Remembering Bishop Sheen

Bill Knight column for Mon., Tues. or Wed., July 9, 10 or 1, 2018

An unlikely TV superstar with roots in downstate Illinois could become a saint.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen debuted “Life is Worth Living” on the now-defunct DuMont television network 67 years ago, competing against early-TV stalwarts Gene Autry, Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra. The former altar boy and teen-aged Catholic Messenger newspaper saleskid hosted the half-hour program until 1955, after which it aired on ABC for two more seasons.

These days, Sheen’s niece, Joan Sheen Cunningham, has been twice granted by a court permission to transfer her uncle’s remains from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, most recently last month in a ruling by New York Supreme Court Judge Arlene P. Bluth – except New York then indicated its willingness to try a third time to keep his body there, effectively blocking the cause for Sheen’s beatification and canonization as a saint.

Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 recognized a decree from the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints saying that Sheen lived a life of “heroic virtues” – a key step toward his beatification.

New York has done little in 15 years to help the effort, but the Peoria diocese said it’s communicated with the Vatican, which assured Peoria that Sheen’s beatification could be announced “in the very near future.”

For Millennials and others too young to recall: Who was Sheen?

Long before the term “televangelist” was coined, the El Paso, Ill., native reached up to 30 million viewers through his show, and the priest became a celebrity, covered in Time, Life, Look and TV Guide magazines.

“Bishop Sheen was the greatest communicator of the 20^th century,” said the late Protestant preacher Billy Graham.

Sheen came to TV from the radio series “The Catholic Hour,” but he was far more than a broadcaster. Sheen also was a parish priest at St. Patrick’s in Peoria (where he received his first communion, confirmation and ordination), and a professor at Catholic University of America; he wrote more than 70 books and edited the Society for the Propagation of the Faith magazine; he helped the anonymous and famous alike to join the Church (including Henry Ford II and newspaper columnist Heywood Broun), and he raised millions of dollars for charity and started an ecumenical housing foundation.

Dan Morgan, who ran Fulton J. Sheen Productions, which released a series of videos featuring Sheen, said, “He was a philosopher with a timely, universal message.”

Espousing both conservative and progressive points of view – defending corporal punishment on the one hand and stressing the importance of understanding and loving one’s enemies on the other – Sheen offered a comforting voice at a post-Depression, post-World War II time when people questioned their place in the world.

“Sheen intuited the void in modern Americans,” said Mary Ann Watson in Television Quarterly magazine. “His remedy was a spiritual life with assured values.”

Sheen once commented that his 28-minute comments – delivered without notes, in a delivery more conversational than many sermons – didn’t target the audiences that crowded into New York’s Adelphi Theater.

“My words are aimed at little family groups seated about their television sets in their own living rooms,” said Sheen, who died in 1979.

Sheen won the 1952 Emmy Award as Most Outstanding TV Personality, beating Edward R. Murrow, Lucille Ball and Arthur Godfrey, and when he accepted the award he commented, “I feel it is time I pay tribute to my four writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”