Editor’s Note: Bishop Robert Barron celebrated Vespers Sept. 23, the night before Archbishop Fulton Sheen was beatified. Please find his full homily below, edited for length and clarity.
I consider it one of the signal privileges of my life to be able to preach this homily on the vigil of Fulton Sheen’s beatification. From the very beginning of my own work in evangelization, Sheen has been my model and inspiration. I do indeed consider him one of the pivotal players in the modern history of the Catholic Church, for he opened the door to the evangelization of the world through the electronic media.
There was an extraordinary intellectual, literary, and spiritual revival within Catholicism in the middle years of the last century. We think of such figures as Graham Greene, Dorothy Day, Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, Thomas Merton, Evelyn Waugh, and many others. Sheen was very much a participant in that renaissance, and he was arguably the most famous and influential of that entire group of luminaries. Billy Graham referred to him simply as “the great communicator.” By common consensus, Archbishop Sheen was the premier preacher in the English language in the 20th century. At the height of his
