Patty Sperendi is praying in front of the tomb of archbishop Fulton Sheen for a very specific reason: her 14-year-old great-nephew has recently had a cancer relapse.
“I told my niece and my nephew that I’d pray for their son,” she says.
From Ann Arbor, Michigan, Sperendi has made the trek to Peoria, Illinois, because Sheen holds an important place in her Catholic faith.
“Bishop Sheen started out being a childhood hero of mine and continued through my life,” she says.
Sperendi recalls how, after dinner on Sunday evenings, her grandfather would give her and her siblings two options: go play outside or sit down, stay quiet and watch Bishop Sheen on television.
“Even as a six-year-old, there was something that drew me to listening to him. He made me feel safe,” she says.
Sheen, regarded by many as the original television evangelist, is set to be beatified at a ceremony in St Louis on Thursday, marking the penultimate step on a 25-year journey to make him the first US-born bishop to be canonized a saint.
It is a major event for the estimated 52 million Catholics in the US including Peoria, a post-industrial city of 110,000 people in north-central Illinois where Sheen grew up, is a place of high excitement. Huge posters depicting Sheen hang from street buildings while the hum of tour bus engines carrying followers from across the country to Sheen’s museum and a nearby cathedral fill the air.
From inside the cathedral of St Mary of the Immaculate Conception, Sperendi says she has read his books, but this is the first time she’s visited Sheen’s tomb.
“He would write on the board, then he would flip the board over and say: “Look, it’s all erased. An angel did it,’” Sperendi says, recalling how Sheen captured her attention as a child.
“It wasn’t done in the 50s. Look at the following he had – the man won an Emmy. What bishop has ever won an Emmy?”
Sheen’s beatification is happening at a time when Americans here in Illinois and across the country are exhibiting renewed interest in the Catholic church.
Born in 1895 to second-generation Irish immigrant parents, Sheen grew up on a farm in El Paso, Illinois, before moving to Peoria at a young age. Realizing the power of technology early, Sheen hosted The Catholic Hour, a radio show that ran on NBC in the 1930s and 40s, before transitioning to television.
His weekly religious talk show, Life Is Worth Living, ran for six years until the late 1950s, with his approachable style winning him an Emmy award, an appearance on the cover of Time magazine, and attracting almost 30 million viewers weekly – decades before other Christian denominations and rites turned to television screens in a bid to grow their power and to reach millions of worshippers.
Sheen wrote dozens of books and pamphlets, including critiques of communism. He died in New York City in 1979.
In 2010, a Peoria woman who had given birth to a son without a pulse for 61 minutes prayed furiously to Sheen. The baby survived and, with the incident regarded as a miracle, a canonical investigation was submitted to the Vatican in 2011 which put Sheen on the road to sainthood.
A second miracle would need to be confirmed and approved by Rome in order for Sheen to be canonized, which would see him just the fourth US-born person and first man to become a saint.
“To have a saint here, from the United States, particularly somebody who’s actually so recent – all of my people remember him as a television star – [is incredible],” says father James Conlon who has traveled to Peoria with a group of 34 parishioners from the St Francis of Assisi parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“He still has an impact; he was a magnificent communicator of the faith. This was a guy who used the means of the day – remember, when you’re talking about the 1950s, 1960s, television was pretty new.”
But Sheen isn’t even Illinois’ most famous Catholic – Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost was raised 150 miles north of Peoria, in Chicago.
Leo, an avid Chicago White Sox supporter, has bantered with rival baseball fans at the Vatican and in statements has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration for its “inhumane” treatment of immigrants, telling reporters in Rome last November that: “If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that.”
In return, the 71-year-old pontiff has drawn the ire of recent Catholic convert JD Vance, who has called him “too European” and warned “it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
At a time when the Catholic church has continued to grapple with the fallout of decades-long sexual abuse scandals, Leo’s inclusive and relaxed worldview has, in part, fueled an increase in people in Catholic church pews that has been observed in the US every year since the pandemic.
Last Easter, the archdiocese of Chicago, the largest in Illinois with around two million members, was expected to welcome 1,059 new members, up from 696 in 2025. In the two decades prior to 2020, attendance at Catholic churches in the US had fallen by 20% – a decline twice the level that was experienced by protestant churches.
“I’ve noticed that so many young people get their spiritual fires lit by [religious] retreats. I think they’re a great way for teens to recenter themselves amidst the stress of school work and peer pressure and to assess their priorities, specifically where God lies in those priorities,” says Cameron Hageman, a first-year college student from Peoria who took part in a virtual meeting with Pope Leo last November.
“I also think that there’s a massive growth in the toxicity of the political landscape in the world. Pope Leo, being an American, has given guidance on many issues that our country struggles with, which is helpful for us as Catholic teens who are unsure which sources to trust.”
Conlon, a priest in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, says the rebound is something he is witnessing every week.
“You can see it in my parish – the number, particularly of young men, who are coming back to church is just phenomenal in Ann Arbor,” he says.
He says Pope Leo’s persona is perhaps playing a role but “there’s also something going on in our world that [means] they’re looking for something richer and more meaningful.”
Originally from an Irish county bordering Roscommon, where Sheen’s family had emigrated from, Conlon says he met Fulton Sheen when he was eight years old, during a visit by the latter to Ireland.
“I remember [him being] this very interesting guy who preached in a completely different style from the clergy that I knew,” he says.
This week St Louis, a city long known as the ‘Rome of the West’ due to its large number of Catholics, churches and cathedrals on Thursday is expecting around 50,000 people to attend Sheen’s beatification.
In Peoria, 150 miles to the north, plans are afoot for a new museum to open on the grounds of the Spaulding Institute, the Catholic high school once attended by Sheen, in 2029 that will use cutting edge technology to share Sheen’s message.
“We would have tens of thousands of people come and visit the tomb. A lot of civic leaders – whether Catholic or not – know that Peoria is on display as a host,” says monsignor Jason Gray, executive director of the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation.
“Now, we’ll use modern media which includes the internet and AI and all sorts of things to have an experience that people can have really encountering Sheen when they come and visit Peoria.”
