Like so many Americans of her generation, Rosemary Serna used to tune in with her mother to watch Bishop Fulton Sheen on TV during the 1950s.
Then Serna left the Church for sixty years. She got married, had children, and worked for several decades as a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer. Yet the faith of her youth seemed forgotten.
But after her husband’s death in 2020, something began to stir inside. She remembers sitting at home one night, thinking about going out to buy cigarettes and something to drink.
“And in my head, I heard, ‘it's time,’ Serna recalled. “And for some reason I thought maybe I should go back to my Church.”
That led Serna to make her first confession in decades and start attending Sunday Mass. Now a parishioner at Holy Family in South Pasadena, Serna has embraced pilgrimage opportunities lately, including one to Turkey and Greece. When a brochure from the Archdiocese of LA for a pilgrimage to St. Louis for Archbishop Sheen’s Sept. 24 beatification landed in her inbox this summer, the timing felt right.
Serna believes the televangelist of her youth had been waiting for her all these years.
“I felt like God rewarded my journey by allowing me to be there,” said Serna after the Mass inside The Dome at America’s Center, where Sheen was officially declared by the Catholic Church “Blessed,” the final step before sainthood. “Witnessing that ceremony, I knew I was home.”
Serna’s group of 35 pilgrims from the archdiocese was accompanied by Auxiliary Bishops Marc Trudeau and Slawomir Szkredka, and five priests. Over four days, they visited shrines and landmarks including St. Louis’ two cathedral basilicas, the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in neighboring Belleville, Illinois, and St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois, where Sheen is buried.
One of the LA pilgrims had a particularly special connection to Sheen. Now a parishioner of St. Peter and Paul Church in Wilmington, Regina Murphy grew up between Brooklyn and Long Island. She watched Sheen as a child, but also met him several times through her grandfather, Jimmy Murphy, a Brooklyn sportswriter who knew Sheen through New York Catholic media circles.
“Being here was personal for me because of the way I was raised,” said Murphy of the Mass. “It was beautiful to see the outpouring of love.”
The love for Sheen in St. Louis wasn’t just from Catholics of Murphy and Serna’s generation. Certainly, of the 50,000 people at the beatification presided by papal representative Cardinal Luis Tagle, many were drawn by fond memories of the man who appeared weekly in their living rooms. But that contingent was in the minority inside the arena that day.
Instead, the event was dominated by droves of couples with small children, teenagers in Sheen-themed shirts, and a few thousand priests and seminarians – most of whom were born after 1979, the year of Sheen’s death.
What explains the cross-generational appeal of a Midwestern cleric who used a chalkboard to talk about Jesus and challenge Catholics to resist the temptations of consumerism, community, and modernity?
“For the older generations, he spoke the truth with love, and he was very dashing and charming,” pro-life activist and Live Action founder Lila Rose, who helped host EWTN’s live coverage of the beatification. “But for the younger generations, there’s grandpa.”
For Rose, who is based in Los Angeles, the turnout was a testament to the power of evangelization through media and Sheen’s “timeless” message.
“The truth he spoke, he did with so much humility and love,” said Rose.
Even in the age of TikTok and shortening attention spans, Sheen’s TV spots – and his more than 60 books – have shown surprising staying power.
Kester Nucum, 25, drove from Huntsville, Alabama with his wife, Katherine, and infant son to attend the beatification. He got hooked on Sheen videos in high school after discovering him while scrolling through YouTube. Nucum credits reading Sheen’s book “Three to Get Married” before his wedding last year with helping him be a better husband and father.
“Yes, he writes in kind of a pre-Vatican II, more Thomistic kind of fashion,” said Nucum. “But the truth is not old-fashioned. The truth is still true even to this day.”
Father John Schiavone, one of the five priests in the LA pilgrimage group, was familiar with Sheen as a celebrity priest on TV growing up. Yet reading Sheen’s books after his ordination in 1973, he believes, proved “foundational” for his ministry.
“He had an immense influence on priests,” said Schiavone, 79. “I think of all the priests whose prayer life improved because of his encouraging them on retreats to do the Holy Hour.”
One teaching that Schiavone said stuck with him was how Sheen identified the link between the crucifixion of Christ and his resurrection: “You can’t have the resurrection with the cross, and the cross without resurrection is despair.
“That was one of the things that stuck in my craw,” said Schiavone, a noted liturgical composer who remembers singing at an Easter Mass at St. Basil’s in Koreatown in the early 70s in which Sheen gave the homily.
Although too young to know Sheen from his TV days, Matt Dhillon of Fullerton has become something of a Sheen “superfan” over the years. While he’s read most of his books and watched hours of video clips, he believes Sheen’s ability to avoid the pitfalls of fame spoke more loudly than anything else.
“He never walked around with self-importance,” said Dhillon, who flew to St. Louis with his wife, Kirsten. “He understood St. Paul’s message that I carry in my body the cross, that I am nothing.”
For Dhillon, one of the most telling episodes of Sheen’s life was his relationship with New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman during the early 1960s. Sheen, one of Spellman’s auxiliary bishops in New York and the national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in the U.S., was persecuted by Spellman over a dispute involving donated powdered milk to the Archdiocese of New York. Sheen refused to criticize Spellman publicly and even omitted the incident from his autobiography.
“He had an unbelievable humility, and showed us what it means to empty yourself in every way,” said Dhillon.
Kirsten, meanwhile, doesn’t share her husband’s level of fandom. But like everyone else in St. Louis that week, she found the reach of Sheen’s legacy – conversions, vocations to the priesthood, cheerful families – hard to deny.
“I don't personally care for his manner of speaking. It's very dramatic, et cetera,” Kirsten said of Sheen. “But I have to admit, the man is a saint.”
