Fulton Sheen Spoke to One America. Fr. Mike Speaks to Another.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 25, 2026

What an outstanding gift to the Catholic Church in the United States is the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen yesterday. What a gift the Church in our country made to the Church universal in raising up such a man as Fulton Sheen in the first place. And how blessed are we all, to have so great a reflection of God’s goodness, of holiness married to intellect, in the witness of Fulton Sheen.

We Catholic Americans are not exactly known as zealous evangelizers. Ever since the nation’s founding the enormous growth of our Church on these shores has been largely due to immigration. And yet our Lord seems always to raise up just the messengers we need to be apostles to our land in a given era. I am always struck by how much they seem the right person at the right time for the cultural moment.

That is how I see Fulton Sheen. His media presence dates back to radio in the 1930s and forward to his death at the end of the 1970s. But what a man of the 1950s he was! And yes, I mean that as a compliment. A big one.

When I think of Fulton Sheen, I think primarily of his 1950s primetime network television show. I think that is how most people remember him. Even those of us who were not yet alive in the 1950s.

That is owed partly to EWTN airing Sheen’s old TV show in recent decades. But it is also due to those older generations who watched the show the first time around. I remember my grandparents—the World War II “greatest generation”—sitting with rapt attention when EWTN began re-airing the show. They shared with me their memories of watching the same episodes when they first aired fifty years earlier.

I both could—and could not—see the appeal. Sheen had such a presence. He was such a good orator. What he had to say was so clear, so precise. It had such a ring of truth to it that it is a wonder the whole country did not convert.

The only Sheen book I ever read was the Life of Christ for Lent in 1993. It was over thirty years ago, and Sheen’s theological speculations have stayed with me:

Sheen pointing out that Jesus alone, only Jesus, can look at us with perfect justice. His theorizing that what Christ wrote in the sand that day was perhaps the sins of the very men who wanted to stone to death the woman caught in the act of the adultery. That perhaps some of them had been with her as well and were trying to cover it up, only to be exposed by our Lord.

Or Sheen’s speculation on Matthew 27:19. “Besides, while [Pilate] was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that righteous man [Jesus], for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream’” (ESV-CE). Sheen thought perhaps what she saw in her dream was all of us at Mass, down through the millennia, reciting that phrase in the Creed: “crucified under Pontius Pilate.”

That is some serious stuff. But Sheen shared those sorts of things on his 1950s show just by looking into the camera, with no higher tech than a chalkboard. With those skills alone he could beat Milton Berle in the ratings, get an Emmy, and become the toast of Hollywood. What an amazing feat. Think what it says, not just about him, but about the America of the 1950s. That was a way more literate, way more cultured, America watching his show than the America we have now.

But again, God always seems to send the right evangelizers to us, the ones we need for a given moment who can best speak to the cultural milieu of the time.

Fulton Sheen was perfect for the network television—and the America—of the 1950s. Mother Angelica was perfect for the cable television—and the internal Church battles—of the 1980s and ‘90s. Bishop Robert Barron was exactly the right man for the dawn of YouTube and he has only gone from strength to strength.

And how perfect is Fr. Mike Schmitz for the present moment? He speaks fluent Gen Z—“You guys, I’m so excited!”—while talking about things that are very un-Gen-Z: sin, repentance, the Eucharist, confession, chastity and the possibility of hell.

As a DC Comics fan from way back, I can’t help noticing that Sheen’s TV show aired during the same decade as George Reeves’ classic Adventures of Superman series. In the 1950s, Superman fought for “Truth, Justice and the American Way” and everyone knew what that phrase meant. There was no sunlight between it and Sheen’s Life is Worth Living. Today, however, Superman has dropped “the American Way” and has—I’m not making this up—a bisexual son.

Bishop Sheen spoke to one America and Fr. Schmitz speaks to another. But both of them—and the ones in between—are sharing the same timeless truth. Which is why Sheen is being rediscovered by Gen Z. May his beatification further magnify in this land—and beyond—the one whom he devoted his life to serving.