Famed Radio-TV Priest Fulton Sheen Beatified in St. Louis

Tens of thousands of Catholic worshipers packed the Dome at America’s Center on Thursday for the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The ceremony advanced the radio and television priest another step toward sainthood.

Teenager James Fulton Engstrom walked toward the altar with his parents and siblings. He carried an ornate vessel containing relics of Sheen, who died in 1979. The church credits Sheen’s intercession with the boy’s survival after he was born without a pulse.

Sheen is now Blessed Fulton Sheen.

The stadium was chosen because no site in Sheen’s home diocese of Peoria, Illinois, could handle the crowd, with approximately 50,000 tickets being distributed.

The beatification came 16 years to the month after James was born at home without a pulse in September 2010 and was rushed to a hospital. His parents and others prayed and sought Sheen’s help—a Catholic practice in which people who lived exceptionally virtuous lives are asked to intercede with God for assistance.

A formal inquiry led the church to conclude that James’s resuscitation, as medical workers prepared to declare him dead, was a miracle linked to Sheen’s prayers. One miracle is typically required for beatification and another for canonization. If canonized, Sheen will become the first American-born male saint.

Bonnie Engstrom, the boy’s mother, said before the ceremony that she expected it would feel like a “foretaste of heaven.”

She had prayed to Sheen during her pregnancy.

“It was just a very natural thing in the hardest hour of our life” to seek his help, she said.

Cardinal Luis Tagle, the Vatican’s top evangelization official, served as lead celebrant. He offered greetings from Pope Leo XIV and called the pontiff Sheen’s “fellow Illinoisan.” Tagle described Sheen as a model for evangelization.

Sheen once appeared regularly in American living rooms, including that of the future Pope Leo XIV, who has said he watched the broadcasts while growing up in Chicago.

Sheen began as a radio priest and moved to television in the 1950s with the Emmy-winning “Life is Worth Living.” He appeared in a cassock, cape, and skullcap at a chalkboard, offering moral and religious lessons that reached beyond a strictly Catholic audience. He often closed with “God loves you.”

His program drew between 10 and 30 million viewers each Tuesday evening, and garnered Sheen an Emmy for Outstanding Television Personality in 1953.

“I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” the archbishop quipped in his acceptance speech.

The newly beatified archbishop was born in 1895 in El Paso, Illinois, and raised in Peoria. He became a priest, earned a doctorate in philosophy, and taught at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

He became famous for his lectures and talks from the pulpit and the studio. He appeared on a Time magazine cover, guided celebrity converts, met popes, spoke at the Second Vatican Council, raised funds for missions, and traveled widely. He served as a bishop in New York and retired as an archbishop.

While he opposed the Vietnam War, he was also a staunch opponent of Communism, which he called the “final logic of the dehumanization of man” in his book “Communism and the Conscience of the West.”

After his death at 84, he was buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

The process for his beatification stalled for years, while a legal battle over the rights to his body played out between the Diocese of Rochester and Sheen’s niece. His niece won a 2019 court case to move his body to Peoria’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, where pilgrims now visit his relics.

James, who recently turned 16, maintains a devotion to Sheen but largely avoids attention.

“I just want to say that for his sake, because otherwise people will have expectations of him,” his mother said.

Pope Leo, ahead of the beatification, praised his fellow Illinois native at his Vatican audience on Wednesday.

“May the example and the intercession of this holy bishop, known for his evangelizing work to the media, inspire many others likewise to find new ways of spreading the gospel message with joyful enthusiasm,” Leo said.

Annie Ertmann, head of a Catholic youth program at St. Ambrose parish in St. Louis, attended the beatification with a group of 10 teenagers. She said the ceremony allowed them to be exposed to “the beauty of the Catholic church.”

“They were able to sit in a building with more than 50,000 people who believed as they do, loved as they do,” she told The Epoch Times. The youth group has spent the last year discussing the biblical theme of “the armor of God.”

“Blessed Fulton Sheen is a perfect example of using your talents and wits as God’s armor,” Ertmann said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.