Peasant dresses. Everywhere the peasant dresses. Comforting to witness! You wear an orchid paisley peasant dress and you might be quietly crossing the line at a School of the Americas protest and be just a skosh frustrated you didn’t get arrested; you could be weeding your herb garden and milking your solitary goat; you might be selling homemade taffy in the parking lot of Lilith Fair ‘97.

Or, on a slightly gray fall day in 2026, you could be sitting in the loge level of a St. Louis football stadium at the beatification Mass of a cape-wearing Catholic evangelist and then praying reverently in front of his jawbone. 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the stalwart, Burbagean voice of American Catholicism whose entire life and work of evangelization, while diffused over dozens of books, talks, lectures, pilgrimages and liturgies throughout the course of his 60-plus years of ministry, was illuminated most vibrantly in the 1950s DuMont Television Network show called “Life is Worth Living” (Life is worth living: Vapid! Secular! Just this side of a syllogism! And cleverly vague enough to draw both the faithful and non-faithful to the threshold of his program, if only to peek in) was beatified Thursday at the Dome of America in front of 50,000-plus Catholics from all over the Midwest, the country and the world.

The all-day event happened in downtown St. Louis beneath black speakers curling down from the rafters like headless seahorses at the stadium where the St. Louis Rams used to play. (The Rams. Kurt Warner. “Thank you, Jesus!” after his Super Bowl win. Somehow it all fits.) The stage of the darkened stadium included a full replica of Fulton Sheen’s television studio, complete with his trusty chalkboard, bookcases, plants, framed pictures and a statue of the Virgin Mary draped in blue holding a worried-looking child Jesus.

Archbishop Sheen was officially beatified after the Penitential Rite during a (nearly three hour) Mass that included an opening procession of hundreds upon hundreds of seminarians, deacons and priests in albs with JMJ inscribed on the back (initials ever-present at the top of Sheen’s chalkboard, for “Jesus, Mary and Joseph”). They were joined by roughly 90 bishops and the principal celebrant, Pope Leo’s delegate to the event, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle.

The ceremony included a reading of Pope Leo’s proclamation of beatification made earlier this year and the presentation in a reliquary of Sheen’s jawbone. A portrait of the newly Blessed Sheen was unveiled, and the choir sang “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.” After Mass, people prayed in front of the relic.

All this, and the women and girls everywhere throughout the stadium in peasant dresses. Goldenrod and misty orange and sky blue and midnight blue and cucumber green and humble dusty rose. The simple peasant dress worn by the Sheen beatification supplicant as perhaps a kind of symbol of the overall sweetness and simplicity of this whole event. 

A reminder that, lest any wry, detached journalistic beatification observer get caught up digging into a thousand-foot cultural analysis of the thing, siphoning out any possible socio-ecclesial trends exemplified in the Large and Priest-Forward American Catholic Stadium and Convention Hall Event, hunting down any trace of church triumphalism or Catholic reactionary weirdness….a reminder that, at bottom, the beatification of Blessed Fulton Sheen was just a very nice Christian spiritual event filled with goodness.

(And not-so-goodness: I could count on maybe two hands the number of African Americans I saw at the stadium. Maybe there were more?)

The beatification in St. Louis of America’s singular evangelist—in one poll at the turn of the century, Sheen was declared one of the top four most influential Catholics of the 20th century—was not unlike the celebration of the election of Pope Leo XIV that the Archdiocese of Chicago held at the home ballpark of the Chicago White Sox on the south side of Chicago a year and a half ago. 

What I wrote about that Mass at the time could be said here about this one: 

It was not a Catholic event created to rally the lost youth or explain the mystical qualities of the Eucharist…or defend religious freedom or rein in A.I. or plead for justice for the wretched of the earth. It was held to celebrate that this guy, who is doing that thing, is from this place, and how great is that?

Here the same. Celebrate this guy from this place—granted, Fulton Sheen was from Peoria (actually from El Paso, outside Peoria), even though they held the event in St. Louis—and how great is that? (Fulton Sheen is also, as Cardinal Tagle put it, Pope Leo’s “fellow Illinoisan.”) 

Simple, the Catholic basics. Cecelia Clay, who came to the event from Kansas City, said of Sheen, “he’s so good at getting his point across, without all the frills. He is the everyman. He appeals to everyone.”  

Jen Sanders, who teaches in the Catholic Studies program at St. Louis University and helped coordinate the attendance of 50 students from the program, said she was happy that her 9-year-old son was able to experience a big Catholic event. 

Of course! So simple! Kids like big things regardless of their religion or lack thereof: big things with lots of costumes and interesting music and fire! Here there are candles afire and monogrammed costumes and lace (ahhhh, so much lace in official American Catholicism these days!) and monarchical music (trumpets resounding during the Mass) and long soldier-like processions all on behalf of a scarlet-caped superhero (or so it would appear). What’s not to like for a kid?

The basics. Standing in the concourse, Beth Gabeheart held in her arms one-month-old James, while James’ five towheaded little sisters (three of them triplets!) milled about below. When I asked Beth, whose brother’s middle name is Sheen, what she liked about Fulton Sheen, she talked about his sense of humor. Namely, one of his episodes on “Life is Worth Living” about the Virgin Mary who, at the wedding of Cana, had to tell Jesus there was no more wine. According to Sheen, Mary told Jesus there was no wine because he brought his friends to the wedding who drank it all up!

In a pre-recorded video shown before the event, “King of Queens” actor Kevin James also celebrated Sheen’s humor: “Fulton Sheen said that people will listen to truths, but make them smile first,” James said. “He was not just complaining about the darkness, but turning on the light.”

As a student from DeSmet Jesuit High School in Creve Coeur (a suburb of St. Louis) who was at the event told me, Sheen “brought humor in a sorrowful world. Humor is necessary and it is even more relevant today. We could lighten up a little.”

We could lighten up a little. God Bless Kevin James and Beth Gabehart and that DeSmet kid. 

The basics. Sister Marie Therese of the Community of Jesus Crucified from the Diocese of Lafayette, La., who brought five members of her community and one aspirant, said she was influenced by Sheen’s Life of Christ, his autobiography Treasure in Clay and The World’s First Love, about Mary. Watching his shows, she said, she realized that Bishop Sheen had “a way of speaking that incites devotion. When it is hard to try to pray on your own, he helps you to pray.”

The basics, the peasant dress basics of it all. One woman’s story crystallized the entire event for me. Standing in the concourse wearing a pink t-shirt for event volunteers that said “Volunteer,” Susan McKarns of St. John Henry Newman parish in Columbia, Mo., told me that she had been a scientist and professor at the University of Missouri until she was hit on her bike by a drunk driver. She had to go on disability. 

Susan then became deeply involved in her church. She makes funeral meal luncheons, she serves all day on Sundays as a Eucharistic minister for the University of Missouri hospital, she preps and delivers food for Meals on Wheels. “There is no reason to explain why I’m here other than to have time to volunteer,” she said. “I have spent a lot of time in conversation with God. I am sure God has a plan for me. I don’t want to waste my time on earth.”

It was said over and over again at the event that Fulton Sheen’s daily holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament was the pivot point of his life. It gave him strength and sustenance and internal peace to go out and do what he did day after day. In some mystical way, the entire life of any Catholic revolves around the Eucharist, whether we even go to it or not. 

But in another mystical way, the life of the Catholic religion itself, of the church as we know it, of any human life worth living, finds its true and vital center in the funeral meal luncheon. 

You bring a chalkboard, a scarlet cape, Thomistic discourse, 60 books, hundreds of talks, millions of viewers, thousands of conversions, a fresh beatification, and she will bring one funeral meal luncheon. The scales will perfectly balance. They are the same thing. 

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”