The following is a conversation between Mytae Carrasco Wallace, the leader of the Word on Fire Institute’s Prayer Community, and Bonnie Engstrom, the mother of James Fulton Engstrom, the recipient of the miraculous healing through the intercession of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Mytae Carrasco Wallace: Bonnie, we are so excited to have you here. So many Catholics have heard of Archbishop Fulton Sheen but may not really know or have an awareness of what led to his beatification. Would you kindly share how your family has played a role in these events?
Bonnie Engstrom: Yes. My son James Fulton is the recipient of the miracle that was approved by the Vatican and Pope Francis in 2019 that has allowed for Fulton Sheen to be beatified this September.
James is my third son, and we had a planned home birth. He was born at home with medical care present. Everything about my pregnancy and the labor were totally normal, healthy, and beautiful, but there was a knot in James’s umbilical cord. We did not know it was present. And during the delivery, the knot tightened. It tightened so much that it cut off his oxygen supply so when James was delivered, he was a stillborn.
There in our bedroom, they immediately began CPR and called 911. In the middle of that, I remember sitting on my bedroom floor and watching my midwife do chest compressions on James. And I remember thinking in my head, “Fulton Sheen, Fulton Sheen, Fulton Sheen . . .” because I was in a state of shock. I was taking in what was happening, but I couldn’t process it. And I didn’t really know what to do, but I had this friendship with Fulton Sheen. In that moment, I was falling. I was just spiraling. I didn’t know what to do. And I called out Fulton Sheen’s name for him to catch me.
I remember thinking in my head, “Fulton Sheen, Fulton Sheen, Fulton Sheen . . .”
In the ambulance, they did different things to try to restart his heart. He was hooked to a heart monitor and was pulseless. He did not have any kind of a heartbeat. Nothing worked that they tried. We got to the emergency room, again, they tried everything that they could to restart his heart. Nothing worked. And all hands came off so they could call the time of death. And it was at that moment—which was sixty-one minutes from the delivery to that moment—James’s heart came back to a full, strong, healthy heartbeat. It never stopped again.
He had been without a heartbeat for sixty-one minutes—a little over an hour. I believe with my whole heart that Fulton Sheen was walking with us through it. I believe he was making a Holy Hour. From the day of his ordination, he made a promise to God that he would make a daily Holy Hour, and he kept that promise for over sixty years. When this Holy Hour was over, it was at that sixty-first minute that our Lord brought James back to life.
Immediately, it was all hands back on deck trying to stabilize him. They took him up to the NICU. There were seven weeks in the NICU, and there were lots of ups and downs. For James, they expected massive organ failure. So we took this in and processed it the best that we could—just hoping against hope, praying that God would perform a miracle, asking for Fulton Sheen’s intercession, and just trusting in the Lord’s goodness for whatever would happen. But it was definitely hard. As beautiful as it was, it was definitely hard.
When James was in the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours of his life, he had an MRI done. There were several imaging tests done, and those all showed that he had brain damage. And when he was three months old, we had a follow-up MRI done, and that showed a completely healthy brain.
Once we had the results of that follow-up MRI, it was actually my mom who said, “You need to contact the Sheen Foundation and let them know about this.” And I remember being like, “Mom, I know the sisters at the Sheen Foundation. People talk to them all the time about miracles. It doesn’t matter.” And she was like, “Bonnie, they’re going to want to put this in a file somewhere.”
So out of obedience to my mother, I called Sr. Anne at the Sheen Foundation and told her, and she was like, “This is amazing.” The word trickled on eventually to the bishop, and he talked to the postulator in Rome who was helping us with the cause. And he said, “We need to do an investigation.”
When James was a year old, there was an official tribunal that lasted three months. At the end of that, they interviewed doctors, nurses, basically anyone who could answer questions about if a miracle had happened. That was all sent to Rome where the postulator kind of compiled it and then submitted it to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. They have a team of medical advisors who study those cases, and the medical advisors actually asked for more information, so we took James to some follow-up physicals and things like that. More paperwork was sent over. And in the end, the medical advisors unanimously agreed that it was a medical miracle.
Then it went to some theologians who were looking into whether it happened through Fulton Sheen’s intercession. They unanimously agreed that it did happen through Fulton Sheen’s intercession. And so then it went to the cardinals who make up that congregation, and they unanimously approved it as a miracle.
In 2019, Pope Francis finally got to his desk, and he approved it as a miracle for Fulton Sheen’s beatification.
You said you were saying Fulton Sheen’s name throughout this shock, and you had already developed a friendship there. What inspired you and your husband to ask Fulton Sheen’s intercession throughout this pregnancy?
I was actually writing a grant. I was asking for money from a group that was named after Bishop Sheen. Because of that, I started watching videos of him on YouTube preaching and episodes of his old television show. And I was just so taken by him. I was a stay-at-home mom with two little kids, and I remember my husband coming home from work one day. I pulled him over to the computer, and I was like, “Look at him. He’s from our diocese. He grew up here. We can go and visit the place he was born and the place where he served Mass. It’s twenty minutes away from us.”
We were just so drawn to him, someone from the Midwest—just a little dot on the map that people fly over and don’t really care about. But here was this man who had done great things, who loved Jesus. And he was brilliant, and he was funny, and he was humble, and he was one of us.
“He has talked about how Fulton Sheen is still someone that he talks to every day, and he is a part of his faith and his spiritual journey.”
We knew that his cause was open, and the Diocese of Peoria was working with the Vatican for his cause for canonization. So we just felt for sure that he was going to be pronounced a saint at one point in the future, and so we wanted to name our son after this future saint. It was during that pregnancy, because of Life is Worth Living and different homilies that he gave, that’s what really made us fall in love with him and want to put our son under his patronage to kind of invite him into our family. The saints, we invite them into our families and make them one of us.
That’s so true and such a testament to God’s love through the saints and the powerful witness the saints can give to us here on this earthly pilgrimage. They’re in it with us.
During those sixty-one minutes when your son’s heart stopped beating, how did you hope against hope? Here you are experiencing an agony similar to our Blessed Mother, walking in the sorrowful mysteries of your own life. How did you believe that? How did you continue to pray forward through that moment?
I honestly believed that I could not, and I had to rely on Fulton Sheen to do it for me. And part of that is because I was in that state of shock. I think I lived in a state of shock for weeks, honestly. I just had to trust in the Lord.
I had to hope in what I knew of the Lord, and I had to hope that Fulton Sheen and our Blessed Mother and others—St. Elizabeth is a patron of mine, and St. James the Greater is too. I had to hope that they were supporting me and carrying me with their prayers, and really, the whole body of the church.
In the NICU, they try to give you hope. They offered something like, “James could be totally fine, or James could be dead by Friday.” They didn’t say it that bluntly, but we understood that they didn’t actually think James was going to be fine. But they thought James was going to be dead by Friday. Or if he wasn’t, he was going to have a very complicated life and a lot of suffering.
We may be undergoing suffering or a trial that seems too much for us to bear—too great that it takes our breath away—but it’s like he literally carries us. He’s like, “I’m going to shield you. It’s happening, but for the parts of it that would cause you to panic, to run away, I’m going to hold you, and we’re going to go through it together.”
Have you or your family faced any challenges along the way being the spotlight and receiving this miracle? How has it grown your faith?
This is such a fun question. It has been such a privilege to be a part of this whole experience. From beginning to end, there have been opportunities to meet people and to go places, to speak and share our story, to write a book, and things like that I otherwise would not have had the ability or opportunity to do. So that has been really an amazing thing about the whole situation.
But it also has been kind of hard. And I feel silly saying that, but I think parenting James is what has been tough, because my husband and I feel very much like this is not our story. This is God’s story, and this happened to us for the good of the Church and the glory of God. So if we can share that, that is a beautiful thing. But God has also put us in charge of a unique soul and a very awesome kid, and we need to protect his privacy and give him a normal childhood. He’s a teenager now, and raising teenagers is different. They provide their own unique challenges. We try to make sure that we are doing a good job and doing what’s best for James in a way that honors the Lord as well. I think doing what’s best for James does honor the Lord because that’s our vocation. We put him first in his privacy and letting him enjoy it all as well. Sometimes it’s really fun to be the miracle baby, you know?
How has this relationship between Archbishop Fulton Sheen and James unfolded throughout the years?
He’s actually pretty private about his prayer life, but sometimes he will say things like, “I was praying, and I was asking Fulton Sheen to pray with me about da-da-da-da.” He has talked about how Fulton Sheen is still someone that he talks to every day, and he is a part of his faith and his spiritual journey, which I think is awesome. That is just so beautiful. A lot of that is on his own. He has been the one to maintain that and carry that banner, which is really cool.
As a very close friend to Archbishop Fulton Sheen on this side of heaven, how has sharing his impact on your family changed your own personal relationship with the Lord?
Bishop Sheen is well known for his devotion to the Blessed Mother and for his devotion to the Eucharist. He’s known for other things as well, of course, but his witness of those things have really changed my heart.
He has a book called The World’s First Love, and reading that just rocked my world. It blew my mind, and I have never looked at the Holy Family the same. So that was just a pivotal moment for me. I carry that with me every day. Every day when I walk with the Blessed Mother and I ask for her intercession—like Bishop Sheen has said and how he has informed me about her—it’s making a daily impact in my life.
On top of that, before my husband Travis and I even knew Bishop Sheen, we were Catholic because of the Eucharist, one hundred percent—huge devotion to our Lord and the Eucharist. But the more we look at Bishop Sheen’s witness—his daily Holy Hour and the way that he writes about the priesthood, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and the importance of our Eucharistic Lord—all of those things have become foundational in our marriage and in the way that we’ve raised our kids.
People talk about his conversions—and he led to a lot of conversions and some very influential conversions—but that was because he had personal connections and interactions one on one with people where he brought them back to the Lord because he was personally invested in them. They could see that he cared about them.
He won an Emmy, he had a television show, he had millions of viewers, but it was the personal one-on-one interactions and connections—that’s what mattered. And I think that’s been my biggest takeaway through this whole process, and a lesson that I had to learn was that the biggest impact comes from loving people who are right in front of me.