On Thursday, 24 September 2026, at two o’clock in the afternoon, a cardinal will stand up in a domed football stadium in St. Louis and read a short formula on behalf of the Pope. When he finishes, a man who has been dead for forty-six years will be called Blessed for the first time.
The Diocese of Peoria expects a crowd. The venue is the Dome at America’s Center, and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation, will preside as the papal representative. Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria announced the date on 25 March.
If you are under fifty you may need to be told who this is. If you are over seventy you almost certainly do not, because for a stretch of the 1950s he was one of the most watched men in America, and he did it in a cassock and a cape.
Who he actually was
Peter John Sheen was born on 8 May 1895 in El Paso, Illinois, a farm town of a couple of thousand people. He took his mother’s maiden name, Fulton, and kept it. He was ordained for the Diocese of Peoria on 20 September 1919.
What happened next is easy to skip past, and it should not be. The diocesan priest from El Paso went to the Catholic University of Louvain and took a doctorate in philosophy in 1923. He then taught theology and philosophy at the Catholic University of America from the mid-1920s until 1950. The television personality was a working academic first, and it shows in the broadcasts: the man arguing with a piece of chalk on a blackboard in front of millions of people had spent two decades teaching Thomism to graduate students.
He went on the radio in 1930 with The Catholic Hour on NBC and stayed for more than two decades. In February 1952 he began Life Is Worth Living on the DuMont network, opposite Milton Berle, and at the ceremony the following February he took the Academy’s award for Most Outstanding Personality for that first season. The show moved to ABC in 1955 and ran until 1957; a syndicated successor ran through 1968.
Meanwhile he did the job that he himself seems to have considered his real work. From 1950 to 1966 he was national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Church’s missionary funding arm in the United States, and he put his broadcast income into it. He was made an auxiliary bishop of New York in 1951, Bishop of Rochester in October 1966, and titular Archbishop of Newport on his resignation from Rochester in October 1969. He died in New York on 9 December 1979.
What the Church is and is not doing on the twenty-fourth
It is worth being exact about this, because beatification is routinely reported as though it were canonization with a smaller crowd, and it is not.
There are three steps and they mean three different things. A Servant of God is someone whose cause has been opened. A Venerable is someone the Church has judged to have practised heroic virtue; Sheen was declared Venerable by Benedict XVI on 28 June 2012. A Blessed is someone whose public veneration the Church now permits, ordinarily within a limited scope: a diocese, a region, a religious order. A Saint is someone whose veneration the Church prescribes for the universal Church.
The difference between the third step and the fourth is not merely one of size. Beatification, in the present discipline, grants a locally restricted permission to venerate; canonization carries a universal precept. The first is a permission and no precept; the second commands. This is why, as the standard reference has it, canonists and theologians generally deny the infallible character of decrees of beatification, following Benedict XIV, who wrote the classic treatise on the subject before he was pope.
Canonization is the contested case, and it is worth being exact about the state of that question rather than flattening it. Some theologians have held it to be of faith. Suárez held that to refuse assent to such a judgment of the Holy See would be impious and rash. The more common view is that such a pronouncement is theologically certain, but not of divine faith, since its content was not immediately revealed, and not of ecclesiastical faith, since the Church has not thus far defined it. That is a live dispute among Catholics in good standing, and nothing on 24 September turns on how it is settled.
So on 24 September the Church will permit the public veneration of Fulton Sheen. She will not be defining anything, and she will not be finished with him.
The miracle
Under the current law one verified miracle is required to beatify someone who is not a martyr. Sheen’s is a boy named James Fulton Engstrom, delivered stillborn at a home birth near Peoria on 16 September 2010, his umbilical cord knotted. His parents prayed through Sheen’s intercession while resuscitation continued, first at home and then at the hospital. Sixty-one minutes after his birth, as the doctors were preparing to declare a time of death, the child’s heart began to beat. He grew up with no lasting physical or mental impairment. The medical and theological consultors of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints examined the case, and Pope Francis approved the miracle in July 2019.
Which should have been the end of the story. Beatification was set for 21 December 2019, in Peoria.
The six-year pause
On 3 December 2019, eighteen days before the ceremony, Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria announced that Rome had postponed it. This is a rare thing to happen to a beatification that has already been scheduled, and it deserves a straight account rather than a discreet silence, which means naming what was actually alleged rather than defending Sheen against a charge nobody made.
The delay was sought by the Diocese of Rochester, where Sheen had been bishop for under three years, and by Bishop Salvatore Matano. Rochester asked for further review of Sheen’s role in the assignment of priests, and cited the New York Attorney General’s then-ongoing investigation into the state’s dioceses; the concern reported at the time was that a release from that investigation might land on top of the beatification. In June 2019 Rochester had sent Peoria documents concerning Sheen’s administration in relation to two priests.
The two cases are worth stating, because in the abstract they sound far worse than they are.
One was Gerard Guli. The 1963 allegation against him concerned misconduct with adults, not minors, and Msgr. James Kruse of Peoria states that Sheen never assigned Guli to ministry at all; that assignment was made by Sheen’s successor. The other was John Gormley, who abused youth in 1969, and whom Sheen removed from ministry immediately when the abuse was reported to him.
Alongside that, both dioceses said the obvious thing. Rochester stated plainly that there were no complaints against Sheen of any inappropriate personal conduct and that no insinuation of the kind was being made. Peoria stated that there had never been, and was not then, any allegation against Sheen involving the abuse of a minor, and Kruse reported that the examination conducted for Bishop Jenky found that Sheen acted rightly and did not place children in harm’s way.
Peoria did not take the delay quietly. Kruse wrote publicly that under the veneer of Rochester’s call for caution, an overwhelming majority of people would conclude it was an unexplainable act of sabotage. Rochester said it would make no further comment, so the charge stands on the record unanswered, which is worth noting in both directions. Separately, and for its own reasons, the cause had also spent years in an expensive court fight between Sheen’s niece and the Archdiocese of New York over where his body should rest, ending in June 2019 when his remains were moved from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where they had lain since 1979, to the cathedral in Peoria.
Then it simply sat. In December 2024 Msgr. Jason Gray, judicial vicar of Peoria and executive director of the Sheen Foundation, said the Foundation had examined all the pleadings in the civil abuse claims filed against the Diocese of Rochester and found nothing touching Sheen: “Sheen is clean. … Not one accusation has been raised that impugned Sheen.” He is an interested party and should be read as one, but he is also the person who read the filings. On 9 February 2026 Bishop Tylka announced that the Vatican had approved proceeding. The date and venue followed on 25 March.
It is not a comfortable episode, and there is no need to pretend otherwise. Nor should it be dressed up as six years of diligent investigation; the substantive review in Peoria was done in 2019, and what followed was mostly a cause stuck behind other people’s litigation. But the plain fact remains that a scheduled beatification was stopped eighteen days out because one bishop raised a question, and that it did not move again until the question was closed.
The objection our readers actually raise
Among traditional Catholics the reflexive response to any modern beatification is not enthusiasm. It is a raised eyebrow, and the reasoning behind it is not frivolous.
The complaint goes like this. In 1983 John Paul II reorganised the whole procedure by the apostolic constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister. The old adversarial structure, in which a Promoter of the Faith was charged with attacking the cause and the postulator with defending it, was set aside; the popular name for that office was the devil’s advocate, and the courtroom contest it presided over is gone. The evidence-gathering phase was handed to the local bishop. Under the norms issued alongside the constitution the miracle requirement was halved, from two for beatification and two more for canonization to one and one. And the number of beatifications and canonizations since has been, by any historical measure, enormous. The objection is that a process built to be slow and hostile was replaced by one built to be fast and cooperative, and that the output tells you which is which.
That is a fair description of what changed. Three things should be said back to it, and the third is the one that matters here.
First, the office itself was not abolished. Article 10 of the very constitution complained of provides that the Congregation is to have a Promotor of the Faith, or Prelate Theologian, who presides over the meeting of the theologians with a vote, prepares its report, and sits as an expert with the cardinals and bishops. What went was the litigation format, not the function. And in this case the brake was pulled anyway, not by a consultor but by a diocesan bishop with a question.
Second, the infallibility question that drives most of the anxiety does not arise at a beatification at all. As above, beatification is a permission and has never been generally held to be infallible, even by theologians who hold canonizations are. Whatever weight you place on that debate, 24 September is not where it lands.
Third, and decisively: nobody can call this cause a fast track. Sheen died in 1979. His cause was opened in 2002, twenty-two years later. He was declared Venerable in 2012. The miracle was approved in 2019, and then the whole thing was halted eighteen days from the ceremony and sat unresolved for six more years. He will be beatified forty-six years after his death, twenty-four years after the cause opened. Whatever santo subito means, it does not mean this.
Why he is worth the trip
There is a particular reason Sheen belongs to readers of a site like this one, and it is not nostalgia for black-and-white television.
Sheen did, on a national network, in prime time, against Milton Berle, the thing most Catholics are told cannot be done. He made the actual content of the faith interesting to people who did not already hold it, without softening it into sentiment and without hiding what he was. He taught doctrine on television and people watched, in numbers, voluntarily, for years. He is standing evidence against the assumption that the choice is between being faithful and being heard.
He also made a daily Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament, a resolution he made at ordination and kept, by his own account in Treasure in Clay, for well over sixty years. He said repeatedly that it was the whole explanation. That claim is either false or it is the most practical piece of advice any of us will be given this month.
The nine-day novena of holy hours in Peoria runs nightly at the cathedral through 23 September, and the beatification Mass follows on the twenty-fourth. Our own prayer for his cause, with a novena tracker, has been on the site for some time. After 24 September it will need rewriting, which is the best possible reason to have to rewrite a page.
References
- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, statement on beatification details (date, time, venue, and Cardinal Luis Tagle as papal representative); Diocese of Peoria announcement of 25 March 2026.
- Diocese of Peoria, published schedule of pilgrimage events, September 2026 (novena of holy hours 15–23 September at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception; ordination-anniversary Mass 20 September; beatification Mass 24 September, 2 p.m.).
- Biographical dates: birth 8 May 1895, El Paso, Illinois; ordination 20 September 1919; doctorate, Catholic University of Louvain, 1923; Catholic University of America 1928–1950; The Catholic Hour from 1930; Life Is Worth Living from February 1952 (DuMont), Emmy 1952; national director, Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 1950–1966; Auxiliary Bishop of New York 1951; Bishop of Rochester 1966–1969; titular Archbishop of Newport 1969; died 9 December 1979.
- Cause milestones: opened 2002; declared Venerable by Benedict XVI, 28 June 2012; miracle (James Fulton Engstrom) approved by Pope Francis, July 2019; remains transferred from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Peoria, June 2019.
- Postponement: announcement by Bishop Daniel Jenky, 3 December 2019; delay requested by the Diocese of Rochester and Bishop Salvatore Matano for further review of Sheen’s role in priest assignments; Rochester’s June 2019 transmission of documents concerning two clerics known to have abused minors, together with its statement that no complaint or insinuation of personal misconduct by Sheen was involved. Msgr. Jason Gray, December 2024. Approval to proceed announced by Bishop Louis Tylka, 9 February 2026.
- John Paul II, Divinus Perfectionis Magister, apostolic constitution, 25 January 1983.
- On the distinction between beatification as permission and canonization as precept, and on the infallibility question, Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini), De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione, as summarised in “Beatification and Canonization,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. II.