On September 24, 2026, in The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, the Catholic Church declared Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen “Blessed.” Tens of thousands gathered. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, papal delegate, read the decree. A portrait of Sheen holding a piece of chalk—the tool of his famous blackboard lessons on Life Is Worth Living—was unveiled. And a teenager named James Fulton Engstrom, who had been stillborn in 2010 and restored to life after 61 minutes without a heartbeat through prayers for Sheen’s intercession, processed forward with a reliquary. Inside it was Sheen’s mandible: the jawbone that had formed the chin and lower jaw of the man whose voice reached millions. Cardinal Tagle incensed it. The Church presented it as a first-class relic, chosen precisely because Sheen’s gift was speech—preaching, teaching, proclaiming the faith on radio and television.
Some found it beautiful. Others found it grotesque. Comments appeared quickly: “macabre,” “not biblical,” “stupid,” “modernist,” “we should have moved out of the 14th century.” Some of those voices belonged to Catholics. The complaint is not new. It is the same objection Vigilantius raised in the fifth century, the same unease that surfaces whenever the Church treats the bodies of the holy as more than discarded matter. It is worth answering at length, because the objection does not merely criticize a liturgical detail. It reveals a thinner understanding of incarnation, resurrection, and the communion of saints than the Church has held from the beginning.
Who Sheen Was and Why His Bones Matter
Fulton John Sheen was born in El Paso, Illinois, in 1895, ordained for the Diocese of Peoria, and became the most recognizable Catholic voice in mid-twentieth-century America. His radio and television programs, his books, his Good Friday sermons that filled streets around St. Patrick’s Cathedral—these were instruments of evangelization on a scale few bishops have ever achieved. He died on December 9, 1979, and was buried in the crypt of St. Patrick’s. The path to beatification was long and messy: a public legal fight between Peoria (which opened the cause) and New York (which held the body), a 2019 postponement amid questions about his brief tenure as bishop of Rochester, and finally the Vatican’s renewed approval. The miracle accepted for beatification was the revival of James Engstrom. The mandible was taken after the canonical recognition of the remains, when soft tissue had long decomposed and only bone remained. It was not snatched in some midnight raid. It was collected according to the Church’s norms for first-class relics after the body had been identified.
The choice of the jaw was not arbitrary. Sheen’s ministry was oral. He spoke. He taught. He used words the way a surgeon uses a scalpel. To honor the instrument of that ministry is consistent with how the Church has always treated the bodies of those who served God with particular gifts. St. John Chrysostom’s tongue was long venerated. St. Anthony of Padua’s tongue is still displayed in Padua because he was a preacher. The principle is the same.
Scripture Does Not Recoil from Bones
The complaint that relics are “not biblical” collapses under the text itself. God has used the physical remains and belongings of holy people as instruments of His power. That is not a medieval invention. It is in the canon.
Elisha died and was buried. When a corpse was thrown into his tomb in haste, “as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood on his feet” (2 Kings 13:20–21). Sirach, received as Scripture by Catholics and Orthodox, later says that even after death Elisha’s body “prophesied” and “even in death his works were amazing” (Sirach 48:13–14). Moses carried Joseph’s bones out of Egypt (Exodus 13:19; Joshua 24:32). Elisha struck the Jordan with Elijah’s mantle and the waters parted (2 Kings 2:13–14). A woman touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment and was healed (Matthew 9:20–22; Mark 5:27–29). Crowds laid the sick so that Peter’s shadow might fall on them, and they were healed (Acts 5:15–16). Handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul were carried to the sick, “and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19:11–12). John sees the souls of the martyrs “under the altar” (Revelation 6:9). “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15).
These are not proof-texts that command a later relic cult in every detail. They are the scriptural premise: God is not embarrassed by matter. He works through bodies, garments, shadows, and bones. The Church did not invent this. She received it.
What the Fathers Actually Did
The earliest Christians did not treat the remains of martyrs as refuse. After Polycarp was burned around 155, the church in Smyrna “took up his bones, as being more precious than the most exquisite jewels, and more purified than gold, and deposited them in a fitting place,” returning yearly to commemorate his martyrdom. They were careful to distinguish: they adored Christ; they honored the martyrs as disciples. The Apostolic Constitutions state that “of those that live with God, even their very relics are not without honor,” and cite Elisha’s bones as evidence that the body of the holy man was not defiling. Jerome, answering Vigilantius—who mocked kissing “a bit of dust wrapped in a cloth”—wrote that Christians do not worship relics with the worship due to God, but “we honor the relics of the martyrs, that we may adore Him whose martyrs they are.” Chrysostom said not only the bodies but the sepulchres of the saints are filled with spiritual grace, again citing Elisha. Augustine recorded miracles at the relics of St. Stephen while insisting the Church builds monuments, not temples, to the martyrs; they are not gods. John of Damascus called the remains of the saints “fountains of salvation.” Ambrose placed newly found martyr relics under the altar. This is not a late medieval accretion. It is the mind of the early Church.
The distinction the Fathers repeated is the one the Church still makes: latria belongs to God alone; dulia, honor, is given to the saints and their remains because those remains were temples of the Holy Spirit and members of Christ’s body, destined for resurrection. Miracles, when they occur, are God’s work through those instruments, not magic inherent in calcium and marrow.
The Charge of the Macabre
“Macabre” is a feeling, not an argument. Death is always somewhat macabre to the living. A funeral is macabre if one stares only at the corpse and forgets the resurrection. The Church does not stare only at the corpse. She looks at the same body that will be raised. She looks at the same matter that the Word assumed. Incarnation means God did not despise flesh. Resurrection means He will not abandon it. To treat the bones of a blessed man as if they were merely biological waste is closer to a materialist or gnostic instinct than to the faith that confesses “the resurrection of the body.”
History is full of first-class relics that would offend modern sensibilities if one judged them by contemporary funeral-home aesthetics: the head of St. Catherine of Siena in Siena and her body in Rome; the arm of St. Francis Xavier in the Gesù in Rome while the rest of him lies in Goa; the tongue of St. Anthony; the blood of St. Januarius; countless fragments of bone in altars across the world, as canon law still prefers. The practice of placing relics in altars echoes Revelation 6:9 and the early custom of celebrating Eucharist over the tombs of martyrs. If the mandible of Fulton Sheen is macabre, so is the entire tradition. The critic must then explain why the tradition is wrong and Scripture and the Fathers are to be set aside.
Some of the recent criticism came from Catholics who otherwise claim to love tradition. That is the more revealing part. They accept the idea of saints in the abstract. They balk when the saint is recent, American, and the relic is a recognizable human bone displayed in a stadium. The discomfort is aesthetic and cultural, not theological. It is the discomfort of people who have absorbed a Protestant or secular suspicion of matter while still wanting the consolations of Catholic identity. They want Sheen’s words and Sheen’s haloed portrait. They do not want Sheen’s jaw. That is not a deeper spirituality. It is a selective one.
The legal fight over Sheen’s body between Peoria and New York was unedifying. Relic disputes have often been unedifying; medieval chronicles are full of them. Unedifying human behavior does not invalidate the principle. The principle is that the body of a Christian who lived in grace is not garbage. It is destined for glory. Honoring it is not necrophilia. It is hope made visible.
A Faith That Is Not Ours to Redesign
Christianity is not a set of preferences we assemble according to what feels tasteful in 2026. It is a revealed religion that includes a particular understanding of creation, incarnation, sacrament, and the communion of the living and the dead. Relics belong to that understanding. God has already shown, in Scripture, that He is willing to work through bones. The Church has received that witness and acted on it for nearly two millennia. Who are we to declare the practice primitive or embarrassing?
Those who complain—Catholic or otherwise—often treat the faith as a product they may edit. They keep the parts that match their sensibility and discard the parts that look strange to a culture that hides death, medicalizes the body, and treats remains as biohazard or sentimental ash. That is not the faith of the martyrs who gathered Polycarp’s bones. It is not the faith of Jerome answering Vigilantius. It is not the faith that places relics under altars. It is a faith trimmed to fit the critic. Such a faith is vain and empty because it no longer submits to what God has actually done and what the Church has actually handed down. It makes Christianity about what the believer thinks rather than about what God has revealed and the saints have lived.
Blessed Fulton Sheen spent his life speaking the Word. The Church has now set his jawbone before the people who heard that Word, or whose parents and grandparents heard it. The gesture is consistent with Elisha’s tomb, with Paul’s handkerchiefs, with Polycarp’s ashes, with every altar that contains a fragment of a martyr. God allowed these things. Scripture records them. The Fathers defended them. The liturgy continues them. Those who find the mandible of a preacher too much to bear have not discovered a higher Christianity. They have discovered their own limits. The Church is not required to shrink to those limits.
