Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen – the 20th-century American theologian, evangelizer, Catholic communications pioneer, teacher and preacher – is now Blessed Fulton Sheen.
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, a pro-prefect for the Holy See’s Dicastery for Evangelization, pronounced the Church’s declaration on Archbishop Sheen’s life and witness at a Sept. 24 Mass celebrated in The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis.
The location had been selected by Archbishop Sheen’s home Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, to accommodate the thousands of pilgrims on hand for the beatification and its surrounding events. Around 50,000 people were in attendance, according to organizers.
The beatification officially occurred between the liturgy’s Penitential Rite and the Gloria. Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria, Illinois, made a formal request for Archbishop Sheen’s beatification to Cardinal Tagle, the papal delegate. A short biography of Archbishop Sheen was read, followed by the formal decree of beatification from Pope Leo XIV.
With the decree’s public proclamation, Archbishop Sheen is formally counted among the Church’s “beati,” from the Latin word for “blessed.”
James Fulton Engstrom – whose revival from stillbirth in 2010, attributed to Archbishop Sheen’s intercession, was formally declared the miracle that moved Archbishop Sheen to beatification – presented a major relic of Archbishop Sheen.
Enclosed in a special case called a reliquary, the relic is Archbishop Sheen’s mandible, or jawbone, chosen because it represented the archbishop’s tremendous gifts as an orator, teacher and evangelist.
With the beatification, a portrait of a haloed Archbishop Sheen was also unveiled. In the image, he is notably holding a piece of chalk, which he famously used (along with a blackboard) during his Emmy-winning television show “Life Is Worth Living.”
Blessed Fulton J. Sheen is truly “blessed” or “fortunate” because of his communion with Jesus Christ during his life, said Cardinal Tagle said in his homily during Archbishop Sheen’s beatification Mass.
“To choose yourself and to go wherever you want to go is not mission, and it is not blessedness,” he said. Rather, unity with Christ and proclaiming God’s wisdom is “blessedness,” he said, which is what Archbishop Sheen experienced by fully surrendering his gifts as a preacher and teacher to God’s will, and not his own.
Cardinal Tagle serves as a pro-prefect in the Holy See’s Dicastery for Evangelization, leading its Section for the First Evangelization and New Particular Churches, and is the archbishop emeritus of his native Manila, Philippines. The cardinal presided over the beatification Mass in St. Louis as Pope Leo XIV’s delegate.
In his homily, Cardinal Tagle said Pope Leo rejoiced in the beatification of his fellow countryman and Illinoisan. In his apostolic letter declaring Archbishop Sheen blessed, the pope described him as “a tireless preacher of the Gospel through the modern means of communication, and a diligent shepherd animated by missionary zeal.”
“What a description,” Cardinal Tagle reflected. “Among many of his virtues and ministries, two stand out: his being an evangelizer or proclaimer of the Gospel, and his being a missionary shepherd.”
Preaching at The Dome at America’s Center, where the Mass was held to accommodate its estimated 50,000 attendees, Cardinal Tagle focused on Archbishop Sheen’s unity with Christ and his mission, and his sincere attention to the poor and vulnerable, while connecting these qualities to the liturgy’s readings from Scripture.
The cardinal said that a “missionary evangelizer ... is known by Jesus and is called to know Jesus and his Gospel, is called to labor humbly with Jesus.”
“In the process, a missionary evangelizer gets to know oneself, himself or herself in Jesus,” he said. “Blessed are you when Jesus sees you, knows you, calls you, sends you and labors with you. Blessed are you when you come to know your true self and mission because Jesus knows you and you know Jesus. Blessed are the authentic missionary evangelizers.”
He relayed an anecdote from Archbishop Sheen’s life, in which Pope Pius XII asked him how many conversions he could attribute to his evangelization. He told the pope that he did not count, lest he be tempted “to believe that they were mine.”
Despite Archbishop Sheen’s fame and talents, he saw himself as “a ‘porter’ who is sometimes able to lead people to the open door of the house of God,” Cardinal Tagle said.
“I have had some success as a porter,” Archbishop Sheen told the pope.
Archbishop Sheen also told a friend who asked why he became a priest that he was called to share the Gospel and tell the story of Jesus.
“I never tire of telling it; I never tire of improving my telling of it. I love my calling,” Archbishop Sheen said, as Cardinal Tagle recounted.
“How blessed are you, storyteller of Jesus!” Cardinal Tagle exclaimed of Archbishop Sheen.
The cardinal commended Archbishop Sheen for making genuine connections with the people he met and to whom he preached and ministered.
“The missionary evangelizer is blessed by the communion with persons and peoples, especially the poor and vulnerable, and this is communion in the name of Jesus Christ,” he said.
Jesus told his disciples “to preach the Gospel to every creature, not to an abstract world or society,” Cardinal Tagle said. “To use preaching as an excuse to avoid concrete persons and to be blind to God’s action in them is not mission. It is not blessedness. ... Blessed are you when you count yourself as an earthen vessel ... so that the power may be of God and not from you.”
Speaking at the Second Vatican Council, then-Bishop Sheen asked his brother bishops to “affirm” the notion of poverty and the bishops who came from poor and suffering parts of the Church. “As only a wounded Christ could convert a doubting Thomas, so only a Church wounded by poverty can convert a doubting world,” he said.
Archbishop Sheen “took up his own challenge by giving to the poor whatever remunerations he received from his various commitments, and by animating missionary commitment ... of the Church in the United States towards the poor churches of the world,” Cardinal Tagle said.
“For Archbishop Sheen, caring for the poor was not ideological propaganda, but an imperative for the following of Christ, of the joining of the Church and the missions, and of the conversion inspired by the Holy Spirit,” the cardinal said.
Blessed Fulton Sheen was a “missionary who digs deep into the heart of the poor to meet Jesus there,” Cardinal Tagle said.
Like Archbishop Sheen, Cardinal Tagle, 69, is an alumnus of The Catholic University of America in Washington. In 2024, Cardinal Tagle served as the Holy See’s envoy to the 10th National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. Earlier in the week, he venerated Archbishop Sheen’s relics at his tomb at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Illinois. There he celebrated Mass Sept. 22 and participated in a special Holy Hour that evening.
