On Thursday, September 24, Archbishop Fulton Sheen will be beatified, the step below canonisation. After that date, he will be known as “Blessed Fulton Sheen”. Known as one of the first televangelists, Archbishop Sheen embraced mass media for evangelisation and brought Catholic theology into millions of households.
Born in El Paso, Illinois, and raised in Peoria, the future archbishop, Emmy winner and Blessed was the oldest of Newton and Delia Sheen’s four sons. He entered seminary after graduating from high school and was ordained a priest on September 20, 1919.
In 1930, about 10 years after his ordination, while teaching at the Catholic University of America, Archbishop Sheen began an at-the-time revolutionary ministry: a radio show. That show, called “The Catholic Hour”, was carried by NBC Radio. At its peak, Archbishop Sheen was receiving between 3,000 and 6,000 letters each week from listeners, and by 1950, it had a reported weekly audience of four million listeners.
Can I still listen?
While many of these radio episodes have understandably been lost in the decades since they aired, some have been preserved online and are available in a variety of formats.
A YouTube channel has 10 restored episodes of the show. The website “Old Time Radio Catalog” has 51 episodes available to download as an MP3.
What about television?
When the world shifted from radio to television, Archbishop Sheen did as well.
In 1952, just months after being ordained an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of New York, the show “Life is Worth Living” debuted on the DuMont Television Network.
Archbishop Sheen’s timeslot of 8pm on Tuesday pitted him against entertainment heavyweights Frank Sinatra on CBS and Milton Berle on NBC. When he was hired, producers at DuMont were simply looking to fill the timeslot – and they figured the show would last one season, if that.
Clad in bishops’ regalia and on a set with no teleprompter, script or cue cards – just a chalkboard – Archbishop Sheen would chat about Christian philosophy and theology. And despite what the executives thought, the audiences loved it. (CBS even cancelled The Frank Sinatra Show in 1952 due in part to Archbishop Sheen’s programme absorbing so much of Sinatra’s audience.)
About 60 per cent of Life is Worth Living’s 30 million viewers were not Catholic. He was nominated for three Emmy Awards, winning one in 1952. Life is Worth Living ended in 1957.
Life is Worth Living began being aired on EWTN in 2009, and episodes are shown weekly on Mondays at 6.30pm EDT.
For those who do not have access to television, 126 episodes of both Life is Worth Living and his later show, “The Fulton Sheen Program”, are available on YouTube. Other episodes are available on Fulton Sheen TV, with a collection of highlights available to watch for free; and more audio and visual media is available at FultonSheen.com.
