Ven. Fulton Sheen

1. The First Televangelist

Before the internet, before cable, there was Fulton Sheen. From 1952 his television programme Life Is Worth Living went out in a prime-time slot opposite Milton Berle, and drew audiences estimated at up to thirty million a week. He won an Emmy in 1952 for most outstanding personality and thanked his writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He worked with a blackboard, a cassock and a cape, no script, no autocue, and no studio audience participation, and he explained philosophy and doctrine to an audience that was mostly not Catholic.

The format was almost defiantly plain. He walked out, talked for about twenty-seven minutes, wrote on the blackboard, made a joke about the angel who wiped it clean between shots, and finished with "God love you." A programme like that should not have worked against a variety show. It ran until 1957.

What made it work was the level he pitched at. He talked about anxiety, boredom, fear of death, marriage, communism and psychiatry, and only then brought in the doctrine. He assumed his audience was intelligent and unchurched, which is a rarer assumption in religious broadcasting than it should be.

2. The Holy Hour

At his ordination in 1919 Sheen resolved to spend one hour every day before the Blessed Sacrament. He kept it for the rest of his life, more than sixty years, and he said repeatedly that it was the source of everything else, including the broadcasting.

He made a specific argument for the practice, and it is worth repeating because it is usable. He said that the hour should be spent in the presence of the Eucharist rather than in a study, because prayer is a relationship and not a task; that the point is to keep the appointment on the days it feels useless; and that a priest who cannot manage an hour will find that his preaching becomes a performance. He wrote about it at length in his book on the priesthood and in his autobiography.

Anyone can do this. A parish with exposition or an open church costs nothing, and the practice belongs to lay Catholics as much as to clergy. Our page on the Eucharist covers what the Church believes is present there, which is the reason the hour makes sense at all.

3. Prophetic Voice

Sheen saw the spiritual condition of the West as the central problem of the century, and he said so consistently from the 1930s onward. He argued that the coming struggle would be fought over the human person, that a society which lost the sense of sin would replace guilt with anxiety and confession with therapy, and that Western materialism and Soviet communism shared a common root in denying the soul.

He was a vocal opponent of communism throughout the Cold War, and he received a number of prominent converts, among them the writer and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, the industrialist Henry Ford II, the violinist Fritz Kreisler, the journalist Heywood Broun and the former Communist editor Louis Budenz. His method with converts was slow and personal, running over months of weekly instruction.

4. Who Fulton Sheen Was

He was born Peter John Sheen on 8 May 1895 in El Paso, Illinois, the eldest of four sons of a farming family that soon moved to Peoria. He took the name Fulton, his mother's maiden name, in childhood. He served at the altar of the Peoria cathedral as a boy, and was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Peoria on 20 September 1919.

He was then sent to study, and he studied for a long time: the Catholic University of America in Washington, then the University of Louvain in Belgium, where he took a doctorate and in 1925 the agrégé en philosophie, a higher distinction awarded after examination before a full faculty. He was the first American to receive it. His early work was on the idea of God in modern philosophy, written against the background of Thomistic thought.

He taught philosophy and theology at the Catholic University of America from 1926 until 1950. He wrote around seventy books over his life, including Peace of Soul, The World's First Love on the Virgin Mary, Life of Christ, and the autobiography Treasure in Clay, which was published shortly after his death. He also attended the Second Vatican Council as a Council Father and spoke in the aula.

He died on 9 December 1979 in New York, and he was found in the private chapel of his residence, before the Blessed Sacrament. Two months earlier, on a visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral, John Paul II had embraced him in front of the congregation and told him that he had written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus and was a loyal son of the Church.

5. From the Catholic Hour to Prime Time

Television came late in his career. Sheen had already been broadcasting for twenty years by 1952, on The Catholic Hour, a national radio programme carried by NBC from 1930, on which he preached to a very large weekly audience. Radio taught him the discipline that made the television work: no notes, tight timing, and a vocabulary that assumed nothing.

When Life Is Worth Living began, it was carried by the DuMont network, then a small competitor, in a slot nobody expected to succeed. It moved to ABC in 1955 and ran until 1957. Sheen later hosted a further series in the 1960s. The programmes survive and circulate widely, which is why a bishop who died in 1979 still has a substantial audience.

The reason to notice all this is that his method transfers. He prepared each talk for hours, delivered it without a script, kept a single idea per programme, and gave the audience one thing to do at the end. Any catechist or parent can copy that.

6. The Missions, Cardinal Spellman, and Rochester

In 1950 Sheen was appointed national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the body that raises and distributes funds for the Church's missions, and he held the post until 1966. He was consecrated a bishop in 1951 as an auxiliary of New York. He gave the income from his broadcasting and writing to the missions, and he used his platform relentlessly to raise money for them.

That work brought him into a serious conflict with Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York and his superior. Sheen's biographers, and Sheen's own memoir, describe a dispute over mission funds in which Sheen refused a request to hand over money he held for the Propagation of the Faith, and took the matter to Pius XII, who decided in his favour. Sheen's position in New York became untenable afterwards.

In 1966 he was appointed bishop of Rochester in upstate New York, his only diocesan appointment. It went badly. He arrived intending to implement the reforms of the Second Vatican Council quickly, and among his initiatives was an attempt to hand over a parish property to the federal government for housing for the poor, which met heavy opposition from the parish and was withdrawn. He resigned in October 1969, after three years, and was named titular archbishop of Newport. He spent his last decade writing, preaching retreats and giving talks.

7. The Postponed Beatification, and Its Resolution

The Holy See postponed Sheen's beatification on December 3, 2019, three weeks before the scheduled ceremony. The Diocese of Rochester confirmed in a statement on December 5, 2019 that it had asked for the delay, saying it had given the Diocese of Peoria and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints documentation raising concern about advancing the cause without a further review of Sheen's role in priests' assignments during his time as bishop of Rochester from 1966 to 1969. The Diocese of Peoria, which promotes the cause, publicly objected to the delay and replied that no allegation involving the abuse of a minor has ever been made against Sheen. In December 2024 the cause's postulator, Msgr. Jason Gray, said no accusation had impugned him. The matter resolved in Sheen's favour: on February 9, 2026 Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria announced that the Holy See had informed him the cause can proceed to beatification.

8. Where His Body Rests, and Why That Went to Court

Sheen was buried in the crypt of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, where the archbishops of New York are interred. His cause for beatification, however, is promoted by the Diocese of Peoria, where he was born and ordained, and a cause normally proceeds where the candidate's remains are kept.

His niece, Joan Sheen Cunningham, went to the New York courts to have his remains moved to Peoria, arguing that he would have wanted his cause to advance and that Peoria was his home diocese. The Archdiocese of New York opposed the move. The litigation ran for several years, the courts eventually ruled in the niece's favour, and Sheen's remains were transferred to St. Mary's Cathedral in Peoria in June 2019.

The episode is worth knowing because it explains why a New York archbishop's cause is run out of central Illinois, and because it is a reminder that causes for canonisation are conducted by human institutions with ordinary disputes.

9. What "Venerable" Means, and What Comes Next

Titles in a cause for canonisation are precise, and Sheen's is often misreported.

Because he is Venerable and not yet Blessed, Sheen has no feast day and no public liturgical cult. Catholics may ask for his intercession privately and are encouraged to report favours to the diocese promoting the cause. Our page on the saints and how the Church recognises them sets out the process in full.

His birthday is 8 May and the anniversary of his death is 9 December. Neither is a feast, and this page will not call them one.

10. What a Reader Can Take From Sheen

The hour comes first

He was clear that the broadcasting, the books and the conversions came out of the hour of prayer rather than the other way round. If the schedule has to give somewhere, give somewhere else. A parish church is open and free.

Talk to people who do not already agree with you

Sheen's audience was mostly not Catholic, and he never spoke as though it were. He started with what a person was already worried about and worked toward the doctrine. That is transferable to any conversation about faith.

Being right does not protect you from being sidelined

He was moved out of New York and out of Rochester, and his beatification was halted three weeks before the ceremony forty years after his death. He kept working. Nobody knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and vindication is not the thing to plan around.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Is Fulton Sheen a saint?

Not yet. He holds the title Venerable, declared by Benedict XVI on 28 June 2012, meaning the Church has judged that he practised virtue to a heroic degree. Beatification, the next step, requires an approved miracle, and canonisation requires a second one after that. Because he is not beatified, he has no feast day and no public liturgical veneration.

What was Life Is Worth Living?

A weekly television programme Sheen presented from 1952, first on the DuMont network and from 1955 on ABC, running until 1957. He spoke for about half an hour without a script, using a blackboard, on subjects ranging from anxiety and marriage to communism and the meaning of suffering. It won him an Emmy in 1952 and drew audiences estimated at up to thirty million a week.

What is the Holy Hour Fulton Sheen practised?

An hour spent daily in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, which he began at his ordination in 1919 and kept for more than sixty years. He treated it as a fixed appointment to be kept whether or not it felt fruitful, and he credited it with everything else he accomplished. Any Catholic can make one in a parish church or adoration chapel at no cost.

Why was his beatification postponed in 2019?

The Holy See postponed the ceremony on 3 December 2019, three weeks before it was to take place, after the Diocese of Rochester asked for a delay so that Sheen's handling of priest assignments during his three years as bishop there could be reviewed further. The Diocese of Peoria objected publicly and stated that no allegation involving the abuse of a minor had ever been made against Sheen. The matter was later resolved in his favour and the cause was cleared to proceed.

Where is Fulton Sheen buried?

At St. Mary's Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois. He was originally buried in the crypt of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, and his remains were transferred to Peoria in June 2019 after litigation brought by his niece, so that the cause could proceed in the diocese promoting it.

How many books did Fulton Sheen write?

Around seventy, including Peace of Soul, The World's First Love, Life of Christ and the autobiography Treasure in Clay, published shortly after his death in 1979. Most remain in print, and his radio and television talks circulate widely in recordings.