Cardinal Timothy Dolan told pilgrims gathered for the beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen that the evangelist’s many accomplishments all came from one source: his faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. 

“The mark of a genuine Catholic is the sense of the divine,” Cardinal Dolan said, quoting Archbishop Sheen. He described it as the ability to recognize God in a child held in his mother’s arms and in the broken body of a suffering man on the cross. 

In his Thursday afternoon talk, the St. Louis native pointed to the words of the apostle Thomas, “My Lord and my God,” ([John 20), also a favorite of Archbishop Sheen, which he said are at the heart of Catholic faith and should be professed often. Doing so, he said, exercises faith, which otherwise “gets soft and flabby.” 

Keeping faith from going soft 

Thomas, Cardinal Dolan noted, demanded hard evidence of the Resurrection. Archbishop Sheen preached that the same craving for clinical proof remains a temptation for a skeptical world, Cardinal Dolan said. God, he added, is received instead through a trusting, “childlike faith.” 

The archbishop-emeritus of New York said it was right to celebrate Archbishop Sheen’s preaching, teaching, writing, radio, and television work. But he urged those assembled to celebrate the source from which all of it came: Sheen’s faith in the real presence of the Lord at Mass, in Holy Communion, and in the tabernacle. 

Archbishop Sheen, Cardinal Dolan said, taught that the Incarnation, in which the eternal Word took flesh and became one of us, continues in the Eucharist. Dolan pointed to Sheen’s daily Mass and daily hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament as a source of strength for both the archbishop and himself. 

Sheen died in 1979. He reached audiences in the tens of millions through radio and television from the 1930s into the 1960s. He was beatified on Sept. 24, 2026.