The Bishop Who Warned Catholics Away From Tradition
On September 21, 1978, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote to a Catholic mother of eight children who was concerned about a friend attending Mass with the Society of St. Pius X. Sheen urged the woman to persuade her friend to leave the Society, warning that continued involvement could lead her family into schism and even heresy.
Then he offered an extraordinary defense of the postconciliar liturgical reform. The changes introduced under Paul VI, Sheen maintained, had merely changed the Mass from Latin into the vernacular.
That was essentially his explanation.
This was nine years after the promulgation of the new Roman Missal, from a bishop who had attended Vatican II and spent decades teaching Catholic theology. The letter, along with a remarkably forceful rebuttal by Dr. EuGene McKenzie of St. Marys, Kansas, appeared in the November 1978 issue of The Angelus.
Yesterday, September 24, 2026, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle formally declared Sheen blessed at a ceremony in St. Louis, acting as Leo XIV’s representative. Tens of thousands gathered to honor the man whose extraordinary preaching had once brought Catholic doctrine into millions of American living rooms.
Both episodes belong to Sheen’s life.
The bishop who explained the Holy Sacrifice with such extraordinary eloquence was also the bishop who dismissed traditional Catholics’ objections to the new rite as though somebody had merely switched languages. The television evangelist who fearlessly denounced Communism later celebrated Vatican II as a revolution in the Church’s relationship with the modern world.
Which Sheen is being presented for our admiration? And what might his elevation accomplish for the postconciliar Church under Leo?
The answers require looking beyond the familiar blackboard and cape.
The Fulton Sheen Traditional Catholics Remember
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There are good reasons traditional Catholics remain attached to Sheen.
Born in Illinois in 1895 and ordained in 1919, he pursued advanced philosophical and theological studies at Louvain before spending nearly a quarter-century teaching at the Catholic University of America. His national radio ministry began in 1930. By the 1950s, Life Is Worth Living had made him one of the most recognizable religious personalities in the United States, reaching an audience that reportedly approached thirty million.
Watch those broadcasts today and the contrast with contemporary Catholic media is almost painful.
Sheen spoke unapologetically about sin, judgment, the Cross, marriage, chastity, confession, the Blessed Virgin and the supernatural destiny of man. He treated Catholicism as a coherent account of reality. His preaching was intellectually serious without becoming impenetrable, accessible without surrendering doctrinal substance.
His books display much the same confidence. Three to Get Married offers a profoundly sacramental understanding of marriage. The World’s First Love communicates a rich Marian theology. Communism and the Conscience of the West, published in 1948, reflects his longstanding intellectual opposition to Marxist materialism.
His understanding of the Mass was particularly striking. In a preface subsequently recalled by Dr. McKenzie, Sheen connected the altar and Communion rail to the primacy of sacrifice. The Eucharist was never merely a religious gathering with consecrated refreshments. Its sacrificial nature explained the very architecture of Catholic worship.
He also took priestly spirituality seriously. His commitment to a daily Holy Hour was characteristic of an intensely Eucharistic devotional life.
And he was an effective missionary.
For all his celebrity, Sheen understood the importance of conversion and dedicated enormous energy to supporting foreign missions. He directed the American Society for the Propagation of the Faith from 1950 to 1966, raising awareness and resources for Catholics in poorer countries. That concern for the missions would later become central to his participation in Vatican II.
There is considerable substance here. Anyone seeking an explanation for Sheen’s enduring appeal can find it without sentimentalizing the man or pretending that everything he said was correct.
His later enthusiasm for the Council is therefore a serious theological question precisely because his earlier Catholic formation was so substantial.
When John XXIII Opened the Doors
By the Council’s third session in 1964, Sheen had become one of its enthusiastic public interpreters.
In an interview conducted by Benedictine journalist Fr. Placid Jordan, Sheen praised John XXIII for opening a Church he described as having been closed to the world for centuries. He portrayed the Council as a revolutionary redistribution of intellectual and ecclesiastical initiative, celebrated its challenge to entrenched assumptions, and likened the experience to a new Pentecost.
He had no doubt that its momentum would continue after the bishops returned home.
His language was revealing.
Sheen believed the Council had liberated missionary initiative, opened Catholics to non-Western civilizations, strengthened episcopal collegiality and encouraged a Church too accustomed to administering existing institutions to rediscover its missionary vocation.
These were sincerely held convictions, and they reflected genuine concerns. Wealthy dioceses could become complacent. Missionary territories needed resources. Bishops had responsibilities beyond constructing buildings and counting parishioners.
But there is a striking historical irony in Sheen’s account.
Here was a man whose radio broadcasts had reached millions since 1930, whose television programs drew an audience most Catholic evangelists today could scarcely imagine, and whose missionary organization operated across the world.
Yet he was describing the preconciliar Church as though she had spent centuries behind locked doors.
His own career disproved the caricature.
Pius XI had hardly been indifferent to worldwide evangelization. Pius XII had repeatedly addressed the Church’s missionary obligations. Catholic missionaries were establishing churches, schools, hospitals and charitable institutions throughout the developing world long before John XXIII announced an aggiornamento.
There was legitimate room to reform ecclesiastical administration. But Sheen’s enthusiasm risked treating changes in pastoral method as though they represented an unprecedented discovery of the Church’s mission.
For traditional Catholics, that distinction remains central. The Church may improve how she communicates the deposit of faith. She cannot discover, after nineteen centuries, that her previous understanding of her relationship with the world was fundamentally mistaken.
The Optimism Survives the First Signs of Disaster
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By January 1970, Sheen had considerably more evidence with which to evaluate the Council’s implementation.
He appeared on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line shortly after leaving the Diocese of Rochester. Buckley pressed him about the turmoil in Catholicism, declining religious practice and the apparent unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to discipline public dissent.
Sheen defended the Council as the means by which the Church had begun relating herself more effectively to the modern world. When Buckley raised the decline in Mass attendance, Sheen suggested that the Council’s effects would require considerable time to mature.
That exchange captures the difficulty with Sheen’s conciliar optimism.
By 1970, the liturgical upheaval was no longer a prospective reform described in carefully drafted conciliar documents. The Roman rite had been extensively rewritten. Catholic institutions were experiencing widespread confusion. Priests and religious were leaving their vocations. Traditional practices were disappearing.
Sheen continued to believe that the new ecclesiastical orientation would eventually produce renewal.
It is possible for a pastor to remain hopeful amid serious difficulties. Indeed, despair would have been a far greater spiritual failure.
But hope is no substitute for an accurate diagnosis.
At what point should a bishop ask whether the anticipated renewal is failing because the reform itself contains fundamental defects?
At what point does defending the Council become an impediment to examining its consequences?
Sheen’s confidence in the reform deserves particular scrutiny because his theological instincts on so many other matters remained recognizably traditional.
The Ecumenical Bishop of Rochester
Sheen’s three years as Bishop of Rochester, from 1966 to 1969, offer a revealing glimpse of how his conciliar enthusiasm translated into pastoral practice.
He took a personal interest in proposals for cooperation between St. Bernard’s Catholic Seminary and neighboring Protestant theological institutions, including Colgate Rochester and the Episcopal Bexley Hall. Plans explored shared educational facilities and broader collaboration while preserving the institutions’ distinct identities. The proposed relocation did not materialize during his tenure; negotiations stalled and St. Bernard’s did not move to the shared campus until 1981.
Sheen also participated prominently in interreligious encounters. In February 1967 he addressed an interfaith gathering at a Rochester synagogue. A year later, he received a brotherhood award during Sabbath services at Mount Neboh Synagogue in New York and addressed the congregation from its pulpit. Contemporary Jewish press coverage emphasized the significance of that encounter for Catholic-Jewish relations.
The traditional objection to these developments requires precision.
Speaking to Jewish or Protestant audiences is hardly, by itself, a betrayal of Catholic doctrine. Sheen’s entire broadcasting career depended upon communicating with non-Catholics, frequently with remarkable success.
The question concerns the theological assumptions governing such encounters.
Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos insisted that genuine Christian unity could never be achieved by treating incompatible confessions as equally legitimate expressions of Christ’s Church. Catholic charity and the desire for conversion had to remain inseparable from the Church’s claim to possess the fullness of revealed truth.
Vatican II introduced a substantially different public vocabulary concerning religious dialogue and the relationship between Catholics and non-Catholics. Sheen welcomed that change.
His critics must demonstrate where his particular conduct compromised Catholic doctrine rather than simply noting that he participated in an interreligious event. His defenders, however, cannot pretend that the ecclesiology behind these innovations presents no difficulty when measured against the earlier magisterium.
Sheen embodied that unresolved tension.
The Teilhard Problem
One episode in Sheen’s intellectual career presents an even sharper challenge.
In his 1967 book Footprints in a Darkened Forest, Sheen predicted that, once disputes surrounding Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s terminology had subsided, the Jesuit might be regarded alongside St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila as a major spiritual genius of the twentieth century.
This was remarkable praise, especially coming from a bishop with Sheen’s theological education.
Five years earlier, the Holy Office had issued a formal warning concerning Teilhard’s writings. It identified serious doctrinal errors and ambiguities, and urged bishops, religious superiors and seminary rectors to protect the faithful, particularly the young, from their dangers. The warning was reaffirmed in 1981.
Sheen’s enthusiastic assessment does not establish that he endorsed every proposition in Teilhard’s evolutionary theology. Nevertheless, comparing a thinker whose writings had attracted such a serious Roman warning to two great Doctors of mystical theology was an extraordinary exercise of episcopal judgment.
The problem reaches beyond one unfortunate literary prediction.
The traditional Catholic understanding of mystical union presupposes clear distinctions between nature and grace, Creator and creature, and the supernatural destiny bestowed upon man through Christ. Teilhard’s speculative system raised precisely the kinds of questions that required doctrinal caution.
Sheen knew that tradition intimately.
His willingness to promote Teilhard so enthusiastically suggests that his openness to postconciliar theological experimentation was much more substantial than a preference for pastoral friendliness or vernacular worship.
The 1978 Letter That Cannot Be Explained Away
Return now to Sheen’s denunciation of the SSPX.
The September 1978 letter was published in The Angelus that November. It warned a Catholic mother that her friend’s association with the Society could endanger her family’s communion with the Church.
There is an important chronological qualification. This was a decade before Archbishop Lefebvre’s 1988 episcopal consecrations and nearly half a century before the SSPX’s 2026 consecrations. Sheen therefore was not commenting upon either event or upon the canonical penalties associated with them.
The Society’s irregular canonical situation was already real. But irregularity alone did not establish that every Catholic attending an SSPX chapel was personally guilty of schism.
Sheen’s condemnation was accompanied by an even more troubling defense of the new Mass. He reduced its changes to the substitution of vernacular languages for Latin.
That description was demonstrably incorrect.
Paul VI’s own 1969 apostolic constitution Missale Romanum explicitly announced the addition of three new Eucharistic Prayers, major revisions to the Order of Mass, changes to the lectionary, and substantial modifications to the liturgical calendar and prayers. The reform was far more extensive than a translation.
Sheen could reasonably have argued that these changes did not alter defined Catholic dogma. That would have required an examination of their theological expression and pastoral consequences.
Instead, he minimized the factual extent of the reform.
McKenzie’s reply was devastating precisely because he recalled the older Sheen’s writings on the sacrificial nature of the Mass. Here was a bishop who had taught Catholics why the altar mattered, now assuring them that the replacement of the traditional rite amounted essentially to a change of language.
For Catholics attached to the inherited Roman liturgy, the contradiction was impossible to miss.
The same bishop who once helped them understand what they were losing now urged them to abandon priests who continued to provide it.
Does Leo Need Sheen’s Approval of Vatican II?
The timing of yesterday’s beatification naturally invites questions.
Leo has maintained the central framework of Francis’s restrictions on the traditional Roman liturgy. His administration has also confronted the SSPX following its July 2026 episcopal consecrations.
Sheen offers a particularly interesting model for a postconciliar hierarchy seeking to retain the allegiance of traditionally minded Catholics.
He possessed impeccable old-fashioned Catholic aesthetics. He wore the cassock and episcopal cape. He preached with doctrinal confidence. His broadcasts continue to appeal enormously to Catholics alienated by contemporary religious culture.
Yet he also celebrated Vatican II, accepted the liturgical reform and condemned the SSPX.
The symbolic usefulness of that combination is obvious.
A traditional Catholic who questions the Council can be reminded that Fulton Sheen supported it. Someone troubled by the new Mass can be directed toward his 1978 letter. Those defending Archbishop Lefebvre can be confronted with Sheen’s warning about schism.
Meanwhile, Catholics enthusiastic about Vatican II can celebrate his openness to ecumenism, his missionary concerns and his support for the Council’s broader pastoral orientation.
That is an exceptionally versatile ecclesiastical legacy.
Christopher Hale, writing in Letters from Leo, has already interpreted the beatification in precisely these terms. He emphasizes Sheen’s defense of Vatican II during his 1970 encounter with Buckley. Following Cardinal Tagle’s homily yesterday, Hale argued that its concentration on poverty and missionary service offered a corrective to interpretations centered principally on Sheen’s anticommunism.
Tagle did indeed draw attention to Sheen’s 1964 intervention at Vatican II concerning the responsibility of wealthier dioceses toward impoverished missionary territories.
That was an authentic part of Sheen’s life, just as authentic as his anticommunism. The two concerns were never necessarily incompatible. The significance lies in how different constituencies can select the portions of Sheen’s legacy that most closely correspond to their own understanding of the contemporary Church.
But this does not establish that Leo engineered the beatification to exploit Sheen’s conciliar loyalties.
What the Evidence Actually Says About Leo
There are important reasons to avoid turning an interesting possibility into an accusation of deliberate manipulation.
Sheen’s cause began long before Leo’s election. Benedict XVI recognized his heroic virtue in 2012. Francis authorized the decree concerning a miracle attributed to his intercession in 2019.
The beatification was subsequently postponed after the Diocese of Rochester requested further examination of Sheen’s handling of priestly assignments during his tenure there. Rochester explicitly stated that Sheen himself had not been accused of personal inappropriate conduct. Following years of additional review, the Vatican permitted the cause to proceed in February 2026. The September ceremony was publicly announced in March, before the SSPX’s July consecrations.
Those facts substantially weaken any claim that the ceremony was devised as a response to the Society.
Leo has also supplied a straightforward personal explanation for his admiration.
Addressing the Pontifical Mission Societies in June, he recalled Sheen’s broadcasts from his own childhood and praised their evangelical reach and worldwide missionary impact. Leo’s own years as a missionary offer an obvious connection with that aspect of Sheen’s career.
His apostolic letter yesterday similarly emphasized Sheen’s communication apostolate and missionary zeal. Cardinal Tagle developed those themes through Sheen’s concern for the poor and his understanding of evangelization as a work belonging to Christ rather than to the celebrity preacher.
These publicly stated reasons are substantial.
The most defensible critical interpretation is therefore that Sheen’s beatification serves several purposes simultaneously. It recognizes a celebrated evangelist whose cause long predates Leo, while also presenting an American Catholic figure whose enthusiastic embrace of Vatican II fits comfortably within the present Roman leadership’s understanding of ecclesiastical renewal.
That second effect is real even if it was never the decisive reason for completing the cause.
Does Beatification Settle the Theological Questions?
There remains the question of what Catholics should conclude from Sheen’s beatification itself.
The Vatican recognized an extraordinary recovery attributed to his intercession. The reported miracle concerned James Fulton Engstrom, an infant born in 2010 who survived after an extended period without detectable cardiac activity. Its investigation formed part of the cause approved under Francis.
Traditional Catholics should neither dismiss such testimony merely because they disagree with Sheen’s later theological positions nor treat the recognition as a blanket endorsement of everything he wrote.
Beatification permits public veneration under specified conditions. It does not declare every theological opinion of the blessed irreproachable. Sheen’s praise for Teilhard, his understanding of ecumenism, his enthusiasm for Vatican II and his assertions concerning the SSPX remain legitimate subjects of historical and theological examination.
For Catholics who question the authority of the postconciliar hierarchy, the process raises additional ecclesiological questions. Yet even within the ordinary distinction between beatification and canonization, yesterday’s ceremony does not resolve the doctrinal disputes surrounding Sheen’s later career.
Nor should criticism become a judgment upon his eternal destiny.
A bishop may possess extraordinary virtues, help bring souls to Christ and nevertheless make serious theological mistakes. The historical evidence concerning Sheen is sufficiently substantial that neither hagiography nor wholesale denunciation does him justice.
There is also a lesson here for those who remember the preconciliar Church primarily through its most charismatic public figures.
Fulton Sheen was a formidable defender of Catholic morality, an eloquent teacher of the supernatural life and a pioneering evangelist. He was also an enthusiastic participant in the conciliar transformation whose consequences traditional Catholics continue to condemn.
He lived long enough to witness the beginning of the postconciliar crisis, but died before many of its subsequent controversies developed. His optimism cannot simply be dismissed as dishonesty. Neither should it be treated as prophetic merely because he sincerely believed the promised renewal would eventually arrive.
The Blackboard Cannot Answer for the Council
Fulton Sheen’s life refuses to fit neatly into either the traditionalist or postconciliar portrait.
The old broadcasts remain compelling. His theological explanations can still instruct Catholics. His devotion to the Eucharist, missionary generosity and remarkable capacity to communicate the faith deserve serious attention.
But so do the disturbing features of his later career.
His celebration of Vatican II was unambiguous. His praise for Teilhard was extravagant. His defense of the new liturgy in 1978 was factually inadequate, and his warning against the SSPX dismissed concerns that traditional Catholics had compelling reasons to take seriously.
Yesterday’s ceremony cannot erase any of that.
Leo may sincerely regard Sheen as an exemplary evangelist whose television programs helped shape his own childhood faith. Others will use the new blessed’s legacy to vindicate Vatican II and challenge contemporary resistance to the postconciliar hierarchy.
For traditional Catholics, the obligation remains to examine the whole man against the perennial faith rather than allowing either affection or ecclesiastical ceremony to settle questions that require theological answers.
The great irony is that Sheen himself spent decades teaching his audience to think clearly about Catholic doctrine.
We should extend him the courtesy of taking that instruction seriously—even when it leads us to question Fulton Sheen.
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Which Fulton Sheen Did Leo Just Beatify?