When Mother Teresa visited Archbishop Fulton Sheen after his painful prostate surgery in 1977, a couple of years before he died, they were hardly strangers.
Yet their meetings, which took place over the course of two decades, aren’t well-documented or well-known because they were almost always in private — the type that turn up in endnotes of books published long after the fact.
Even when exactly they first met is a little murky. One source says 1960, in New York. Another puts it around the mid-1960s, in Rome.
But either way, at the time then-Bishop Sheen, in either his mid- or late 60s, was a national celebrity in the United States because of his former television show and well-known internationally because of his books on how to follow Christ. Mother Teresa, in her early or mid-50s, was the head of a growing-but-not-yet-world-famous religious order of sisters ministering to what she called “the poorest of the poor” in India.
Bishop Sheen was also U.S. national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith — for which he was a prodigious fundraiser and a major donor (from his television earnings and book royalties) and thus a conduit for large sums
