America has three native-born canonized saints. All three are women: Elizabeth Ann Seton, Katharine Drexel, and Kateri Tekakwitha.
But who will be the first native-born American man raised to the altars?
It is, admittedly, a strange kind of race. Saints don’t compete or campaign. And the Church does not “make” saints in the deepest sense. When the Catholic Church canonizes someone, it is solemnly recognizing what God has already done—that this person truly shares in the glory of heaven and may be venerated and imitated by the faithful.
Still, from our side of eternity, the question is irresistible.
The field is strong: Bl. Solanus Casey, the humble Capuchin porter of Detroit; Bl. Michael McGivney, the parish priest who founded the Knights of Columbus; Bl. Stanley Rother, the missionary martyr from Oklahoma; and Bl. James Alfred Miller, the Christian brother killed while serving young people in Central America.
Each offers American Catholics a distinct image of holiness: humility, priestly fatherhood, missionary courage, and self-giving service.
Today, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen joins them.
For Catholics, the basic facts of Sheen’s beatification hardly need repeating. What’s more interesting, especially now, is what his cause says about the kind of saint America may be ready to offer the universal Church.
Sheen may have been the first great Catholic “influencer.” Not in the cheap sense of chasing attention or cultivating a brand, but in the nobler sense: he converted attention into evangelization. He demonstrated that a microphone, a camera, a chalkboard, and a printing press could become instruments of grace.
Before Catholic media became an industry, Sheen mastered radio, television, books, and public speaking. Life Is Worth Living brought Catholic thought into millions of American homes. He wasn’t a comedian, movie star, or political celebrity. He was a bishop in a cape, standing before a chalkboard, speaking about God, the soul, freedom, sin, suffering, love, and eternity.
And America listened.
Sheen won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality and famously thanked his “four writers”—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The line still works because it reveals the man. Sheen was witty, dramatic, and gifted. He didn’t water down the truth to fit the medium. He elevated the medium by filling it with truth.
We live in an age of podcasts, livestreams, reels, algorithms, and outrage. Everyone is communicating; fewer people are communing. Sheen reminds us that communication is a moral act. It can manipulate, distract, and deform—or it can illuminate, persuade, and save.
Sheen also spoke with clarity about the ideological dangers of his time. He warned against communism not simply as a political system, but as a false vision of the human person. A society that rejects God, he told us, eventually rejects man as well. When the image of God is rejected, human dignity—and human life—becomes negotiable.
His reach extended beyond Catholic circles. Ramón Estévez, the actor we know as Martin Sheen, took his stage name partly from admiration for Bishop Sheen, showing how deeply Sheen entered the American imagination.
Popes saw it, too.
In 1979, during Pope St. John Paul II’s first papal visit to the United States, the Polish pontiff embraced the aging archbishop in New York and told him, “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus. You are a loyal son of the Church.” Sheen broke down in tears.
That may be the most concise biography of Fulton Sheen ever spoken: written well, spoken well, loyal son.
The most important recent development may be Pope Leo XIV’s June 1 tribute to Sheen before the Pontifical Mission Societies. Leo called Sheen “a light of faith, hope, and love” whose media work shone for decades. Even more strikingly, the pope said, “I myself am a witness of his evangelization when I was growing up.” Sheen’s broadcasts, Leo added, touched millions with the hope of the gospel and brought enormous spiritual and material aid to mission territories.
That’s a missionary reading of Sheen’s life. In building up an audience, he built up the Church. His work was not a substitute for mission; it was mission.
There is a profound fittingness in imagining Sheen as America’s first native-born male saint. The United States is one of history’s great communications superpowers. We export images, stories, slogans, distractions, and dreams to the world. How beautiful it would be if the first American-born man canonized by the Church were a communicator who used every available medium not to promote himself, but to proclaim Jesus Christ.
In the end, the “race to the top” is not really among Casey, McGivney, Rother, Miller, and Sheen. All of them point upward. All of them call us to holiness.
The race is ours.
How will we use our gifts for God? How will we speak truth with courage and charity? How will we turn our platforms, professions, families, and conversations toward Jesus?
Life is worth living because Christ is worth following. And if America is looking for its first native-born male saint, Fulton Sheen would be a luminous place to start.