Bl. Fulton Sheen Recap & Mortgage Rates Rising

Drew Mariani (0:00)

The issues that matter most, right here. The Drew Mariani Show.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

On Relevant Radio. Well, for an entire generation of Americans, he was a weekly fixture in their living rooms, using humor to connect with the faithful, like in this 1974 clip from one of his sermons.

Fulton Sheen (0:22)

So I simplified it and I said, well, boys, I'm going to talk on heaven and how to get there. Would you like to come and find out?

They said, you don't even know the way to the town hall.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

Well, long before social media, long before streaming, Archbishop Fulton Sheen was using radio and television to talk about faith to millions of people.

Bob Tiballi (0:44)

It's The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio.

Drew Mariani (0:49)

That was ABC News on the church's latest. Blessed Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Good afternoon. I'm Drew Mariani. It's great to be back here with you today, isn't it? Wonderful to hear Father Richard Simon. And just so grateful to be able to spend my afternoons with you. And thank you for tuning in last Thursday. We did the beatification coverage. I haven't had a chance to do a post follow-up on the beatification with you, so I thought maybe we could talk just a little bit about that today. And I'd love to get your own experience. I don't know if you were there. Did you go down to St. Louis where you were present for that historic moment? It was a pretty significant moment. I'd love to hear what your experience was like, so feel free to sound off. You can write in. You can call me at 888-914-9149.

888-914-9149. Pretty amazing, right? The procession took about 40 minutes, and all of those seminarians and deacons and priests and bishops and cardinals. They left a lot of people stunned. One person said that it looked like all the seminarians from the country were there. There were so many people. I was pretty, it was breathtaking. 50,000 people in the Dome at America Center there in St. Louis. They were to witness this in person and participate. Of course, Brooke Taylor and I, we went ahead and we gave you live coverage of the event. And if you missed it, you want to just get a glimpse of what went down, feel free to go ahead and to go to Relevant Radio Plus. It is up there or go to the app. You can stream the whole beatification and see really what was a magnificent day. It was supposed to happen back in 2019 Some bishops requested a delay and they ended up looking a little bit further into the ministry of the Bishop of Rochester, New York and over how he handled some issues and all that got cleared. And of course, it set the way for the beatification of Bishop Sheen. And it's just an incredible, incredible, it was an incredible event.

I was looking to determine what was the relic of Bishop Sheen that they had present there that day when I was doing the broadcast. I wasn't sure whether it was a piece of an arm, a finger. I mean, first class relic tends to be a piece of the body or blood or hair of the person that is being elevated to either being beatified or canonized. It was actually his jawbone. And I saw an image of it a little later when they had a big close up of it. You can even see the teeth in this jawbone. And it was chosen because of his extraordinary ministry of speaking and preaching. I just thought it was so appropriate, right? What a powerful evangelist here in this country. St. Anthony of Padua, another great orator like St. John Chrysostom and others. St. Anthony of Padua, his tongue, which by the way is incorrupt, and his vocal cords are on display in Padua. So very, very appropriate. So for those of you who are not familiar with this, you think, you Catholics are nuts. What are you talking about? Why do you have somebody's jawbone in a reliquary and you're proceeding around a church with it, or a stadium in this case?

You know, I know you're thinking, you know, worship belongs to God alone. It does. A relic, it just honors the person whose body participated in the life of grace. And ultimately, it points towards the resurrection, right?

The Archbishop, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, they've done a lot of other things. That relic is going to be on display. Of course, you can go to his tomb down there. They just announced that St. Mary's in El Paso, Illinois. It's where Sheen was baptized. They're going to unite with St. John's in Benson to form a brand new parish, the Blessed Fulton Sheen Parish. They're going to do that on December 9th. So already Bishop Sheen's legacy continues. I was part of the Sheen Awards on Friday night, the day after the beatification, where we looked at those involved in media, Catholic media in particular, in the role that we were doing. It was just spectacular to be there that night as well. But I want to hear from you today. I'd love to get your experience. If you were there, feel free to dial in, give me a call, 888-914-9149.