by Pascale Rizk
Rome – The missionary zeal that permeated the entire life and work of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was neither an effort nor a strategy. It was not driven by a desire for conquest. Everything in him flowed simply from being a “fervent apostle of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world”. He was a disciple made both ingenious and realistic by the very faith that recognized that, without the love of Christ, even the most sophisticated strategies and tools used to proclaim the Gospel ultimately become like “a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal”, as St Paul writes in the First Letter to the Corinthians.
Archbishop Sheen’s missionary vision and its relevance today are highlighted by Msgr Roger J. Landry, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, as he reflects on the life and legacy of the American Archbishop, who will be proclaimed Blessed on 24 September in Saint Louis, Missouri, during a solemn liturgy presided over by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle.
Below we publish the text of the video interview that Msgr Roger J. Landry gave to Fides during the most recent General Assembly of the Pontifical Mission Societies.
Venerable Fulton J. Sheen himself led the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States from 1950 to 1966.
What does Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s legacy specifically mean for the missionary identity of the Church in the United States of America today?
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, soon to be blessed, Fulton Sheen. His whole life is defined by his ardent love for Jesus Christ. The thing he did was to try to serve Jesus well and to bring as many people as he possibly could to come to know Jesus, to feel loved by Jesus, to love Jesus back, and to try to spread love of him.
That’s why he studied so hard and became one of the most educated priests in American history. That’s why he worked so hard on preaching and why he was able to make pulpits explode with the fire of the Holy Spirit as he passed on his love for Jesus. That’s one of the reasons why every morning for the 61 years of his priesthood, he made a solid hour of adoration before the Lord. And that is the reason why he was able to say that his greatest love has always been for the missions of the Church. He gave everything he could, so much energy, so much talent, so much money that he raised through his various ventures, in order to try to spread the faith all across the globe.
Everything flows from the fact that he was a devout disciple and an ardent apostle of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.
What aspects of his personal spirituality do you find most relevant for missionaries on the ground today and which one touches you most personally and why?
Fulton Sheen was not just a great missionary to missionaries, but he also trained the entire church out of the effect of a mission. Two things I’d say about his piety that all of us can emulate. The first is, he took Jesus’ real presence in the Holy Eucharist seriously. For him, the Eucharist wasn’t a thing or it was someone. And it was a no-brainer for him to prioritize time with Jesus every single day.The mission of the church is not just bringing the words of the gospel to the ends of the earth. It’s not even just founding churches. The mission of the church is to bring Jesus Christ to the end of the earth. lives with us, God with us, is still with us in the Holy Eucharist, in his body, blood, soul, and divinity. And so Fulton Sheen’s love for the Eucharistic board really inspired his missionary spirituality so that churches would be built, not edifices and physical structures, but churches that are made the mystical body through Jesus working in the Holy Eucharist. And then the second great thing I’d say about Sheen is that he worked in the art of communication.He knew that it wasn’t enough just to have faith. It wasn’t enough just to have the desire to spread the faith. He needed to be effective in spreading the faith. He needed to show the fire. of love that God has for us in one’s words as one preached the gospel. Fulton Sheen always had that. And one of the biggest influences of his life has been that he has encouraged not just few media, old and new, as pulpits in order to shear with ardor the treasure of our faith. And so those are the two things that I think he’s taught the whole church about doing mission well. For me, the most powerful thing about Fulton J. Sheen is his love for the priesthood. Fulton Sheen was a priest’s priest, and when he finally retired, he spent the last decade of his life preaching three weekly retreats to priests every month, because he wanted to form his brother priests with a real missionary Christ-like heart, so that they could go as salt-like leaven and transform the whole. world. I started listening to Fulton Sheen’s cassettes when I was an 18-year-old on long drives in my car, and his thought penetrated my mind, his fire penetrated my heart, and I like to think now as his successor, he was the fifth National Director of the I not only have his example to follow, his playbook to implement, but I have his powerful intercession from Jesus’ eternal right side. So I really love Fulton Sheen.
What can today’s “digital missionaries” learn from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, not just in terms of technique, but in terms of that spiritual grounding? What would he think also in a critical way about the illusions of our era of communication?
What would he think also what would be his criticism in light of what’s happening today in the world of digital media and digital missionaries world Archbishop would encourage all of today’s digital missionaries and influencers to start first and foremost with their with Jesus.
If they don’t have that experience of the Lord’s personal love for them, if they’re not really trying to grow in faith, hope, and love in that personal relationship with Jesus, then to use St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians, they’ll just be noisy gongs and clashing cymbals. For them to bear great fruit, they have to be attached to Jesus as branches on the vine. And so that would be the first piece of advice that Fulton Sheen Sheen did. For Fulton Sheen, it wasn’t the medium that was important. It was the message that was being broadcast through whatever media he used, whether it was books, whether it was radio, whether it was television, or to use today, whether it would be videos or podcasts or even artificial intelligence, etc.
Fulton Sheen was always focused on that message, and that message… was what God wants to do with us that he wants to live life in tandem with us that he not only has suffered died and risen for us but he walks with us still today christ is risen he just as it has.
And that truth was very much known to Fulton Sheen, and he lived every day, starting with an hour before the risen Lord Jesus in the tabernacles of his private chapels. With regard to artificial intelligence, Fulton Sheen would first and foremost see its great potential. Second, he would want to make sure… That that great possible means to help the church and help humanity wouldn’t come back to harm humanity. That we shouldn’t be followers of artificial intelligence, eventually be dominated by it.
But we’ve got to exercise dominion, just as the Lord told us in the book of Genesis, over the works of our hand, over the creativity that he has inspired. So Fulton Sheen would first and foremost see the possibilities in these new means.God has placed before us, but he would likewise call everybody to recognize that the devil actually can use those same means. And so we have to be on guard to make sure they’re always ordered to God, because if they’re not ordered to God, they, and we through them, will become disordered. As you said, Fulton Sheen built his missionary action on a daily holy power before the Blessed Sacrament.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, built his entire missionary action on a daily holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament. You walked 65 days carrying the Eucharist across the United States in 2024. What is the substantial link between the Eucharist and mission?
As Cardinal Tagle, the pro-prefect of the Dicastery of Evangelization, said to the Church in the United States during the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis,”The Eucharistic Jesus is inherently missionary.” He gives his body and blood for us, and then he says, do this in my memory. Which doesn’t mean merely celebrate the Mass in memory of him, but it means make our life truly Eucharistic. That we, like Jesus, are meant to be broken for others.That we are supposed to be able to say to others, this is my body, this is my blood, these are my calluses, this is my sweat, these are my tears, this is my heart, all that I am and have, give it out of love for you. A Eucharist that doesn’t turn into mission, as St. John Paul II once told us, is intrinsically fragmented it’s broken but just as we receive the Lord’s outpoured love for us when we’re able to receive Jesus worthily in Holy Communion so Jesus now within us wants us to continue that communion with him by sharing in his mission for the salvation of the world That’s one of the reasons why the celebration of every Mass finishes with God giving us his blessing and then saying, go in a… the Gospel of the Lord. “Ite missa est” means the goal of the church has been set and so Christ who makes us his body sends us out together with him so that transformed by him the Eucharist we might transform the whole world.
Pope Leo XIV is often described as a missionary Pope but above the slogans, how do you analyse his missionary perspective and vision?
Pope Leo served for 22 years as a missionary seminarian, priest, and bishop in Peru. And then for 12 years, he went to 50 different countries as the prior general of the Augustinians. So for half of his life, he was a missionary.When he was elected May 8, 2025, he was the first pope since Saint Peter who had dedicated part of his life to going far away from home to proclaim the gospel to people who hadn’t heard Jesus, as Leo did among the mountains in the north of Peru. So he brought that experience, he brought that much-marked passport. with him to the chair of Saint Peter.
And just like Pope St. Pius X would have been the first pope in centuries to have been a pastor, use that pastoral experience to transform the papacy. So Pope Leo, who’s the first missio agentes pope since Simon Barjona of Betsaida in Galilee, crisscrossing the globe to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the faith with him to the Apostolic Palace. It’s not by surprise. That in his opening homily, not only did he greet the people in Sheklaio, where he’d been a missionary bishop, but he said, together we must look for ways to become a missionary church. When you think about what makes unique his missionary experience, it’s that he… recognizes that mission work is the joint effort of the entire church, that it’s not one missionary’s labors, it’s not a few in a missionary congregation, but for the church’s mission to succeed, it’s all hands on deck. And from his first words, As the 267th Peter, he’s been asking all of us to join him with missionary zeal in bringing the world’s greatest gift, Jesus Christ. Christ himself to everyone, all 8.1 billion, out of the 8.1 billion alive today, for whom Jesus lovingly gave his life. That’s what makes him truly unique and how blessed we are, not just to have an American Pope, I can say that as an American. but also to have a truly missionary Pope and that desire to spread the faith is in his bones.
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