If Blessed Fulton Sheen has a No. 1 fan on earth, it may be Msgr. Hilary Franco. 

Having returned from Sheen’s beatification Mass in St. Louis less than a week earlier, from the very beginning of a 90-minute interview at St. Theresa’s Church in Briarcliff Manor, Msgr. Franco couldn’t wait to talk about his former boss, mentor, and friend. He opened a thick red folder filled with letters, most carefully preserved in plastic sheets.  

“These are all relics now,” he said, thumbing through the pile. Not many people have a file cabinet full of second-class relics. Then again, most people never spent years of their career working for and corresponding with someone recently beatified in St. Louis and now venerated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  

At 93, the Bronx native recalls his time with now-Blessed Fulton Sheen as if it were yesterday, and in voluminous detail. “To make a long story short” is one of his regular phrases because Msgr. Franco, author of the books “Bishop Sheen: Mentor and Friend” and “Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers,” has a lot of long stories and loves to tell them.  

A providential phone call 

 Msgr. Franco credits his first meeting with then-Bishop Sheen to “providence,” as he does for numerous events in his life. He had studied and was ordained at the Pontifical Roman Major Seminary in Rome in 1955, before returning to the Bronx and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church.  

Although Msgr. Franco had seen Sheen in person at an event, they had never met until one day the young Bronx priest called him. “I’m a priest of the archdiocese. I have some questions for the bishop,” he said, cold-calling the bishop’s office. “I have to talk to the bishop.” Ultimately, Msgr. Franco was granted 15 minutes with Sheen, which became 43 minutes and an invitation to lunch the following day.  

The other guests at that lunch were the artist Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, Msgr. Franco said. After lunch and a return to Bishop Sheen’s chapel, the bishop asked him if he would help him with Latin for the upcoming papal council commissions that would become part of the Second Vatican Council.  

Preparation, preparation, preparation 

Msgr. Franco credits Blessed Sheen’s success as an evangelist to the amount of work he did ahead of each broadcast, and specifically, three types of readiness: “He spent 27 hours per week preparing 23, sometimes 25 minutes of television. … So the secret was remote preparation, immediate preparation, and then looking at the audience, understanding who you have in front of you. Unfortunately, I see some of my colleagues go on for 20 minutes, the usual thing. You have to tailor it to who is in front of you, so they bring home something that will stick in their minds. That’s essential, and that’s what he did. I learned from the best, and I’ve been trying to do it ever since,” he said. 

One example of this evangelization effectiveness, Msgr. Franco noted, was aboard a flight from Uganda back to the United States. “We were coming back from a leper colony. … There was a beautiful young stewardess, and the bishop was looking at her. He said, ‘Young lady, you have something that God has given you. It would take only one minute of one of your smiles to make a difference in the lives of the people I just came back from,’” The flight attendant thanked the bishop for the compliment, but indicated she was not Catholic. About two weeks later at the bishop’s residence, the monsignor said, “The doorbell rings. … She said, ‘I am the young lady from the plane. I’m here to take instructions in the faith.’ After six months, the bishop received her into the Church. The following day, she left for that leper colony.” 

Proximity to the tabernacle 

Another major source of Sheen’s success was his spiritual and physical closeness to Jesus, Msgr. Franco said. “Above all, he was a man of faith. In his study, he would sit there writing, but the doors would always be open, and he would always look at the tabernacle. The secret of whatever Fulton J. Sheen did was only one thing: the good Lord in the tabernacle.” 

That also applied to Blessed Sheen’s well-known practice of a daily holy hour in Eucharistic adoration.  

“The holy hour, so to speak, was not one hour for us; it was about three hours. But we enjoyed it immensely,” the monsignor said, recalling one particular occasion in Paris.  

“We arrived in Paris at 7:30 in the morning, tired. Usually he followed what I suggested; he was so humble. But that morning, near Saint-Sulpice, a beautiful church in Paris, he said, ‘Why don’t we do the holy hour here, since we’re here?’ I said, ‘Bishop, you must be kidding. We’re tired. Let’s go to the hotel.’ He insisted. 

“We went in, he knelt down, and he went to sleep. You can imagine me fuming in the back. He slept exactly one hour. Then he turned around, with the simplicity of the saints, smiled at me, and said, ‘Well, I guess the good Lord wanted us to have that holy hour this way,’” Msgr. Franco recalled, smiling broadly. 

A saint then and now 

Msgr. Franco attended the Sheen’s beatification in St. Louis on Sept. 24, sitting in a place of honor on the main stage. While he has been a leading proponent of the canonization cause, Msgr. Franco is not too concerned about the ultimate outcome.  

Speaking of St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. John Paul II, with both of whom he also worked, and Blessed Fulton Sheen, Msgr. Franco said, “These people, especially my mentor and friend [Sheen], were saints while I was working and living with them. The official declaration of the Church is all right, but for me personally, he was already a saint a long time ago in the broadest sense.”