“Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and Religious. It’s up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and your Religious act like Religious.”
— Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 28 May 1972, Doylestown, PA

On the morning of September 5, 2025, I walked into the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome carrying a petition signed by more than 14,000 people from 99 countries. I expected to hand it across a desk, offer my thanks, and leave.

Instead the Undersecretary, Rev. Bogusław Turek, C.S.M.A., received me personally, and a two-minute handoff became a thirty-minute conversation of remarkable candor, which he let me record for Sheen’s cause.

PHOTO: presenting the petition at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, September 5, 2025

Let me say plainly what that petition was. Rescheduling the Beatification Mass was the Movement’s first objective, never its primary reason for existing. It was a means to a larger end: placing Fulton Sheen’s legacy before America at the hour America needs it.

The Silence

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen was to be beatified in Peoria on December 21, 2019, the miracle having been approved that July. Weeks before the date, the beatification was postponed indefinitely.

Every concern about Sheen’s brief tenure in Rochester had already been investigated exhaustively, by Peoria and by the Holy See, before that date was set. All reached the same conclusion, and Sheen was never accused of abuse. Yet objections arrived at each milestone, and Rome deferred.

Then came six years of silence, and the faithful paid in confusion and lost grace.

Why a Petition

By 2023, devotion to Sheen was curdling into resignation; people spoke of the beatification in the past tense.

So we began the Fulton Sheen Movement, and our first act was the humblest instrument the laity has: a petition asking that the Mass be rescheduled. A petition has no canonical force. But it can count.

Fourteen thousand names came in from ninety-nine countries. Devotion to Sheen was global, young, and hungry.

We held rallies across the country in 2023 and 2024 with Fr. Thomas Loya and many other courageous witnesses. We began praying the Rosary together every weekday at 11 a.m. Eastern, in Latin on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And we launched the Daily Holy Hour Revolution, because Sheen made a daily Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament for sixty years and asked every priest and lay person to do the same for the peace of the world.

PHOTO: Chicago Bears Co-Owner, Pat McCasky speaking at the Fulton Sheen rally on July 9, 2023 at Annunciation Byzantine Catholic Church, Homer Glen, IL

What Rome Actually Said

Fr. Turek made one thing unmistakable: Rome was waiting on Peoria, not the other way around. My cover letter was addressed to the Prefect of the Dicastery, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, respectfully asking on behalf of all the signatories that a new date be set without further delay, for the sake of the salvation of souls. Fr. Turek was sympathetic, but noted that protocol requires the cooperation of the local diocese. Nothing in Rome stood in the way.

Something certainly took place behind closed doors around the time of my visit, because to everyone’s surprise, on February 9, 2026, the Diocese of Peoria announced the Vatican had cleared the beatification to proceed. In March came the date: Thursday, September 24, 2026, at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle presiding as the representative of Pope Leo XIV.

A Refounding Moment

That date falls in the year of America’s 250th anniversary, and I choose these words carefully: this nation is in a refounding moment. Not a commemoration — a refounding, the hour in which a people either returns to its roots or loses them for good.

The National Garden of American Heroes, now funded and slated for 250 statues in time for the Jubilee, includes Fulton Sheen. A secular government, weighing no attorney general’s report and no counsel of prudence, has publicly recognized Sheen as essential to the history and character of this nation.

The state moved to enshrine him while the Church still hesitated to proclaim him.

Sheen himself named this hour more than eighty years ago:

Our so-called liberal civilization, which is dying, is only a transitional phase between a civilization that once was Christian and one that is anti-Christian. It has no stability of its own, being based for the most part in successive negations of the Christian philosophy of life. It will end either in a return to the Christian tradition or in revulsion against it. This alone constitutes the crisis of democracy; it will either return to its roots or die.
— Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

That is the precipice America stands on. His beatification is no sentimental tribute to a television preacher. It is the Church holding up the antidote — Eucharistic faith, Marian consecration, priestly renewal, the daily Holy Hour.

Never About A Date

September 24 is not a finish line but a launching point. On the eve of the beatification — Wednesday, September 23, at the Hilton St. Louis Frontenac — we gather for our “America’s Saint” conference, where the Movement formally begins its next stage: Sheen’s American and global mission to remake the world by first remaking the individual, and to build new and deeper Catholic foundations for a New America.

When Fulton Sheen is proclaimed Blessed, a tsunami of grace will be unleashed. As he said himself, “There is nothing greater than the salvation of a soul.”

For twenty years Sheen broadcast under the title The Catholic Hour. That hour is no longer a program. It is upon us, and America will not be offered another — an unrepeatable turning point in which this country is claimed for Christ. It will pass whether or not we rise to meet it.

So come. Be with us at the conference on the twenty-third and at the Dome on the twenty-fourth. And if you cannot come, sign, pray, keep the Holy Hour, and stand up to be counted at fultonsheenmovement.com.

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