What’s Happening for Fulton Sheen’s Beatification? Find Out Here
Tens of thousands of tickets have already been sold for the upcoming beatification of the Emmy-winning American prelate.
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Assess the Church’s criteria for beatification in contemporary cases
The Church’s contemporary criteria for beatification combine theological judgment, historical investigation, procedural safeguards, and ecclesial discernment. They seek neither to canonize mere popularity nor to identify morally flawless personalities, but to establish with moral certitude that a deceased Catholic lived the Gospel in an exemplary way—or gave his or her life in a genuinely Christian act—and that God appears to confirm this witness through signs attributed to the person’s intercession.
Beatification is fundamentally a public ecclesial recognition of exemplary Christian holiness. The Church proposes the blessed as models of discipleship and permits a limited form of public veneration, ordinarily within a particular diocese, religious family, country, or ecclesial context. The Church’s contemporary procedure rests principally on the reforms of Divinus perfectionis Magister (1983) and the subsequent norms and instructions governing diocesan inquiries.
The Church therefore asks a practical theological question:
Does the evidence demonstrate that this person followed Christ with an exceptional integrity of life, martyrdom, or self-giving—and that this witness is spiritually fruitful for the faithful?
The process is not simply an award for social achievement, intellectual influence, heroic activism, or cultural importance. A candidate must be evaluated as a Christian disciple, with attention to faith, hope, charity, and the other virtues as lived in concrete circumstances.
Contemporary causes generally proceed under one of three categories:
The “offering of life” was formally established in 2017 as a distinct category, separate from martyrdom and heroic virtue.
The ordinary basis for a non-martyr cause is the candidate’s reputation for holiness and the practice of Christian virtue to an heroic degree. The relevant norm describes the candidate as someone who, during life, at death, and after death, enjoyed a reputation for having lived all the Christian virtues heroically.
“Heroic” does not mean that every action was spectacular or that the candidate never experienced weakness, illness, conflict, or ordinary human limitation. It means that the person habitually responded to God’s grace with an exceptional consistency, maturity, and generosity appropriate to his or her state of life.
This criterion is especially significant in contemporary cases because holiness is not restricted to cloistered religious or ecclesiastical leaders. Recent papal teaching explicitly highlights:
Thus, the contemporary Church’s assessment is more attentive to the holiness of ordinary life. The relevant question is not whether the candidate conformed to a single historical stereotype of sanctity, but whether the person’s particular vocation became a genuine path of charity.
Martyrdom is not simply an unjust death, political persecution, or death in a violent period. The Church examines whether the death had the theological structure of martyrdom.
The criteria identified in the recent teaching of Pope Francis include:
This third element is crucial. Christian martyrdom is not merely passive victimhood. It is a death united to Christ’s self-giving love. Pope Francis explains that the Cross can be understood only through love: divine love enters suffering and death in order to overcome them.
Consequently, contemporary martyrdom cases require careful historical and moral analysis. Investigators must distinguish:
A major practical distinction is that a miracle is not required for the beatification of a martyr, because martyrdom itself is regarded as sufficient evidence of the candidate’s conformity to Christ in the supreme witness of charity.
The Church’s contemporary approach can also recognize the witness of Christians outside the Catholic Church in certain circumstances. Pope Francis referred to Orthodox and Anglican Christians who died for Christ as martyrs, stressing that martyrdom can reveal a profound unity among Christians even when full ecclesial communion is lacking. This does not erase differences concerning communion or doctrine, but it shows that the assessment of martyrdom is centered on fidelity to Christ.
The 2017 category of the offering of life addresses cases in which a person freely and generously gives life for another without fitting the strict definition of martyrdom.
The official criteria require:
This category is carefully delimited. It does not mean that every heroic act of self-sacrifice constitutes an offering of life. The sacrifice must be:
The category is particularly relevant to contemporary figures who accepted serious danger, disease, or death in order to protect or serve others. Yet the Church still requires evidence that the act was spiritually intelligible as Christian charity and not merely admirable humanitarianism.
A cause must begin with a genuine reputation of holiness, not merely with a campaign organized after death. The Church defines this reputation as an opinion spread among the faithful concerning the purity and integrity of the person’s life and the heroic degree of the virtues practiced.
This reputation has two dimensions:
Popularity alone is insufficient. A public figure may be admired for courage, competence, charity, or cultural influence without possessing the specifically Christian reputation required by the process. Conversely, a relatively unknown person may have a strong cause if credible witnesses testify to a life of profound faith and charity.
The Church also examines a reputation for intercessory power, meaning that the faithful turn to the candidate in prayer and attribute spiritual or physical favors to that person’s intercession. The investigation includes the alleged miracles attributed to the Servant of God or Blessed.
This protects the distinction between Christian veneration and celebrity culture. The candidate is not treated as a self-sufficient source of power. Any authentic miracle is understood as God’s action through the person’s intercession.
The diocesan inquiry is not intended to create a devotional biography or a public-relations narrative. Its purpose is to gather evidence sufficient to reach moral certitude regarding heroic virtue or martyrdom.
Moral certitude is a high degree of assurance based on converging evidence. It does not mean mathematical certainty or the impossible elimination of every conceivable doubt. It means that, after a serious and balanced examination, a reasonable person can judge that the contrary explanation is not persuasive.
The inquiry therefore should address both favorable and unfavorable evidence, including:
A contemporary cause is particularly vulnerable if it relies on selective memory, devotional exaggeration, edited quotations, or anachronistic judgments. The Sanctorum Mater framework emphasizes the gathering of documentary proof and the hearing of witnesses in accordance with the applicable procedural norms.
The process begins locally but is not decided solely by the candidate’s diocese. The diocesan bishop or equivalent authority has the right and duty to investigate, within the relevant jurisdiction:
This local stage is pastorally appropriate because the local Church possesses access to witnesses, archives, institutions, and the community that knew the candidate. It also prevents every cause from being treated as an abstract Roman procedure detached from the person’s actual ecclesial setting.
At the same time, the cause is governed by particular pontifical law and by the competent Roman dicastery. The diocesan investigation is therefore preparatory and judicial in character, while the Holy See provides broader review and final ecclesial judgment.
The term Servant of God applies once the cause has been initiated; it does not mean that the Church has already judged the person holy. This distinction is pastorally important, since public enthusiasm can otherwise treat an early-stage candidate as though beatification had already occurred.
The present criteria are strong in several respects:
The recent emphasis on “everyday holiness” also makes beatification more representative of the universal call to holiness. The Church’s contemporary witness can include people whose sanctity was expressed through family life, professional work, sickness, poverty, evangelization, or service to the marginalized.
Several tensions require careful handling.
First, public reputation can be unstable. Contemporary media can produce rapid international devotion, but visibility is not the same as holiness. The investigation must ask whether the reputation is informed, durable, and specifically Christian.
Second, heroic virtue must not be confused with personality or effectiveness. A gifted communicator, reformer, founder, or public intellectual may have exercised significant influence, but influence itself does not prove sanctity. The case of Fulton J. Sheen illustrates how evangelization through mass media and missionary service may be relevant evidence, but the decisive issue remains the Christian quality of his life and ministry, not the size of his audience.
Third, martyrdom must not be politicized. A candidate’s cause cannot be established merely by assigning religious meaning to a violent death. The motive of the persecutor and the candidate’s Christian response must be demonstrated.
Fourth, self-sacrifice must not be romanticized. The offering-of-life category requires freedom, charity, a connection to death, and prior Christian virtue. These conditions protect the Church from confusing sanctity with recklessness or disregard for life.
The Church’s contemporary criteria are theologically coherent and pastorally adaptable. They preserve the traditional core—conformity to Christ, heroic charity, faithful endurance, and ecclesial recognition—while applying it to new historical circumstances and a wider range of vocations.
The most important criterion remains not extraordinary achievement but perfection of charity: a life transformed by God’s grace and directed toward God and neighbor. Pope Francis summarized the purpose of the process by presenting the saints as witnesses who help the faithful live their baptismal vocation and see “the most beautiful face of the Church.”
Beatification, therefore, is best understood as a prudent ecclesial judgment that a person’s life, death, or self-offering gives credible and exemplary evidence of Christ-like holiness, supported where required by the sign of a miracle and always ordered toward the sanctification of the faithful.