Fulton J. Sheen

Fulton J. Sheen was an American Catholic bishop, broadcaster and writer whose radio and television work between the 1930s and the 1960s made him the most-recognized Catholic preacher in 20th-century America. He was born Peter John Sheen on May 8, 1895, in El Paso, Illinois, took the name Fulton (his mother's maiden name) in childhood, and was raised in Peoria, Illinois.

He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria in 1919 and went on to take a doctorate in philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium in 1923. He joined the faculty of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in 1926 and taught there until 1950. He was consecrated auxiliary bishop of New York in 1951 and served as Bishop of Rochester, New York, from 1966 to 1969; he was appointed titular Archbishop of Newport on his retirement.

From 1930 to 1950 he was the principal speaker on the NBC radio program The Catholic Hour, which reached an audience of about 4 million. From 1952 to 1957 he hosted the prime-time television program Life Is Worth Living on the DuMont Network and then on ABC, drawing as many as 30 million viewers a week and winning the 1953 Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality. His later television series The Fulton Sheen Program ran from 1961 to 1968. He wrote more than 70 books, among them Peace of Soul (1949) and Life of Christ (1958).

From 1950 to 1966 he served as national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the principal U.S. Catholic missionary fundraising body. He died in his private chapel in New York City on December 9, 1979. He was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012; his cause for canonization is open.

His name Fulton is an English surname-turned-given-name from a place name, probably Old English fugol ("bird") and tūn ("settlement"). It is a masculine name borne in his case as a maternal-family surname carried into given-name use.