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Beatified 24 September 2026 in St. Louis. His tomb is in Peoria, Illinois.
The Illinois farm boy who became the most familiar Catholic voice in America, and the places that keep his memory.
He was born in El Paso, Illinois on 8 May 1895 and grew up in Peoria, where he was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria on 20 September 1919 in the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception.
He preached on NBC radio’s The Catholic Hour from 1930 to 1950, then on television in Life Is Worth Living, which ran from 1952 to 1957 and won an Emmy in its first year. From 1950 he spent sixteen years as national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in the United States.
He was made an auxiliary bishop of New York in 1951 and served as Bishop of Rochester from 1966 to 1969, after which he was named a titular archbishop. He died in New York on 9 December 1979 and was buried in the crypt of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He was eight years old, serving at the altar of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria. The celebrant was Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, a considerable figure in the American Church at the time. The boy was carrying the wine cruet, and he dropped it on the marble floor.
He never forgot the sound. Writing about it decades later in his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, he reached for the loudest comparison he could find, an atomic explosion, and said even that would not have matched a cruet smashing on marble in a silent cathedral. He was, by his own account, frightened to death.
Spalding did not scold him. After Mass he called the boy over, asked him about his schooling, and told him to go home and tell his mother that when he was grown he was to study at Louvain, in Belgium. Then he said that one day the boy would be just as he was.
He did go to Louvain. He did become a bishop.
His television programme, Life Is Worth Living, went out on Tuesday evenings on the DuMont network, opposite Milton Berle on NBC and Frank Sinatra on CBS. A bishop in choir dress, a blackboard, and no script. It should not have worked.
In under two months the number of stations carrying him went from three to fifteen. He was getting 8,500 letters a week. By the time the programme ended in 1957 it was drawing an audience reported at up to thirty million. Berle, who was losing viewers to him, took it in good humour and said publicly that if he had to be pushed off the top, he would rather lose to the One that Sheen was speaking for.
He accepted the 1952 Emmy for Most Outstanding Television Personality by thanking his writers: “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” He took no payment for the programme.
He published seventy-three books, among them Peace of Soul in 1949, Life of Christ in 1958, and the autobiography Treasure in Clay, which appeared after his death.
From 1950 he spent sixteen years as national director in the United States of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Church’s mission-funding office. He gave it ten million dollars of his own television earnings.
He died in New York in 1979 and was buried in the crypt of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Years later the Diocese of Peoria, which was running his cause for sainthood, wanted his body brought to the cathedral where he had been ordained. The Archdiocese of New York did not agree, and the question went to the New York courts.
A judge ruled in 2016 that the transfer could go ahead. An appeal sent the case back for a hearing, and in 2018 the ruling was reaffirmed. In June 2019 the Archdiocese ended its objection, and on 27 June 2019 his remains were moved to the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, where they are today.
Without that move the beatification could not have proceeded as it did. He is buried a few streets from where he grew up, and a short drive from the town where he was born.
The Diocese of Peoria opened the investigation into his life and writings.
Benedict XVI declared that he had lived the Christian virtues to a heroic degree.
One miracle approved. He was beatified in St. Louis on 24 September 2026.
A second approved miracle would open his veneration to the whole Church.
“It doesn’t require much time to make us saints. It requires only much love.”
The miracle accepted for the beatification was the recovery of James Fulton Engstrom, an Illinois child born without a pulse, whose family prayed for Sheen’s intercession. Pope Francis approved it in 2019.
Canonization needs one more. A claimed miracle has to be reported, examined by doctors who can find no natural explanation, then reviewed by theologians before it reaches the Pope. Six further cases are under investigation, and there is no timetable.
His tomb since 27 June 2019, in the cathedral where he was ordained a priest in 1919.
The town in central Illinois where he was born on 8 May 1895.
Where he preached for many years, and where he was buried from 1979 until 2019.
Not yet. He was beatified on 24 September 2026, which gives him the title Blessed. Canonization would need a further miracle approved by the Holy See.
A Mass at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis on 24 September 2026, at which Cardinal Luis Tagle, representing the Pope, read the decree declaring him Blessed. The miracle accepted for the cause was the recovery of James Fulton Engstrom, an Illinois child who showed no heartbeat for 61 minutes after birth and lived.
9 December, the day he died in 1979.
In the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Illinois, the church where he was ordained. His body was moved there from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on 27 June 2019.
The Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria is a parish church and his tomb is inside it. Check the cathedral’s own site for opening hours and Mass times before travelling.
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