Tuesday, February 10, 2026
1954 President Dwight Eisenhower warned against US intervention in Vietnam
2019 Sexual abuse investigation into US Southern Baptist churches revealed 400 church members implicated with over 700 victims
2023 A World War II-era bomb found in Great Yarmouth, England exploded in "unplanned" detonation as experts attempted to disarm it
2025 President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on all aluminium and steel imports.
In bed at 9, up at 5:15. 33/27/37/28.
Morning meds at 7:45 a.m I missed all the meds yesterday, distracted by hand and back pains from the fall.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll append the words from my memoir about my memories of Bishop Sheen to this excerpt from this morning's New York Times.The Vatican will allow an American archbishop, who was one of the best-known Catholic clergy of the last century, to be beatified, ending a six-year delay and placing him one step away from sainthood.
Archbishop Sheen, once called “the greatest communicator of the 20th century” by the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, headed a radio broadcast for 20 years before hosting the television series “Life Is Worth Living” in the 1950s and a similar program in the 1960s. He won an Emmy for most outstanding personality in 1953, besting nominees including Edward R. Murrow and Lucille Ball.
Some experts credit Archbishop Sheen’s popularity with paving the way for the election of John F. Kennedy as the country’s first Catholic president in 1960.
Beatification, a key step in the process of becoming a saint, means the church has investigated and verified a miracle connected to the person, and determined that he has either been martyred or demonstrated a “heroic” level of virtue. The next and final step is canonization, a rare honor that signifies a deceased person is worthy of veneration by the entire church.
Before his beatification was postponed, Pope Francis formally approved the attribution of a miracle to Archbishop Sheen, opening a path for him to gain that status. Three other American-born men have been beatified, but the timeline to canonization can vary widely, and not all who are beatified reach that height. (Canonization usually requires a second verified miracle.)
The miracle attributed to Archbishop Sheen involved a stillborn boy in the diocese of Peoria in 2010. His parents had named the boy James Fulton after the archbishop, and they began praying for the archbishop to intervene. After just over an hour of prayer and medical intervention, the boy came to life, according to an account in the Catholic publication Our Sunday Visitor.
From my memoir:
Until my exposure to Wally and Dave at the liquor store, my world was thoroughly Catholic: Catholic church, Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, Catholic friends, Catholic (in a manner of speaking) family members. The ‘best’ hospitals were the Catholic hospitals, like Little Company of Mary. The ‘best’ old age homes were the Catholic old age homes, like the Little Sisters of the Poor. The only movies we could attend were those that passed muster with the Catholic Legion of Decency, whose movie ratings were published every week in the archdiocese’s Catholic newspaper, The New World. When television arrived on the scene, the programs, unlike post-war movies, were family-oriented and non-threatening (Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Howdie Doodie, I Remember Mama, etc.), but on Tuesday nights we all watched Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s network program Life is Worth Living, even though it ran opposite The Milton Berle Show. Sheen was an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of New York, under the powerful Cardinal Spellman. It speaks to the size and influence of the American Church in the 1950’s that the first national televangelist was a foppish Catholic hierarch and not a Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson or even Billy Graham.
My footnote comment on Bishop Sheen:
My mother, who was a devoted fan of Bishop Sheen, would be disappointed that I call him a fop, but a fop he clearly was. He appeared each week wearing his most dramatic episcopal finery: the basic garment a black cassock gown with red piping and red buttons, topped by a black shoulder cape with the same red piping and an underside of red, all the red matching his zucchetto or skullcap and his dazzling Superman/Batman/Captain Marvel cappa magna¸ a flowing bright red floor length cape draped across his shoulders and tied with thin red sashes about his neck, directly above what appeared to be his platinum pectoral cross secured on a long, platinum or silver or white gold chain, while his midriff was secured by a broad red cincture that perfectly matched his piping, his buttons, and his zucchetto. He was, in a word, DAZZLING! In the Church’s sumptuary laws, the color red was normally reserved to cardinals, bishops ‘owning’ the color purple. Why Sheen wore red rather than purple in his television heyday is a mystery to me, but it may account, in small part, to the personal enmity between him, a mere auxiliary bishop, and his superior, the formidable Cardinal Spellman of New York. In his later telecasts, in the early 1960s, he wore the traditional purple, actually a shade of lavender. In the pre-Vatican II Church, in the Church before the pre-pedophilia scandal Church, these dazzling, feudal, European, ostentatious displays of capes and cassocks, satins and velvets and laces and brocades seemed to work their magic on the ever-obedient Faithful, who seemed to think it not bizarre to drop to one’s knees to kiss the ring of the episcopal dandies who ruled the Holy Mother Church. Indeed, to kiss the bishop’s ring and to receive his blessings was considered quite a privilege. How pathetic!
Regarding Sheen's foppishness (and the foppishness of the Church hierarchy generally), I refer anyone who might read these words to the photo of Sheen that I posted with this entry. All that's missing is an ecclesial Superman/Batman cape. My favorite exemplar: Cardinal Raymond Burke, below.
The Unclenching of Fosts, Russia, North Ossetia, watched this afternoon.
