He was a farm boy from El Paso, Illinois, who ended up with a prime-time network television show, an Emmy, and a cause for canonization. Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was born on 8 May 1895 and died on 9 December 1979, and on Thursday, 24 September 2026, he will be beatified in St. Louis. What follows is the short version of a long life, plus one date that most of the internet is about to get wrong.
Illinois, and a name that wasn't quite his
The family were farmers. He was born in El Paso, a small town in central Illinois, in the spring of 1895, and nothing about the household suggested that its eldest son would spend the 1950s arguing with a comedian for the attention of the American public.
He was ordained on 20 September 1919, at St. Mary's Cathedral in Peoria. Worth noticing the shape of the month he's being beatified in: the anniversary of that ordination falls on Sunday the 20th this year, one hundred and seven years on, four days before a cardinal reads the rite over him in a stadium in Missouri.
The hour nobody watched
Here is the fact that matters most, and it's the one least likely to make a headline this month.
On the day he was ordained, Sheen began a daily holy hour. One hour, every day, in front of the Blessed Sacrament. He kept it for sixty years, straight through to his death in December 1979 — through the doctorates, the broadcasts, the arguments, the fame, the cameras, the years when the cameras had gone.
Sixty years of an hour that nobody rated and nobody televised. Whatever you make of the rest of his life, that's the discipline underneath it, and it is the least glamorous fact in his file.
It also tells you something about the ordering. The holy hour didn't begin once he was famous and looking for ballast. It began on the first day he had any priesthood at all, before there was a broadcast or a diocese or a camera to answer to, and it outlasted every one of those things.
The rosary was part of the same habit. He wrote about it directly in *The World's First Love*:
- The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known.
That sentence is the reason we're releasing a Sheen rosary on the day he's beatified, and it's a better argument for the beads than anything we could write ourselves. Until then, the rest of what we make lives in the Saints Collection.
February 1952: a cassock against Milton Berle
Now the part everybody knows, or half-knows.
In February 1952, a programme called *Life Is Worth Living* premiered on prime-time network television. Its host was a Catholic bishop in full choir dress. He worked from a blackboard. There was no studio band, no panel, no gimmick. And the slot he had been given was the one opposite Milton Berle, who at that point was the thing every other show on American television simply lost to.
Sheen was the only competitor who held his own.
He won the 1952 Emmy for Most Outstanding Television Personality, which is not a religious-programming category — it's the category. Berle's own remark about being beaten, as it has come down to us, was that if he had to lose the top spot, he would rather lose it to the one Bishop Sheen was speaking for. (Berle said, Bishop. Almost everybody did, then and now. The correct style is Archbishop.)
A man in a cassock, with chalk, on commercial television, in 1952, beating a comedian at his own game. It is one of the strangest facts in the history of American broadcasting, and it is entirely true.
Venerable in 2012, Blessed in 2026
Causes move slowly, and the vocabulary is worth a paragraph if nobody has ever laid it out for you.
A cause opens, and the person is called a Servant of God. When the Church judges that they lived the virtues heroically, they become Venerable. At beatification, they become Blessed, and public veneration is permitted, usually in particular places. Canonization makes them a Saint. Each step is a judgment, not a promotion, and there is no timetable.
What is certain: the beatification takes place at 2:00 p.m. Central on Thursday, 24 September 2026, at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle presides as delegate of Pope Leo XIV.
Venerable up to that hour. Blessed after it.
His feast day is December 9, not September 24
This is the correction worth carrying away from this post, because a lot of coverage next week is going to get it backwards.
September 24 is his beatification. It's a rite, it happens once, and it changes what he is called.
His liturgical memorial is December 9 — the day he died in 1979, and the date on which he will be remembered every year from now on. That's the ordinary pattern: saints and blesseds are commemorated on their death date, the day they were born into the life that matters. Sheen is not an exception to it.
So if you see "Fulton Sheen's feast day, September 24" in a headline, in a parish bulletin, or in a caption, it's wrong. Put December 9 in your calendar instead. It's a Wednesday this year, and it will be a quieter and better day to mark than the one with the television cameras on it.
What happens on Thursday
Two o'clock Central, the Dome, a cardinal from Manila reading the rite for a farm boy from Illinois who spent sixty years keeping an appointment nobody could see him keep.
Our Fulton Sheen Rosary is available now:
