979, while praying before the Blessed Sacrament in his private chapel, where he had always been faithful to his holy hour.
He was buried in the crypt of St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and in 2019 his remains were transferred to the Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois.
His cause of canonisation was opened in Peoria in 2002 and in 2012 the Vatican declared him to have lived a life of heroic virtue. In 2019 a miracle attributed to his intercession was approved involving the recovery of a stillborn boy, who had had no discernible heartbeat for 61 minutes.
Archbishop Sheen was beatified on 24 September 2026 in St Louis, Missouri.
