A Catholic bishop beat Frank Sinatra in the TV ratings
In 1952 the DuMont network put Bishop Fulton Sheen on at 8pm on Tuesdays, opposite Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra. With no script and only a chalkboard, his show Life Is Worth Living became a hit; Sinatra's programme was cancelled that April, and Sheen won an Emmy, thanking his four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Born Peter John Sheen in El Paso, Illinois, on May 8, 1895, he later took Fulton, his mother's maiden name. He was ordained for the Diocese of Peoria in 1919 and looked so young that a priest once asked him to serve Mass as an altar boy. At the Catholic University of Leuven he earned a doctorate in 1923 and no American before him had taken the Cardinal Mercier Prize, awarded there for philosophy. Offered teaching posts by Columbia and Oxford, he instead accepted a curacy in a poor Peoria parish without complaint, then taught philosophy at the Catholic University of America until 1950.
Broadcasting made him famous. His NBC radio programme The Catholic Hour, begun in 1930, drew thousands of letters a week and about four million listeners by 1950. In 1940 he narrated an Easter Mass on an experimental station, one of the first religious services televised in America. Life Is Worth Living, sponsored by the TV maker Admiral, jumped from three to fifteen stations within two months and eventually reached as many as 30 million viewers a week, most of them not Catholic. Berle joked that Sheen used old material too; Sheen suggested he be called Uncle Fultie.
His most famous broadcast, in February 1953, recast the burial scene of Julius Caesar with Soviet leaders in the roles and ended by predicting that Stalin would one day face judgment. Days later Stalin had a stroke and died within the week. Sheen also gave away about 10 million dollars of his television earnings to missionary work, and Time credited him with converting figures such as Henry Ford II and Clare Boothe Luce.
As Bishop of Rochester from 1966 to 1969 he condemned American involvement in Vietnam and reached out to Orthodox and Protestant Christians. His beatification, planned for 2019, was postponed amid a dispute over a priest's assignment, which the Diocese of Peoria said Sheen had not made. He was beatified in St. Louis on September 24, 2026.
Source: Fulton J. Sheen
