Thursday, September 24, 2026 · Independent editorial

Life is still worth living

Tens of thousands of people stood in a football stadium in St. Louis on Thursday and watched a teenage boy walk a relic toward the altar. The boy is James Fulton Engstrom. The man the Church just called Blessed is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Beatification puts him one step from sainthood. The Associated Press report is the one Breitbart carried.

Organizers told the AP that about 50,000 tickets went out. Peoria, his home diocese, did not have a room that big, so the Mass was at the Dome at America’s Center. James was born at home in September 2010 with no pulse. His parents asked for Sheen’s prayers. Medical workers were about to declare him dead when his heart started. The Church counts that as the miracle. Pope Francis approved it for this step. James carried the relics in with his family.

Pope Leo XIV has said he watched Sheen’s broadcasts growing up. On June 1 he called Sheen “a light of faith, hope, and love.” The night before the Mass he asked that Sheen’s example, and his intercession, would push other people to spread the Gospel with some joy in it. That is a pope talking about a priest. It is not a campaign line.

If you are younger than the reruns, Sheen was the man in the cape at a chalkboard. Life Is Worth Living sat opposite Milton Berle in the 1950s. He won an Emmy. People still repeat the joke that he thanked his writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He signed off “God love you.” A midterm does not do that. A press conference does not do that.

A lot of Christians will scroll past this because it is “Catholic” or because it is not on the ballot. The thing that happened is simpler than that. A child who had no pulse walked into a stadium carrying the relics of the priest his parents prayed to. You can argue about saints later. You should not need a party to be glad the boy is alive, or to notice that somebody once put the Gospel on television without sanding off the four Gospels.

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