What was effective about the beatification ceremony for Blessed Fulton Sheen last week on Sept. 24, 2026? How was it effective or “successful” as a model of Catholic evangelization? Or are those even the right words to use to describe a celebration like this?

One day on an East Coast tour of “Twelfth Night” in the late ’90s (it was my first professional acting job; I played the servant Curio and had approximately four lines—not that actors ever count their lines), I got to talking about faith and prayer with another actor in the show who was also a baptized Catholic but no longer went to church.

Along with me there were two other churchgoers on the tour. One of them, with a bit of non-denom fervor, occasionally said to my fellow Catholic (let’s call him Toby), “I’ll pray for you.” The other actor, with Southern Baptist gentility, would say to him, “I will keep you in prayer.”

For someone like Toby, who for his own private (and, I am sure, meaningful) reasons no longer practiced his childhood faith, to be told “I’ll pray for you” without having requested that prayer rankled him to no end. It was just this side of offensive. On the other hand, he had no problem with the phrase, “I’ll keep you in prayer.”

It is the exact same thing, “praying for someone” and “keeping someone in prayer.” You are offering this person’s life and soul to God, asking God to be present to them. But oh, how you say it! And even how you intend it. Not the same thing! 

Under certain circumstances, “I’ll pray for you” is basically telling someone his or her life is deficient, and that you are mobilizing God to change that person; “I’ll keep you in prayer” is simply being with someone, with God, whether the person changes or not.

At the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen in the Dome at America Center in downtown St. Louis on Sept. 24, we witnessed prayer and preaching and exhortations by any number of lay and ordained speakers. The celebration even included old black-and-white clips on overhead screens of Archbishop Sheen himself exhorting his TV audience in the 1950s and ’60s. 

But the overall point of the event was not to try to exhort or persuade. The event was not instrumental. It was celebratory. And that was its power. It was not trying to “mobilize God” to change us in our deficiencies. It was just a chance for all of us to “be with each other, with God” as we celebrated the life and holiness of this outsized personality, the center of whose life through his daily holy hours was the broken body of Christ.

Fulton Sheen, philosopher, theologian, missionary fundraiser, voluminous correspondent, TV phenomenon, social justice warrior, curate of “the worst parish in Peoria,” advocate of marginalized peoples the world over, converter of everyone from communists to film stars to mechanics to call girls, opponent of the Vietnam War, driver of Cadillacs and grandee of country club life in suburban Washington, dispenser of money to the poor like water from a sieve, known by everyone and perhaps not really known by anyone, was a titanic figure of 20th-century American Catholicism. He was also one of the greatest Catholic performers ever to stroll a television studio. 

The Sheen biographer Thomas C. Reeves relates how the actor Jackie Gleason would watch Sheen from the control booth of the archbishop’s smash TV show “Life Is Worth Living,” amazed at Sheen’s comedy and timing. (“When Moses smashed the tablets, he was the first man in the world to break all the commandments at once!”) And he was from the Midwest! He was from a small town just outside Peoria! And so here we were in late September 2026 in a larger Midwestern town, gathering together on behalf of a Midwestern guy who was now just a few yards shy of sainthood: Rejoice! 

The beatification in St. Louis was in some ways like the church’s celebration of Pope Leo’s election in Chicago last year. “The simple celebration at the ballfield,” I wrote about the event, “was not created to address…issues of poverty or alienation or marginalization but just to give thanks and to celebrate and lift the host into the open air.” 

Sometimes simply giving thanks and not trying to “address issues” is a way to strengthen and nurture us to go out and “address issues.” 

(Though I can’t help but wonder if any and every American Catholic event these days shouldn’t, in some way, address at least one issue—the fact that our leaders are rounding up thousands of migrants each month like wild animals in the streets in order to rid our country of them.)

In any case. 

The kind of enthusiastic Catholics who would travel from near and far to go to a beatification were ready to be “prayed for.” They did, in a sense, ask to be “preached at.” Susan McKarns of Columbia, Mo., told me she was at the beatification because “we should all live our lives to be saints. The more exposed I am to these events, it clears my path to heaven.”

She was eager for any spiritual sustenance that came her way at the event. 

But simply preaching or praying at people isn’t always the best way to change them. Being exposed to the totality of the thing may matter even more. Susan said, of the beatification, “I love the atmosphere and people and connections and what I can take back to my parish.” 

As with the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in 2024, people mentioned to me how wonderful it was, as a Catholic, simply to see thousands upon thousands of other Catholics gathered together in one space. An event like the pageantry of a Catholic beatification tilts toward the writer’s maxim: “Show, don’t tell.” 

The huge crowd, the liturgical lighting, the Gregorian chant mingled with praise and worship, mingled with a classical symphony. The 30-minute-plus entrance procession! All those priests and bishops in white! (All those white priests and bishops! The hierarchy’s lack of racial diversity was shown vividly as well.) The (somewhat monarchical) unveiling and incensing of Sheen’s portrait followed by the singing of the Catholic national anthem, “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” Smoke, water, fire, regalia, melody, harmony, brush strokes on a canvas, theater on a stage, all to immerse you in a uniquely Catholic experience of God. 

On Thursday, the Archdiocese of New York will continue to honor Sheen, not by offering seminars on his virtues and achievements, but simply by offering Catholics a chance to venerate a relic of him. To show him, not to tell about him.

Sometimes the best evangelization is not trying to evangelize—it is just putting something out there and saying: Behold! Look at these fascinating things! You are free to join!

After all, on a particular Wednesday in March during our late ’90s tour of “Twelfth Night,” Toby, who never went to church, got up at the crack of dawn and drove 20 minutes with me to Mass and got his ashes.

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