Life
Peter John Sheen was born on May 8, 1895, in El Paso, Illinois, the eldest of the four sons of Newton and Delia (Fulton) Sheen. His mother dedicated him to the Blessed Virgin Mary at his baptism, and he later took his mother's maiden name, Fulton, in place of the name he was christened with. The family moved to Peoria, where he served as an altar boy at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception and graduated valedictorian of Spalding Institute in 1913. He studied at St. Viator College in Bourbonnais, Illinois, and Saint Paul Seminary in Minnesota, and was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Peoria at St. Mary's Cathedral on September 20, 1919, by Bishop Edmund Dunne. He took a doctorate in philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1923 and was the first American to win the Cardinal Mercier Prize. After a year as a curate at St. Patrick's parish in Peoria, he taught philosophy at the Catholic University of America from 1928 to 1950, writing the greater part of his roughly seventy books. Sheen became the best-known Catholic preacher in American broadcasting. "The Catholic Hour" ran on NBC radio from 1930 to 1950, reaching a weekly audience of about four million. His television programme "Life Is Worth Living" ran from 1952 to 1957 with an estimated audience of thirty million and won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality; on accepting it he thanked his writers, "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." He directed the Society for the Propagation of the Faith from 1950 for sixteen years, giving it ten million dollars earned from television. Pope Pius XII appointed him Auxiliary Bishop of New York and Titular Bishop of Caesariana on May 28, 1951; he was consecrated in Rome on June 11 of that year. Pope Paul VI appointed him Bishop of Rochester, New York, on October 21, 1966. He resigned the see on October 6, 1969 and was named Archbishop of the titular see of Newport in Wales. He took part in the Second Vatican Council and kept a Eucharistic Holy Hour every day, calling it "the hour that makes my day." His episcopal motto was Da per matrem me venire — "Grant that I may come through the Mother." Two months before his death, Pope St. John Paul II embraced him at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and said: "You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus. You are a loyal son of the Church." Archbishop Sheen died in New York City on December 9, 1979, aged 84, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and was buried at St. Patrick's Cathedral. On June 27, 2019, after a three-year court battle, his remains were transferred to the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, where they rest in a marble monument at the side altar of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
Cause for Canonization
The cause was opened in 2002. In June 2012 Pope Benedict XVI recognised a decree of heroic virtue and Sheen was declared Venerable. The miracle accepted for beatification concerns James Fulton Engstrom, born in central Illinois in September 2010 after a true knot tightened in his umbilical cord, who was without a pulse for sixty-one minutes while his parents prayed for Sheen's intercession and afterwards developed normally; Pope Francis approved it on July 5, 2019. A beatification planned for Peoria on December 21, 2019 was postponed. On February 9, 2026 Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria announced that the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints had cleared the cause to proceed, and on March 25, 2026 the date was set: September 24, 2026, at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, Missouri, with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as papal representative.
Status as of 2026-08-07: Venerable. The beatification Mass has not yet been celebrated. When it is, this file should be renamed to bl-fulton-sheen.yaml and the title changed to Blessed.
