(LifeSiteNews) — Venerable Fulton J. Sheen will be beatified on Thursday, September 24, 2026, in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, will preside at the beatification Mass as Pope Leo XIV’s representative.

Archbishop Sheen was declared “venerable” by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, meaning that he was recognized as having lived a life of heroic virtue.

Beatification, the first major step towards canonization, means the sovereign pontiff has declared that the individual not only lived a holy life but is in Heaven and requires that one miracle be attributed to his or her intercession. In 2019, Pope Francis recognized the miraculous healing of a stillborn child that had been credited to the late archbishop’s intercession.

His beatification was initially approved in 2019 but was delayed by the Diocese of Rochester, New York, as a precautionary measure, as the diocese – where he served as bishop – faced over 70 sex abuse allegations. However, the late bishop of Rochester had never been accused of abuse or cover-up.

Archbishop Sheen was a popular teacher and radio and television personality in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. His television show “Life is Worth Living” reached millions of viewers of all backgrounds, supplementing more than 50 books.

In one remarkable teaching on confession in the mid-1970s, he discussed sin and its resulting weight of guilt on overall health, zeroing in on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. 

“Just think, my dear ladies, of how many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul,” said Sheen.

Fulton Sheen’s old clip on abortion is going VIRAL.

“Just think of how many mentally disturbed women we are going have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul.” pic.twitter.com/kQh8chy6nv

— Sign of the Cross (@CatholicSOTC) January 13, 2026

In 1947, in one of his most memorable radio sermons, then-Bishop Sheen laid out the dozen or so tricks the anti-Christ will use to destroy Christians and declared the anti-Christ would set up a “counter church” or the “ape of the Church.”

“(The antichrist) will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live. He will invoke religion to destroy religion. He will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived,” Bishop Sheen said at the time.

“In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; he will not believe in God,” the bishop continued. “And because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.”

“He will set up a counter-Church, which will be the ape of the Church because he, the devil, is the ape of God. It will be the mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the Church as the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man, in his loneliness and frustration, to hunger more and more for membership in his community that will give man enlargement of purpose, without any need of personal amendment and without the admission of personal guilt. These are days in which the devil has been given a particularly long rope,” he added.

Archbishop Sheen died in New York at the age of 84, on December 9, 1979.