Fulton Sheen, the US bishop whose TV show drew nearly 30 million viewers a week and won an Emmy, is set to be beatified in St Louis on Thursday. The ceremony is the penultimate step in a 25-year process that could make him the first US-born bishop canonized a saint.
Sheen’s sainthood cause advanced after a 2010 case in Peoria: a woman prayed to him after her son was born without a pulse for 61 minutes, and the baby survived. The case was regarded as a miracle and submitted for Vatican investigation in 2011. A second miracle must be confirmed and approved by Rome for Sheen to be canonized.
About 50,000 people are expected at the St Louis ceremony. Sheen, born in Illinois in 1895, first reached audiences through NBC radio’s The Catholic Hour in the 1930s and 1940s; his television program Life Is Worth Living ran for six years, ending in the late 1950s.
