On 24th September 2026, in St Louis, the Church beatified Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, a man whose voice carried the Catholic faith into millions of homes and whose work for the missions carried his concern far beyond the audience he could see. The ceremony offers an occasion to ask what made his witness extraordinary. Christ commanded his disciples to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations; Sheen recognised that, in the twentieth century, the journey into that world might begin at a radio microphone or before a television camera, while its horizon remained the conversion of souls and the universal mission of the Church.
Beginning with The Catholic Hour on radio in 1930, Sheen learned to address people who had never entered a Catholic church and might never have sought out a priest. Later, Life Is Worth Living brought theological and moral argument to a vast television audience without dumbing down or asking viewers to leave their intelligence at the door. He could speak of sin, sacrifice, the Virgin Mary and the Cross in the language of a common human predicament, drawing a listener from an apparently ordinary question towards the claims of Christ. As national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith from 1950, he also supported the Church’s missions across the world. His broadcasting and his missionary work belonged to the same vocation: the Gospel was given to be proclaimed to everyone.
Even Pope Leo XIV has spoken of Sheen as someone whose evangelisation he witnessed while growing up. That personal recollection captures something numbers cannot. Sheen entered homes through a medium commonly assumed to belong to entertainment and commerce, and spoke there of eternity. He understood how to use the instruments of his age without allowing those instruments to dictate the content of the faith. At the centre of his preaching stood neither a programme of social improvement nor a vague assurance that life possessed spiritual meaning, but Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, calling men and women to conversion.
It is consequently strange that arguments surrounding his beatification have come to turn upon one of his darkest warnings. In 1947 Sheen described an Antichrist who would imitate Christian concern for humanity while separating it from repentance and the fatherhood of God. He foresaw a counterfeit Church, an “ape of the Church”, retaining an outward resemblance to the real thing while being emptied of its divine content. Some Catholics now invoke those words to suggest that the Church governed from Rome has become the counterfeit he anticipated. Yet among traditionalists who welcome that interpretation are also critics who oppose Sheen’s beatification because of his praise for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The irony deserves more than a clever observation, for it exposes how readily Sheen can be treated as authoritative when his language appears to condemn the Vatican and unreliable when his judgement complicates a preferred account of Catholic orthodoxy.
The objection concerning Teilhard is substantial, and devotion to Sheen gains nothing by minimising it. In Footprints in a Darkened Forest, published in 1967, Sheen treated Teilhard’s attempt to understand Christianity within an evolutionary vision of the universe with unmistakable sympathy. He was drawn to a picture of creation moving towards Christ and to the ambition of presenting the faith on a scale equal to the immensity disclosed by modern science. His admiration went so far that he predicted that Teilhard might eventually be recognised as a spiritual genius of the twentieth century, once arguments over his vocabulary had faded. Such praise cannot be reduced to an isolated courtesy or a passing remark.
