When a baby was born without a pulse outside Peoria, Illinois, about 16 years ago, his parents invoked in their prayers the name of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the popular mid-century Catholic leader from the area.
"You would start praying too, and you would want a miracle," said Greg Beabout, a professor at St. Louis University's Catholic Studies Center.
More than an hour after his birth, the boy's pulse picked up, and he's now a healthy high school sophomore. His parents gave him the middle name Fulton, and the Vatican, the seat of the Catholic Church, certified his full medical recovery as a miracle.
That means Sheen can now be beatified, or formally elevated as "blessed," and put one step away from canonization, or sainthood. Sheen's beatification ceremony will happen Thursday afternoon at the Dome at America's Center in St. Louis, a venue chosen for its proximity to Sheen's hometown of El Paso, Illinois, and ability to handle the expected crowd of more than 50,000.
"This is a unique event," said Beabout. "The rules changed about 20 years ago, where normally an event like this would happen in Rome, and so this is really new."
Sheen will join just a small number of Americans who've been beatified in the church and will be the first bishop elevated in this way.
Sheen was a trained philosopher who spent more than three decades in the public eye advocating for the church and preaching its teachings, most popular in the 1950s and '60s because of his television program, "Life Is Worth Living," for which he won an Emmy award and remarkably high viewership.
"Something about his Midwestern charm was that he could communicate to people in a way that made you know very subtle and sophisticated ideas accessible to a very wide range of people," said Beabout. "He had 30 million viewers a week. How many TV shows have that today?"
Beabout believes Sheen's presence on radio and television wasn't the only thing that made him accessible to his audience.
"He was involved with the Second Vatican Council, and the central message of the council is the universal call to holiness," said Beabout. "Before the council, Catholics would think priests and nuns are the holy people and nobody else is. But he really had this vision that every single person is called to holiness."
Although the Catholic definition of saint refers to anyone who has died and whose soul is in heaven, someone who is given the formal title is believed to be proven to be in heaven due to a series of steps of verification, including additional miracles, and is thus declared an exemplary role model of the faith.
Today, Beabout said he sees examples of Sheen's influence permeating among young Catholics.
"When he became a priest, he developed this practice of Eucharistic adoration, and he would spend one hour in silence every day before the blessed Eucharist. Right now, I have students that do this practice. When I was in college, that was something grandmas did," said Beabout. "I do think that's actually influencing young people. People are drawn to that. They see that their lives are better if they just set aside some time, right, one hour to be right in the presence of God. It centers them and helps them."
Beabout is among those who believe Pope Leo XIV will canonize Sheen in the near future.
"There's already a good handful, maybe a half-dozen of other cases of miracles, and so the Vatican's looking at those. We've got a pope from the Midwest, from Illinois," said Beabout. "I can't see the future, but I think [canonization] could be coming down the road. But in the meantime, here's what we've got: a beatification in St. Louis."
The beatification Mass will be at 2 p.m. Sept. 24. For information on tickets, parking and other events surrounding the event, visit the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation website.
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