“What virtues do you think Sheen is an example of?” That question was put to me by a fellow sister who was preparing her classroom for the beginning of the school year. Here in Peoria, Ill., we are already several weeks into the school year. But in other parts of the country, students and teachers just had their first days of class this week. This sister was preparing a bulletin board about saints and virtues.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that question. The fact of his beatification tells us the Church believes Sheen to be a man of heroic virtue. Soon-to-be Blessed Fulton Sheen was certainly a man of faith. He had had a deep and personal adherence to Jesus Christ revealed in his famous commitment to the daily Holy Hour.

“If you want to know about God,” he said, “get down on your knees.” On his ordination day, Sheen promised to make a Holy Hour every day, and his fidelity to that promise disposed him to receive the fruits of theological faith.

The light of faith illumined his mind and gave him insights into the mysteries of Christ that then informed his teaching, preaching, and writing, giving them a power born of the Spirit.

A fidelity that shaped his life

He knew about Christ from study, but he knew Christ from prayer.

That fidelity was sometimes costly. In “Treasure in Clay” he writes of the lengths he would go to keep his daily appointment with Our Blessed Lord, through periods of dryness and distraction or the time he was accidentally locked in a Chicago church, climbed out a window, and landed in the coal bin.

The Blessed Lord rewarded his fidelity in the most touching way, coming to meet Sheen definitively during his Holy Hour on Dec. 9, 1979, to lead his faithful disciple to the Father’s house.

The Holy Hour was the rock of Fulton Sheen’s life, the place where he found his identity, gained insights for his teaching, gathered strength for the task ahead of him. It was the source of his remarkable integrity. He was the same person regardless of his situation and audience, at home among the rich and famous as well as the charwoman and street sweeper.

A love for the poor and a life of hard work

His stories, however, reveal that he was more at home among the poor and simple. He told the story of the street sweeper in Rome who was unimpressed by the cardinals and bishops gathered for the Second Vatican Council, and who reminded him that the simple man doing his work for the love of God was doing a more profitable thing than any “important” tasks accomplished for other reasons.

This spiritual vision fostered a deep respect for each individual and for the wisdom and honor of the common man. This respect was born of his love of God, which allowed him to see each person as a brother or a sister with a deep and practical love for his neighbor, a love that animated his zeal for souls that sustained his preaching and missionary activity.

Fulton Sheen was famously hardworking. As a university professor he tore up his lecture notes at the end of each term, he rewrote them each semester so that he would be coming to the material fresh.

He spent over 30 hours preparing for each television episode, practicing its delivery in several languages. It would be easy to dismiss Sheen as a workaholic, but perhaps it was an embrace of asceticism, a sort of spiritual discipline and devotion to one’s duty, refusing to give into the complacency that can accompany success and the presumption that excuses one from work because “I know how to do this already.”

Obedience to the Church, even when it was difficult

All of his activities, including preaching, teaching, writing, radio and television appearances, and missionary work, were at the service of the Church, an expression of his undying obedience to Christ and the Church as manifested by his hierarchical superiors.

He was clear-eyed in this obedience, going toe-to-toe with Cardinal Francis Spellman when he judged it right. This obedience was, as all obedience is at some point, a crucible in his final years, one he accepted and embraced out of love for Christ and his body, the Church.

In the heady and confusing times of the ’60s and ’70s, Sheen, who had a platform and an audience at his fingertips, chose the path of discretion, intentionally not displaying the ecclesiastical falling outs for all to see. They get only a vague reference in his autobiography.

His faith in Christ, present in his Church and his obedience even in the face of the fallenness of her members and leaders, gave his love that character of endurance and sacrifice that is the hallmark of the old-fashioned-sounding virtue of long-suffering. His trials and physical sufferings in the last decade of his life conformed him to Christ the victim, making him a witness to the enduring reality of Christian hope.

A teacher for a new generation of Catholics

It is no wonder then, that St. John Paul II told Sheen, just two months before his death in 1979, “You are a loyal son of the Church.” The Polish pontiff saw in the frail bishop a man whose whole life and identity had been handed over to Christ and placed at the service of the Church.

On Sept. 24, St. John Paul’s successor will, through his representative Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, declare Fulton Sheen blessed. By this action, the Church our Mother is giving us the gift of a teacher and guide, telling us that Sheen’s teaching and writing can form us in faith, and his life is a model of holiness through the imitation of his practice of heroic virtue. As students fill classrooms across America this September, Catholics are being invited to meet a new teacher in the school of holiness, Archbishop Fulton Sheen.