Driven by the words of a man he would never meet face-to-face, Father Schmitz’s grandfather entered the Church.
Long before Father Mike Schmitz became one of the most recognizable voices in modern Catholic media, a radio speaker’s voice was already echoing through his family’s living room, quietly reshaping his lineage.
For Father Schmitz, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen isn’t just a historic figure or a gifted communicator — his connection to the venerable archbishop is deeply personal.
“My grandpa and grandma met and married each other pretty quickly,” Father Schmitz recalled on a recent episode of his podcast. “And my grandpa would go to Mass with my grandma, but he wasn’t becoming Catholic. He was Lutheran. He would go to Mass with her, but he was not going to become Catholic.”
That fixed resolve began to soften when his grandfather started tuning in to Fulton Sheen’s legendary radio and television broadcasts. “The more and more my Grandpa Bjarney would hear about the truth, and about the Church, about Jesus, coming through the mouth of Archbishop Sheen, including Archbishop’s comments against communism, my grandpa came to that point where he said, ‘That guy speaks the truth.’”
Driven by the words of
