In September, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was beatified: the premier evangelist of the twentieth century; an Emmy Award winner; friend to European royalty and Hollywood stars alike; a farmer’s son sent from Peoria to study at the Saint Paul Seminary, Catholic University of America, and Louvain, who went on to earn multiple honors and advanced degrees; a man with a sensitive stomach who slept little and worked exhaustively; and an ardent adorer of the Blessed Sacrament who died during his daily morning holy hour after sixty-one years of the devotional practice. And in all this, he was beatified neither because of his fame nor his evangelistic reach but rather because of his radical intimacy with God.
The remarkable beatification was a national event gathering over fifty thousand people in St. Louis, Missouri: bishops, priests, deacons, seminarians, religious brothers and sisters, old people, babies, and every person in between. Culturally, we would associate a celebration the size of Sheen’s beatification with being proportionate to his own fame and reach. Famous guy = big party. As Catholics and Christians, we see something different. Holy guy = big party. People came with memories of watching him on television and hearing him on the radio; some even had known him personally. Internationally known bishops, nationally famous podcasters, actors, musicians, artists, all prayed alongside the most ordinary of all ordinary lay persons in the pew. It was exactly the mix of folks Sheen would have loved to see.
The process for beatification involves many years of interviewing people to prove that the candidate lived a life of heroic virtue. Those conversations are compiled into a large tome called a positio. Simultaneously, investigations are undertaken into alleged miracles attributed to the candidate’s intercessory prayer. Sheen was found to not only intercede for a baby, James Fulton Engstrom—who went sixty-one minutes (the same number of years of his holy hour practice) without a heartbeat and now is a healthy, wonderful teenage young man—but he also lived a life according to the virtues. As then-Fr. Robert Barron wrote about the beatification of Pope John Paul II, “And what exactly is virtue? The Church has identified the ‘cardinal’ virtues of justice, temperance, prudence and fortitude and the ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope and love. . . . [A saint is] someone who has remarkably embodied these moral and spiritual excellences.” Sheen embodied these excellences, and the Church was delighted to celebrate this remarkable man.
Sheen shows us all the exterior aspects are important, but at the end of the day, it’s the interior that really counts.
I was privileged to be present for the events leading up to the beatification and the beatification Mass. I saw the crowds of folks shuffling through the expo hall. I heard the roar of the audience at the morning’s entertainment event. I witnessed the forty-five-minute procession at Mass of over one thousand men: cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, and seminarians. I sang along with the magnificent choir and orchestra during Mass. I wept when my old friends, the Engstrom family, whose son’s healing was the miracle cause for the beatification, processed up with Sheen’s jawbone relic. The Sheen Foundation certainly put incredible time and effort into each detail of the remarkable gathering to hear the pronouncement of beatification from Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the papal delegate.
But as I heard it, something moved in my heart beyond the crowds and the clamor, the commotion and the clapping. Sheen shows us all the exterior aspects are important, but at the end of the day, it’s the interior that really counts.
Sheen led a remarkably public life: teaching at CUA for nearly twenty-five years; speaking on his radio show The Catholic Hour, which reached four million households over twenty years; filming his television show Life Is Worth Living for nearly a decade, reaching up to ten million viewers a week; writing nearly seventy books on a variety of topics; and serving as national director for the Propagation for the Faith for nearly fifteen years, raising millions for the missions around the world. He led an even more remarkable private life, one we know of from interviews, letters, and stories told posthumously. It was this proof of heroic virtue that brought him to beatification, not the tens of thousands of conversions, high- and low-profile, not the personal relationships with popes, or the speaking tours around the world. The hidden life—one of interior union with God—is what we are actually called to emulate.
Word on Fire has a particular tagline: Proclaim Christ in the culture. Not “to” the culture. Not “at” the culture. Not “towards” the culture. The choice of that preposition holds great meaning. I would venture a guess to say that one can only proclaim something “in”—a position of relationship. If I’m “in” the room, I can speak to people inside of it. If I’m near or outside of or adjacent to, my reach is limited by proximity and access. Fulton Sheen lived this out in a very specific way. He entered whole-heartedly into relationship with everyone he encountered. He brought Christ into the conversation, the exchanges of humor, the moments of carrying the suffering of the other. He stepped in.
If we look at the wide-ranging biographies of saints and venerables, those who lived with a deep desire to be intimately close with the Lord, they include this profundity in common. Some led public ministry—many did not. Sheen lived his successful outreach from a simple place of deep interior intimacy with our Lord Jesus. He credits his practice of a daily holy hour that he began at seminary for the graces necessary to do the work that the Lord offered to him. He offered himself to God and found that he could then live in the overflow of those graces and that intimacy. That overflow is where we see that, time and again, he touched the lives of others by stepping outside of himself and into their story, whether it was a cold and hungry man on the curb or a woman in the elevator of a hospital visiting a dying parent or the flight attendant with a wounded past. He saw them as God’s beloved children and entered into their stories.
I’m not saying that our takeaway from Sheen’s example is to remain purposely hidden, and I am also not saying it is to order a ring light and whip up a fee-based video platform so as to evangelize. Upon examining his life, his writing, and his impact, Sheen believed that God’s desire is for us, fully and intimately. If we podcast, great. If we listen to our neighbor’s woes and pray with them, greater. If we allow Christ to reveal himself to us, to transform us through the graces he alone offers, then we can live in the overflow of those graces to proclaim him in the culture. Sheen may be the world’s most famous evangelist, but he’s recognized as a blessed because in the small, hidden rhythms of his day, he chose to habituate virtue, cooperate with grace, and be obediently intimate with the workings of the Holy Spirit. You and I are called the same. Let’s begin today. Nunc coepi.