The grandson of Roscommon emigrants who inspired an American actor to take the professional name Martin Sheen was beatified in the US city of St Louis, Missouri, on Thursday.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, grandson of John and Mary Fulton of Croghan, Co Roscommon, who emigrated to Illinois, was best known in the US for his radio and television broadcasts.
Beginning in 1930 with his Sunday night radio programme The Catholic Hour on NBC, he became a household name, building an audience of millions of people with his weekly television programme Life Is Worth Living, broadcast from New York’s Adelphi Theatre from 1952.
Much of his material included anecdotes from “the old country” and the homeland of his ancestors.
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He made the cover of Time magazine in 1952 and won an Emmy award as most outstanding personality. He received a second Emmy nomination in 1953 and a third in 1957, by which time his audience was 30 million. He died in 1979 aged 84.
Actor Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez, whose mother was Irish, took the professional name Martin Sheen in honour of the archbishop.
Fulton Sheen, who was born in Illinois in 1895 and ordained a priest in 1919, visited Croghan in Co Roscommon a number of times during his life, the first in 1952 when he rededicated St Michael’s Church in the village and called into his grandmother’s house nearby.
In 2019 the Vatican approved a miracle attributed to the archbishop’s intervention, involving the recovery of a boy who is said to have been initially stillborn in 2010 in Illinois after his parents prayed to Sheen.
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Retired principal at Croghan National School, Oliver Donagher, remembers another visit by Sheen, believed to be in the early 1960s, when “children from the school, including myself, lined up both sides of the road from the parochial house to the church” as he walked the route.
He remembers Sheen as “very sociable, speaking to people all along the road to the church – he was very well regarded”.
