‘A powerful heavenly friend and intercessor’: Bishop Barron reflects on Fulton Sheen

ST. LOUIS — Families with young children, religious sisters and brothers, and pilgrims who had traveled to St. Louis filled the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis Sept. 23 for evening prayer on the eve of the beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

More than 1,000 people gathered for the service, as the cathedral’s schola sang the psalms and canticles and Archbishop Mitchell T. Rozanski of the Archdiocese of St. Louis presided. Bishop Robert Barron of Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, preached.

Barron began by recalling Sheen’s extraordinary influence as a preacher and communicator, including the millions who watched his television programs at the height of his career.

But Barron said he wanted to focus on a different question: What made Sheen “blessed, a saintly man of God”?

His answer, according to Barron, was friendship with Jesus Christ.

From the beginning of his own work in evangelization, Barron said, Sheen had been his “motto and inspiration.” Sheen repeatedly insisted that Christianity was not an abstract philosophy or simply a set of moral convictions but a relationship with a living person — Jesus Christ, who told his apostles that he no longer called…