A Prophetic Voice of Hope

September 1, 2026

This month’s beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen celebrates a great Catholic evangelist and Knight of Columbus

By Derek Rotty

September 1, 2026

Sheen 1970 Supreme Convention.jpg — Archbishop Fulton Sheen (front row, second from right) joins fellow bishops and Knights at the 88th Supreme Convention in Houston in 1970. With him are Coadjutor Bishop John Morkovsky of Galveston-Houston (center); Supreme Chaplain Bishop Charles Greco of Alexandria, La. (left); and Supreme Director James Foley of New York, next to Bishop Greco. Foley had proposed Archbishop Sheen for membership in the Order in 1968. (Knights of Columbus Multimedia Archives)

“Our world is full of prophets of gloom, and I would be one of them if I did not practically believe in God,” Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen wrote in a 1951 newspaper column titled “There Is Hope.”

Sheen helps us to understand mid-20th-century American culture, from roughly 1925 to 1975. As a priest, university professor, bishop and media personality, he engaged the profound ideas and changes of the time. He presented to an audience of Catholics, Protestants, skeptics and nonbelievers ways to navigate a turbulent period and find hope by remaining faithful to the objective truth revealed by God in the person of Jesus Christ.

No matter what darkness the world faced, Sheen’s message always conveyed the reality of Christian hope, which he wanted to share with a weary, often hopeless world. That message was present throughout his books, radio broadcasts and syndicated newspaper columns.

“Times are bad,” Sheen acknowledged in that 1951 column. “But despite these facts, this is not the end of civilization; nor are we to be without hope. We have simply reached a moment in history where God is permitting us to feel our inadequacy, so long as we trust only in ourselves.”

As the Church prepares to celebrate Sheen’s beatification on Sept. 24 in St. Louis, that prophetic note of hope remains timely — as does his long relationship with the Knights of Columbus.

A CALL TO ENGAGE THE WORLD

Fulton John Sheen was born May 8, 1895, in the rural farming town of El Paso, Illinois, the eldest of four boys. His family later moved to nearby Peoria, where the seeds of his intellectual life were planted and his love of learning was cultivated in Catholic schools. After attending St. Viator College and St. Paul Seminary in Minnesota, he was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria in 1919.

Then-Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen is pictured with an NBC radio microphone in an undated photo. (CNS file photo)

After ordination, he studied at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy and became the first American to win the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Prize. He returned to Washington in 1926 to teach at CUA, where he remained until 1950.

His intellectual formation prepared him to understand and engage the philosophies shaping modern life. Sheen wrote, taught and preached about many of the era’s major questions — science and faith, education, marriage and sexuality, politics, economics and communism. Yet his response to these questions was never merely academic. The solution to problematic historical movements and dilemmas, he maintained, was the eternal truth revealed by God.

Sheen also engaged his contemporaries through popular media, and his association with the Knights of Columbus began decades before he formally joined the Order. When the national Catholic Hour radio program was launched in 1930, the Supreme Council contributed $5,000 — the largest single subscription — and continued its substantial support in succeeding years. Following the inaugural broadcast, Sheen delivered a series of seven addresses.

Over the following decades, Sheen spoke at numerous K of C events and collaborated with the Order in Catholic educational and evangelization efforts. In 1946, for example, the Supreme Council promoted his pamphlet “Communism, the Opium of the People” through full-page newspaper advertisements across the United States and Canada, prompting requests for thousands of copies.

Sheen’s public apostolate continued to expand. In 1950, he became national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and in 1951 he was consecrated an auxiliary bishop of New York. Soon afterward, his television program, Life Is Worth Living, made him a national celebrity, and in 1953 he won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality. He quipped that his success was due to the valuable contributions of the writers Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Between 1962 and 1965, Bishop Sheen attended all sessions of the Second Vatican Council. He worked closely with then-Father Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who served as a theological expert on the commission for mission. In a 2012 Vatican Radio interview, Pope Benedict recounted how “Fulton Sheen ... would fascinate us in the evenings with his talks.”

From 1966 to 1969, Sheen served as bishop of Rochester, New York; upon his retirement, Pope Paul VI named him titular archbishop of Newport, Wales. On May 11, 1968, Sheen joined Rochester Council 178 and became a Fourth Degree Knight two months later.

In 1970, Archbishop Sheen stood before delegates to the 88th Supreme Convention in Houston and offered his brother Knights a challenge characteristic of his lifelong ministry: Engage the world through a faith made visible in action. Five years later, at the 93rd Supreme Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, he would return to that challenge from another direction, urging Knights to place Jesus at the center of their response to modern culture.

Sheen’s Houston address, titled “The Signs of the Times,” identified the Church as being in a transitional moment that called for new ways of carrying out her mission. He instructed Knights to take up a “theology of action” rooted in charity and encouraged them to work with others, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, “whenever you can for the betterment of the world.” He reminded them not to assume that “only Catholic organizations work for the kingdom of God.”

“Our new mission,” he concluded, “is to rebuild a morally united nation.”

Sheen particularly urged Knights to engage young people. “Teach them patriotism, honesty and reverence for parents,” he instructed delegates. But such efforts required trust between the generations, strengthened by works of mercy: “A great example would be given if they would dig into their pockets to give something to the afflicted for whom they plead.”

Archbishop Fulton Sheen addresses delegates at the 88th Supreme Convention in Houston in 1970. (Knights of Columbus Multimedia Archives)

Sheen’s call for engagement culminated in a theme he addressed frequently — the inseparability of Jesus Christ and his cross. “Our new mission to the world,” he said, “must put the two together again.”

Sheen maintained that Knights — and all who seek to build the kingdom on earth — must continue Jesus’ mission in its totality. They must proclaim the truths of Christianity with words while exercising discipline, doing personal penance and showing compassion for the suffering. In all ages, those who would work for God’s kingdom must engage the world as Jesus did, in word and deed.

THE PRIMACY OF CHRIST

Sheen opened his address at the 1975 convention with a deeply personal admission: “I am worried about America. So are you.”

The bishop believed Americans had become so absorbed in the immediate crises of the age that they had lost the perspective necessary to understand them.

“What makes us unable to understand our problems is that we are obsessed with the insanity of the contemporary news of the hour,” he said. “Our hands are before our eyes, and we have no retrospect, no views of the past by which we may judge the present.”

He also challenged an idea that had developed in the postwar era: that “there would never be a limit to [man’s] progress.” Such confidence in human achievement, he believed, could obscure man’s dependence on God.

Sheen proposed only one answer to this malaise: “Somehow or other, there has to be a restoration of the meaning of our existence, and that has to center around Christ himself.”

Supreme Knight John McDevitt escorts Archbishop Sheen to the podium for his address to the delegates at the 93rd Supreme Convention in Miami Beach, Fla., in 1975. (Knights of Columbus Multimedia Archives)

Sheen pointed to two practical responses. The first was to respect and protect human life amid developments that divorced technical progress from nature and justice. The second was catechetics and education.

“Think of what a tremendous impact you Knights of Columbus could make for the Church in America if you insisted on real catechetics being taught in schools,” he said. “There is only one reason for supporting our schools and for making sacrifices, and that is because we have a philosophy of life, because we believe that souls are to be saved.”

Making Jesus and his revealed teaching the center of Catholic education, Sheen argued, would also provide a witness to millions “outside our churches [who are] adrift without any faith.”

They “would come and talk if they could only find some of that love and some of that certitude and some of that Christ-likeness,” he continued. “But that requires discipline and order.”

Finally, he left the delegates with marching orders: “So, when you go home, in your parishes, insist on the primacy of Christ.”

Sheen lived only four more years. On Oct. 2, 1979, Pope John Paul II embraced him at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and told him: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus. You are a loyal son of the Church.”

Sheen died Dec. 9, 1979. His cause for canonization opened in 2002. He was declared venerable in 2012, and Pope Francis recognized a miracle attributed to his intercession in 2019.

Sheen’s voice endures because it points beyond the passing crises of any one age. His answers to the questions of his time — and ours — were grounded in the ultimate source of hope, Jesus Christ.

No matter what darkness the world faced, Sheen sounded that prophetic note of hope tirelessly and joyfully for a world that needed to hear it. The hunger for hope in human life was the foundation of his work. Now, as the Church prepares to name him Blessed, his message remains no less urgent.

*****

DEREK ROTTY is a teacher and writer on Catholic history and culture and the author of Prophet of Hope: Fulton Sheen Responds to the Modern World (Our Sunday Visitor, 2025). He lives with his wife and five children in Jackson, Tennessee, where he is a member of Father Jay Jackson Council 1101.

A Prophetic Voice of Hope

A CALL TO ENGAGE THE WORLD

THE PRIMACY OF CHRIST

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