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Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Pope Leo XIV’s delegate to the beatification of Fulton Sheen, never said the word “communism” in his homily today.
The poor, poverty, and the vulnerable came up fourteen times.
“For Archbishop Sheen, caring for the poor was not ideological propaganda, but an imperative for the following of Christ.”
He preached those words at the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, before roughly 50,000 pilgrims, a crowd that skewed conservative and included much of the leadership of the Catholic Church in the United States. His choice of subject was the message.
No one doubts that Fulton Sheen preached against communism. He published Communism and the Conscience of the West in 1948, and he spent the better part of two decades on radio and television treating communism as the enemy of the age. That record is settled.
The question facing the Church in the United States is a different one: whether communism poses the same threat to the West today that it did seventy years ago. How you answer it decides what Sheen’s beatification means in 2026.
Bishop Robert Barron gave his answer on Tuesday, in a video filmed in front of the Gateway Arch that Fox News ran as an exclusive. “You don’t need me to tell you that communism is making a comeback right now in our country,” he said, calling Sheen “one of the great voices against communism in mid-20th century America” and adding, “We need that voice again today.” Much of the narrative leading up to this Mass, shaped by Barron and his allies over many years, has run along the same track.
We simply disagree about the biggest threat facing the country and the Church right now. Bishop Barron is making his argument, and we are making ours: an authoritarian president who attacks the pope and sends ICE into parishes, whose agents have shot Catholic men dead on their way to work, endangers God’s people more than the Democratic Socialists of America, a movement born inside the Catholic Church through a saint-to-be, ever will. Readers can weigh both.
Cardinal Tagle, speaking on behalf of the Holy Father, gave his own answer without ever naming the disagreement. He took as his text Pope Leo’s apostolic letter, which calls Sheen “a tireless preacher of the Gospel through the modern means of communication, and a diligent shepherd, animated by missionary zeal,” and then he told the priests in the room, in seven separate passages, what mission is not.
The refrain was “It is not mission. It is not blessedness,” and the cardinal attached it, one by one, to preaching yourself instead of Jesus, to proclaiming “destructive words” while “doing violent acts,” to dominating others and making your importance felt, and to preaching “from a posture of self-righteousness that prevents you from empathizing with other people’s brokenness.” Without naming a single name, the cardinal called out the celebrity priest culture that afflicts our Church today, and he said it to a room full of priests.
Then he asked which people most often remain anonymous and forgotten, and answered his own question: the poor.
The heart of the homily was Sheen’s intervention at the third session of the Second Vatican Council on November 9, 1964, when the bishop of the airwaves begged the council fathers to make poverty the fruit of the council.
Tagle read the passage out in full, down to the line about the 30th parallel, and the crowd in St. Louis broke into applause before he reached the end. “Wow,” the cardinal said.
He went on to describe how Sheen gave away whatever he earned from his broadcasts and books to the missions, and how he turned the American Church toward the poor churches of the world, before closing with the leper colony at Buluba, Uganda, where
Sheen flinched from a man’s corrupted hand, dropped the silver cross he had come to give, and then, ashamed, picked it back up and counted himself “the 501st person with leprosy.”
This is the Sheen that so much of the commentary has hidden.
The right-wing recreation of him as a Cold War mascot has crowded out the bishop who went toe to toe with William F. Buckley Jr. over the Second Vatican Council, telling him on Firing Line in January 1970 that “what the Vatican Council did was to relate us to the world” and that the Church had moved “from the rigidity of excommunication to the patient bearing of offenses.”
As I wrote yeseterday, Sheen defended the council at a time when defending it cost him friends.
The same recreation has no room for the bishop who, in the summer of 1967, asked President Johnson from his Rochester pulpit to withdraw American troops from Vietnam while Cardinal Spellman was still blessing the war. Buckley pressed him on that too.
Sheen answered that he had been “giving a Christian appraisal, not a political appraisal,” and that restraint would have “given a moral example to the world.”
When Buckley tried to turn the cost of the war into evidence of American virtue, Sheen walked him through the arithmetic of killing, from 75 cents a man under Julius Caesar to a million dollars an hour in Vietnam.
“I was not speaking about moral arithmetic,” he said. “I was just speaking about the terrific economic burden that is thrust upon mankind in virtue of fighting.”
Fellow Catholics, we cannot pretend none of that happened. Cardinal Tagle’s homily should be our guide.
Fulton Sheen defended the council, the poor, and, at real cost to himself, peace; he stood against every ideology, from the left and from the right, that threatened the well-being of God’s people. Nobody who has read him can imagine a Fulton Sheen who would keep quiet about the tyranny of Donald Trump, because silence before power was never who he was.
A personal note.
I remember the first summer I discovered YouTube, as an undergraduate at Xavier University in 2009, a lonely stretch when I carried both the burdens of life and a fear of the future.
I found Fulton Sheen there, black and white, chalk in hand, and in many ways he directed me toward the light in the middle of the darkness. He named his program Life Is Worth Living. During a tough period of my life, I took those words as my own personal motto.
Today was also a breakout moment for Cardinal Tagle.
When Pope Leo’s earthly pilgrimage ends, as far off as we pray that day may be, the friend who handed a nervous Robert Prevost a piece of candy inside the conclave will be counted a papabile, and what he did in St. Louis is part of the reason. He reframed the conversation around who Fulton Sheen actually was, and around the kind of Church Leo XIV means to lead.
Thank God for that.
Nostalgia for a past that never quite existed is no answer, and neither is a refusal to walk into the future; what remains is trust in the Spirit at work in the Church and in the world.
Blessed Fulton, pray for us.
Cardinal Tagle’s full homily
Here is the complete homily from the Dome at America’s Center, with Letters from Leo subtitles.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal Tagle, with Pope Leo XIV, and with the millions of American Catholics who believe that the poor are not a talking point and that a Church wounded by poverty is the only Church that can convert a doubting world.
In an era when saints get conscripted into cable-news arguments, we remain rooted in a faith that measures every ideology, of the left and of the right, by what it does to the least of these.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than nostalgia and fear. They are looking for the real Fulton Sheen, the one who defended the council, begged for the poor, and asked a president to end a war while his own cardinal was blessing it.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I may be wrong, but I can't recall Archbishop Fulton Sheen associated with any political party. He stood for God and God alone.
Barron is part of the problem, not part of the solution. He provides window dressing for Trump and the far-right espousing ideology not the teachings of Jesus. He is a disgrace.