Fulton Sheen, a Trusted Intercessor for Our Times

National Catholic Register, 19 September 2026

Archbishop Sheen suffered more from the Church than he did for her — and did so with equanimity and grace. He understood those sufferings as his carrying of the cross, a necessary part of discipleship. They formed an important part of his holiness.

Blessed Fulton Sheen will be a suitable patron for the missions, for preachers, for Eucharistic devotion. And, suitable for our times, he can also be an intercessor for unity in a combative cultural moment, both inside and outside the Church.

Archbishop Sheen suffered more from the Church than he did for her — and did so with equanimity and grace. He understood those sufferings as his carrying of the cross, a necessary part of discipleship. They formed an important part of his holiness.

In his final months, Archbishop Fulton Sheen had one last great triumph in a life replete with them. Pope St. John Paul II visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in October 1979, and the emotional high point of the visit was his embrace of Archbishop Sheen, elderly and frail, in the sanctuary.

“You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus,” John Paul told him, applying the words spoken from a crucifix to St. Thomas Aquinas. “You are a loyal son of the Church.”

In those final months — he would die in December 1979 — Archbishop Sheen was completing his autobiography, published posthumously under the title Treasure in Clay. In its final pages, Archbishop Sheen asked whether, in a long life of remarkable accomplishment, fame and honors, he had actually suffered, taken up the cross.

“I was a priest without being a victim,” he wrote, acutely aware that he had preached hundreds of times that Jesus was both, that on the cross the priest and victim were the same. “During His trial He spoke to Pilate seven times as a Priest, and He was seven times silent as a Victim.”

Fulton Sheen was always a man dedicated to prayer, but in his ministry there was not much silence. There was instead a prodigious torrent of sermons, books, TV shows and interviews.

“When I was a priest, I thrilled at being called ‘Father,’” he wrote:

“I found the title ‘Monsignor’ mellifluous, but was I a victim? I enjoyed the prestige of being a university professor, and of appearing on radio and television not only at home, but abroad; I was popular, I was sought after, I was loudly applauded after lectures and banquet talks, I was a friend of both royalty and the masses, my face appeared in millions of homes. I made the right kind of enemies, namely, the Communists. But … but … how close was I to the Cross? I was the priest; was I the victim?”

In his final years, he bore the suffering of heart surgery, pain and infirmity, but had he suffered in his ministry as Jesus had? After all, who was in a position to make such a celebrated priest suffer?

The Church provided for Archbishop Sheen, as she usually does, the necessary suffering. A great churchman may suffer for the Church from the world; more common is that he will suffer from the Church.

Archbishop Sheen confessed that, aside from the mandatory laws of fasting, he did not fast, and no great mortification had come into his life. To the contrary, “I loved creature comforts.”

“Since I would not take up the Cross, the Lord would lay it on my back as He laid it on Simon of Cyrene, who later came to love it,” he wrote. “The cross took two forms: trials inside the Church and trials outside the Church.”

Regarding the trials inside, he kept silent, but they had a name.

Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967, was Fulton Sheen’s tormentor — a fact widely suspected during his lifetime, known for certain to a few, but largely hidden from the Catholic faithful, let alone the wider public.

Cardinal Spellman was the great power broker of the American Church in a time of wealth, power and cultural influence, yet he was not even the most prominent priest in New York — that title belonged to Bishop Sheen, who was more famous, more influential and more beloved. Even more galling was that Bishop Sheen was an auxiliary bishop of New York. He had been made bishop because he was head of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the pontifical agency to support the missions. As an auxiliary bishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman was Bishop Sheen’s superior canonically, but in no other way, and everyone knew it.

Cardinal Spellman’s resentment of Bishop Sheen manifested itself in a particular conflict. The U.S. government gave the Archdiocese of New York surplus food for the poor, which Cardinal Spellman then entrusted to Bishop Sheen’s missionary agency for distribution. The cardinal wanted Bishop Sheen to “reimburse” the archdiocese for the food, even though it had received the food for free.

Millions of dollars were at stake. Bishop Sheen was a formidable fundraiser — but for the missions, not for the archdiocese. Cardinal Spellman wanted to get his hands on the money and thought Bishop Sheen ought to obey him, his ecclesiastical superior.

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