Every so often in the life of the Church, there is an opportunity for the whole body of Christ to come together, reflecting many different priorities and lived experiences, to share in a communal celebration. Thursday, September 24, at the Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, for the beatification of Bl. Fulton Sheen was precisely such an occasion.
Bl. Fulton (1895-1979) was born in the small town of El Paso, Illinois, and moved when he was young to the city of Peoria, where he functioned from a young age as an altar server. He tells the story in his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, of Bishop Spaulding telling Bl. Fulton as a boy that one day he would study abroad at Leuven and be as Spaulding was; Spaulding’s words were fulfilled in how Bl. Fulton's life played out. After two advanced degrees--one in Leuven, Belgium and one at the Angelicum, our Dominican school in Rome--he became a teacher at the Catholic University of America and a pioneer in the use of what was at the time the new media of radio and television. He was incredibly effective as a radio communicator, won an Emmy Award, and enjoyed at his peak an audience of 30 million viewers a week.
He also worked tirelessly for Catholic Missions throughout the world and contributed to their flourishing at the Second Vatican Council. Near the end of his life, Bl. Fulton was recognized during Pope St. John Paul II's visit to New York in 1979 as a faithful son of the Church who had written faithfully of Christ the Lord. He was a figure unmatched as a public face of the Catholic Church during the 20th century, and so the desire to have so broad a swath of that Church celebrate together his beatification was an appropriate one.
More than twenty Dominican priests and brothers attended the beatification, and we were joined by literally thousands of priests, seminarians, and religious; this number was only a fraction of the perhaps 50,000 people who filled the Dome at America's Center to celebrate Bl. Fulton. The parts of the beatification that I think Bl. Fulton would have found most edifying included most notably the presence of the young man whose life constituted the decisive miracle in Bl. Fulton's cause; his having been restored to life--with no medical explanation--more than an hour after being stillborn. Bl. Fulton was surely especially edified at the huge number of priests, seminarians, and religious in attendance, living lives visibly consecrated to handing on the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Additionally, he would have seen the whole assembled body as representing people drawn by the Universal Call to Holiness. The seed of this universal call can be perhaps best seen in an anecdote from Bl. Fulton's life; in his autobiography, he told the story of his mother offering him on the Marian altar at their home parish, asking that the child be specially made a child of the Blessed Mother. Further, he recounted his personally renewing this offering at his First Communion. His mother’s offering--and his conscious embrace of it--represents the kind of wholehearted Marian offering available to all people. At our booth, both before and after the beatification mass, we shared prayer cards recounting this story and including a prayer of offering to be made by all individuals, but especially families.
May all in attendance and all with a special devotion to Bl. Fulton benefit by this beatification; may great evangelical fruit come about through his intercession, and by following his example. Bl. Fulton Sheen, pray for us!
Fr. James Cavanaugh, OP
Promoter of the Holy Rosary Confraternity