The Real Story Behind Fulton Sheen's Beatification

Welcome to this very special edition of The Deep. We have a new American blessed among us. We are so excited. Venerable Fulton Sheen, almost seven years after his miracle, I think it is seven years after his miracle was approved, will be beatified here in the United States on September 24th this year. I can't think of a better way to celebrate America 250 than beatifying an American. This is great. And I'm here today because on September 23rd, the Eve of that beatification, in St.

Louis, leading Catholic scholars, clergy, and evangelists are going to gather for a one-day national conference titled Fulton Sheen, America's Saint. And I have here with me today one of the organizers of that conference, Dr. Peter Howard, the founder of the Fulton Sheen Institute, and he's going to be leading that gathering, examining Sheen's enduring vision for faith. His leadership and cultural renewal here in America. So, Dr. Howard has been one of the driving forces behind the beatification, and it's been a long road, to say the least, but he's a happy warrior, and I can't wait to get his story for all of you, because it's amazing.

And his mission is really, you can speak for yourself, but helping us think like Fulton Sheen, praying like Fulton Sheen, and suffering like Sheen. And leading like Sheen. So, Dr. Howard, welcome to the LOOPcast. Thanks, Erika. It's a real privilege and joy to be with you. Same here. We're very honored, and I'd love to just start, if you could share some of your own personal story about how you came to know Venerable Fulton Sheen, and what inspired you, I mean, essentially, to devote your professional and personal life to him and his cause.

Yeah, well, it was kind of a harsh reality check when I... It's going back in the years, because it was 1998 when I first got introduced to him in any real personal way. So, I was like, gosh, I'm getting old. It's almost 30 years ago. And so, anyway, I was in a key moment in my life. I was in my mid-20s or so. When was it? So, 24? Anyway, but it was. It was a very key part of my life, discerning what God was calling me to do.

I spent a couple years looking at giving God, you could say, you know, the first choice is calling me to be a priest because I love my faith. So, anyway, during a year off, you could say, I was in Dallas, Texas, and by the end of that year that I was there, it was Lent, and I said, I need some direction. So, I took a personal retreat, and then on my drive out to East Texas, it was like three hours from Dallas, my sister said, hey, Pete, why don't you come by, and I'll give you something that you might want to use for your retreat.

And I was like, okay. I wasn't really open to it. And when she's like, it's Bishop Fulton Sheen, and honestly, I was like, okay. I only heard of him. I never read anything of him. I never listened to anything from him. I heard his name, and I actually thought he was Irish or English. I mean, he is Irish, but anyway, I was like, all right. I'll give him a chance.

I got a three-hour drive. I'm from New Jersey, so I'll make my decision really fast. You're either in or you're out. And I put him in, and after about less than two to three minutes, I was completely gripped by this man. And the quality of the recording, I always mention this because it is important. Imagine if we had a hiss in the background, it wasn't that great. This was a remastered retreat, so it sounded very much like I'm talking to you now.

And so, he's next to me in my car, and I can't go anywhere for this trip, and I couldn't turn it off, especially by the end of his first talk, because he put a call to action. He gave the story of a woman who says, for those of you in this big hall, she's like, for those of you who don't like baked beans, dinner is over.

And I say to all of you who are at this retreat, with priests and seminarians, he says, if you don't want to hear about Christ and him crucified, and you're going to have to change your life, this retreat is over.

I'm like, what am I going to say? What am I going to do? My guardian angels are there to witness my actions, of course, but at the same time, I was like... I don't know what I just entered into, but I'm going, and I sat in my car. You know, this is cassette tape, so I couldn't have much luxury to go out and do much else. Throw it back, yeah. Yeah, there wasn't an iPhone or anything like that, but I just sat in my car for a few days, and I just listened to talk after talk, and I'm sitting there in deep thought, deep prayer.

I'm crying, then I'm praying, and I'm crying even more. I'm like, this guy, what is happening here? He had certain call to actions in there that, to this day, define my entire life as a Catholic, and I knew that no matter what God was calling me to, This man was going to be really in the driver's seat of that mission, and I want everyone to know, at least what I heard in this retreat, I was so pumped up, but at the same time, I was like, hey, I just graduated from Francisco University.

How come I've never heard stuff explained like this? It kind of just like shattering my arrogance there. I'm like, I've got a lot to learn, and this is completely different, but this man, everybody needs to know who he is. So, you know, you fast forward.

During this last 20-something years, 28 years or so, it's been, I studied in Rome, I did my doctorate dissertation on him, and on works that today are now more relevant than when I wrote them. The whole thing of the question of Mary as Mediatrix, in light of that document that came out, that theological note about this title, my whole doctorate work using Fulton Sheen was on it, and I'm sitting there like, Here it is. It didn't happen. I just unpacked my bags from my trip, but it was like, this thing answers all of it because Sheen does it in the most brilliant way.

So, it's like, there you go, problem solved, but nobody knows that. So, anyway, he shaped, like you said in the intro, he shaped my life in a way where the future of the Catholic Church in America, and I would say even the broader trajectory, is tied up in this man. Who is going to be beatified? He is America's saint for lots of reasons, and I don't want to drop every little bombshell, like little, you know, insight here, but the connection that he has looking into the future of our country in this 250th anniversary, and then the mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe, because he shares the feast day.

With Juan Diego and the first day that she appeared, which connects them to that mystery, when people start discovering this, it truly blows their minds, and I think gives them a lot of hope to deal with all the other junk that we know and we're discovering. I get ramped up realizing we finally have a spiritual general.

Who's there to lead us in every way? That's why we say, think like Sheen, pray like Sheen, love like Sheen, and suffer like Sheen, because he's a man for all seasons for us. Not to steal from Thomas Moore, but he is.

I bet Thomas would share, yeah. Yeah, I know. But it's interesting, because the timing... That was providential. The timing of Thomas More's canonization was exactly 400 years after his death, right at the rise of Hitler. Right. And why would that happen? Because she says God doesn't do anything in history without the greatest finesse of detail. Why then? Because the Pope at that time, so this was what, when was he, this was in the 30s, so this would have been the highest.

38 or 39, yeah. So. It was because he wanted Thomas More's to be rising up in Nazi Germany, who are not going to fold, and be bold in speaking to power of, we cannot compromise the faith, we cannot go in this direction. So, I see now, even though Sheen's beatification has been delayed almost seven years, as frustrating as that has been, There is a divine wisdom, and now that it coincides with this very moment in the future of America with the 250 years, I think that this is extremely providential, that every Catholic in this country should pause and ask that question, why?

Why Sheen, and why now? Yeah, I was getting ready for it. No, and I want to circle back to all these themes. I want to ask you about his battles with communism as we're looking at the Democratic Socialists of America seeming to be on the upswing and him coming at this very moment, but I was also struck this morning as I was preparing to speak with you about the timing, and I would like to get a little bit of insight. I think a lot of American Catholics were very confused in 2019.

When we got the word that Pope Francis had approved the miracle, and we had a date in, I believe, December of 2019, and then just weeks before, it was told, oh, we're going to put it off, or we can't do that because we need to investigate this other thing that we didn't investigate before. So, as someone who was on the inside and sort of seeing all that happen, I know you can't share every detail, but if you could kind of walk us through.

What those challenges and obstacles were, and how you saw the Holy Spirit bringing us to this moment instead for his beatification. Yeah. Well, I think one of the most helpful resources for anyone who wants to know what led up to the pause or the cancellation, I mean, when you hear things like indefinitely suspended. Yeah, he was canceled. Yeah, exactly. I mean, a lot of Catholics who had their podcasts were all saying, yeah, that's just another way of saying they iced this.

I would say what I found personally to be the most helpful was what was released right after that through the Diocese of Peoria, and this was a Monsignor Cruz, K-R-U-S-E. He was one of the canonists and priests and principals, you can say, in that entire process leading up to the approval and the actual decree by Pope Francis in July of 2019 saying, the miracle is approved. The body at that point was transferred over now to Peoria. Everything was resolved. Set the date.

And that's a ceremonial thing. People don't realize that. It's not like there's a big thing that has to now be planned other than logistics. It takes five minutes tops to proclaim somebody blessed or canonized. So, but this Monsignor Cruz, he was on the inside, and he...

He came out and used the word, it was sabotaged, very deliberately. And so, he started tracing, and it was a letter, it was in the Peoria paper, the Diocesan newspaper, which was, I think it was the Diocesan, it was either the local paper or the Diocesan paper, but his article was in there, and he detailed this history of obstruction that Peoria was having with the Diocese of Rochester.

And to the point where it was obvious, Rome and Peoria worked together. They worked out everything. People don't realize, like, there's not a stone that's left unturned in the process of declaring somebody venerable, because actually, that's the hardest stage. Not really blessed and saint, because... Because that's when you're doing the heroic virtue, and you have to, like, interview everyone, right? Exactly. Everything he said, wrote, it's got to be... Everything's scrutinized. Exactly. He's finished each other's sentences.

And so, he was, Monsignor Cruz was talking about how they knew of what later on was being used as an excuse, that there was, during the three years that Bishop Sheen was Bishop of Rochester, New York, during that tenure, there was a couple of cases of priests that had suspicions or how they were handled.

Well, Sheen inherited these things, but he also, when he found out about them, he quickly just dealt with them in the way that they needed to be. It was like, that was, it's that simple. Open shot, no big deal. And, but later on, when it was canceled, just like you said, a few weeks before the actual beatification, when all the contracts had already been signed, satellites set, you just, I mean, from a logistical standpoint, you could just imagine what this meant to them.

They say, well, a call was made to Rome from Bishop Matano of Rochester, and this is all public, so this is a secret. And he had the backing of Cardinal Dolan and Cardinal Supage to do this, to request from Rome that they pause this, because they were uncomfortable.

Because a report, a secular report from the New York Attorney General that was investigating all of the diocese of the state of New York of clergy sexual abuse allegations and those things hadn't been released, and they thought it was prudent to wait to make sure that there's nothing in there that could cast a shadow on Sheen.

Now, one may say, oh, well, that makes sense, other than the fact of Rome and Peoria knew all of these things. Any possible thing, I mean, there was nothing that could have been missed, and especially these two cases that we learned that they were using. And so, this was a deliberate act to intervene to stop this. And so, but that was the excuse from that point on. Rome, the other thing is, Rome went along with it. They did say, okay, well, almost like, okay, you Americans work it out, you know, and I met with the Dicastery of Saints back in this last September when I was there with my son for the dual canonizations, and I brought up the history, because I had, by this point, I'm fast-forwarding a little bit, but we had a petition that we delivered.

After three years of the pause, and there was no development. We're just waiting on this report, waiting on this report. And I'm sitting there saying, does no one else see that there's an issue here? Why is the church waiting for a secular report, which they admit will not reveal anything that they didn't know? So, it doesn't matter.

But they're making it, it's sort of like, I kept saying, like, this emperor has no clothes, but we have to wait for it. It's like, we have to have this out of an abundance of caution and all this stuff. So, that's when we started a movement three years in to say, the people need a voice, because there's a lot of discontent.

People, they need a voice to express, we want this man as our saint. We need Fulton Sheen. This isn't like a trophy, like, I love Fulton Sheen. Darn it, they took him from us. And this was the argument that we had for the movement, and it's taken right from Fulton Sheen. Two things. He says, if souls are saved, everything is saved. Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved. This is all about the salvation of souls.

And then the other thing was a quote that Sheen gave in front of like 100,000 people in Pennsylvania in 1974, I think it was, or 72. He said, who's going to save the church? It's not going to be us bishops, priests, and religious, but you, the people. You have the eyes, the ears, the minds to save the church, and it is your responsibility to make sure that your bishops act like bishops, your priests act like priests, and your religious act like religious.

So, the first half of that was like, okay, yeah, let's game on. Like, yeah, we need to fight for this. The other part is, nobody likes to be in a position where you're calling on bishops to be bishops and priests like priests, but such are the times in which we live, and there was a lot of, like, hey, this is it. Don't ask questions. We'll tell you when the time is right, and then we'll celebrate Sheen and his beatification. Well, that just doesn't work.

And it was very frustrating, and more and more people were asking me questions like, what is going on? Why are we waiting? Is this ever going to be rescheduled? And I said, you know, I honestly don't know, but we're kind of in uncharted waters because he has a decree to say that he's... For all intents and purposes, he is blessed, and the mass is... He's in heaven, right. Yeah. There's a miracle that verifies this, that will not be reversed, and a decree says set the date.

So, and they did set a date, and it's like I said, it's only the five minute, three to five minute... Part of the Mass, in the very beginning, where they go through his, literally, like a super short CV of Sheen, and then they say he's elevated to the altars, and in the Eucharistic prayer, they mention it. It's like, that's it. It's really, I don't want to say anticlimactic, but, I mean, the event is anticlimactic, but you're kind of like, that's it?

That's all they needed to do? So, that was a big thing, and when we started the movement, it was really, it was... Every day that this is being postponed, the world is being held back from rediscovering why we need this man now, why heaven has chosen him. And heaven has chosen, the church has confirmed him. Why are American prelates causing this problem? And so, it didn't make me popular. It didn't make what we were doing. I can't imagine why not, right?

And it's hard, because aren't we all on the same team? But the measure is souls. How many souls could have been touched? Because when this happens in a short amount of time, It's going to reach hundreds of millions of people, if not over a billion, just because America has a new blessed, and everyone seems to have heard of him. And because of his sort of celebrity side of being on television, the world's going to rediscover him, and especially America is.

How much have we lost in that impact in six and a half years? Yeah. That's a lot. It is a lot. So, he's not an obscure person. We're like, oh, yeah, we have another American. No, this is a man who is a very, very big deal.

I think that once this does happen, and like I said, God's providence is perfect, His wisdom is perfect, and I believe everything that's happened in the last six and a half years and our movement, all of that has played a very important role for what is going to happen. So, a lot of it, in one sense, is water under the bridge. We don't want to revisit all that. We fought for it. I do think our presence in presenting a petition that was signed from 99 countries when I delivered it to the Dicastery of Saints in September.

Did have an impact. I know it went to Cardinal Samarro. The cover letter was very clear, even though I kind of knew what the answer would be. Basically, can Rome just intervene and do this? Yeah. But here we are. We have a date, and it's just around the corner. It is. And it could be a very quick transition from blessed to saint, because...

Of the unusual circumstances of six and a half years ago, and the decree being issued, and a date being sent, the clock for the second miracle usually would begin right after the beatification, but because of the way things were set up, miracles since that time can be submitted. So, they have three to five apparently really good candidates, and they just need to choose the best one. So, it could be very fast and blessed to see. Yeah. That's so exciting, and what a gift to the church, finally.

So, I want to return, though, to the fact that we are in this historical moment. So, God, in his infinite wisdom, has permitted this delay, and now that we're finally in line with heaven again, I think, we can expect all these graces. So, I want to touch on a couple of different things, and you mentioned the first one already, was his incredible devotion to Our Lady.

And, to me, this is really important. The first book I ever read of his, cover to cover, kind of like you with the tapes, like I couldn't put it down, was The World's First Love, and I discovered that in college, and it just transformed my understanding of Mary, especially as a convert. Highly recommend to everyone. So, talk to me a little bit about the sort of... The spiritual circumstance, I don't want to say circumstances, but the sort of divine providential connections that we have between, like you mentioned, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Fulton Sheen, and the mediatrix controversy, this moment in the church in a Marian perspective.

Yeah, this is my favorite question, and it's the hardest to answer in a short amount of time. I'll start with this. Sheen, in his autobiography, he talks about the history of the church going through 500-year cycles, and I recommend everybody start with that book. I go, where do I start with Sheen? Start with his autobiography. You get a good survey of his life and how he saw it and what he loved and his wisdom, and he said, so every 500 years, the church has had a crisis, a big crisis to deal with, and God always gave us a great pope to deal with it.

The reason why I start with that is because we also know we're living in an extraordinary Marian age, or Marian era, and if you look at the history of the church going back to, you know, every 500 years, the church begins when Christ, after he dies, or right before he dies, you can say when he gives Mary and John this mutual exchange, and then Pentecost is the same year. You know, it takes us 33, AD 33.

Most of the Ann Catherine Emmerich's dates point us to 31. We'll leave it at that. That's another interview. Yeah, that's very, but let's just say, either one, but let's just say maybe 31. Well, if you fast forward to this last cycle of 500 years, that would put us at 1531. What happened at 1531? December 9th. Heaven sends. Our Blessed Mother, to the heart of the Americas, and she reveals herself as Our Lady Guadalupe, and it's the largest conversion in the history of the church that took place there, and the history of Our Lady Guadalupe goes way before 1531, because that was one of the miracles, is the fact that she said, she called herself a name that the Aztecs couldn't pronounce, but when Juan Diego's uncle was asked, what's the name?

He was able to say Guadalupe, and remember, these are Spaniards that are there. Well, the original Guadalupe title, it goes all the way back to Spain, and this goes back to like the 600s. And anyway, but the point is, Our Lady of Guadalupe points to an event that was prepared for for 3,000 years in Mesoamerica that then goes to Europe. It actually goes, actually before Europe, it goes through the evangelist St. Luke, because he's, the tradition is he carved the statue that eventually was found in Spain after the, that was hidden.

Next to the Guadalupe, it was called the Guadalupe River, the Arabic words, and this little statue of Mary, after being hidden for about 700 years, 600, 700 years, became known as Our Lady of Guadalupe. A monastery was built on top of it by the king and the queen.

And it's there to this day, and it's an extraordinary place. Well, this monastery, this royal monastery with the statue now, this little, you can still see it today, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is where Christopher Columbus went and Cortes went. Cortes grew up in the backyard of this region. They went there, Columbus went there to basically sign the papers and get the funding to go out and then, as we know, discover the new world, what becomes the new Spain in Mexico. So, Our Lady of Guadalupe was already known.

She preceded her time in 1531. Cortes does his job, cleans house that needs to be done with the most violent culture you could imagine, and destroys their religion, and then the Bishop of Zumarraga is sitting there after about 10 years saying, how do we evangelize people? And they had over 100 dialects.

And they had just some converts, Juan Diego being one of them. And so, even though the Toma miracle story was beginning to get out there, one of the big things was the story of Juan Diego. So, to make a long story short, as the Aztecs learned the story of Juan Diego, they began to realize, when he went up on the hill on the first day, and he says, where am I? I've entered a place that I can't explain. He's actually referring to a...

A story, a song that goes back almost 3,000 years, and so when the Aztecs heard about it, he entered this flower world paradise, as they called it. Juan Diego entered it, and the answer was baptism. So, that's why they wanted, they were like, how do I be baptized? So, they flooded. Then they heard about this image that was left, and once they saw the image, as we know this, you know, we all hopefully know that story. Thousands of diversions. Exactly. The Aztecs just looked at it, and they just saw all the truths of who Mary was written into this miraculous image.

So, anyway. The number of conversions, like from Carol and others who wrote on this, was like 9 million and 8 years. So, you do the math, that's 3,000 a day, a Pentecost a day. It's like Pentecost, yeah. Exactly. So, the reason why I'm setting this up like this is because with Sheen, it was... You know, he's brought into this mystery of Our Lady of Guadalupe, because the day that he died, his feast day, is December 9th, and... I know this is the whole thing about our Blessed Mother, and I'm trying to think of what...

Oh, the 500 years, because we're now coming at the end of this 500 years, which would be 2031, which happens to be the 500th anniversary of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It's the 100th anniversary of the image of Divine Mercy being told to be painted, so the Era of Mercy. It's the 2000th anniversary of Redemption. All of this is converging at this time, and right in the lead up to this, and now a man who shares that feast day, not to obscure it, to confuse people, like, oh, now, is this taking away from Our Lady of Guadalupe?

No, Our Lady of Guadalupe is saying, this man has something to do with the mission that I had, and it's for the Americas, but it's even beyond, like the Philippines. They're consecrated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. So, the conquest of Our Lady, we are reaching a very extraordinary moment. And Sheen talked about this, going at the time of the, you could say, this last super phase of this age of Mary, this last 500 years, bookended by Our Lady of Guadalupe, you have Our Lady of Lourdes, 1858, and Sheen used Mary, he was so...

So smart and so holy. I mean, he contemplated this. He said 1858 was the year the modern world began, and you talked about communism. You talked about the things that we're facing today. He said all of them had really their birth in the formalized philosophy in 1858. You had three writings. John Stuart Mill wrote an essay. Okay, so you know these. Philosophy major. Well, there you go. And you had Charles Darwin, his Origin of Species, and then you had Karl Marx, his political essay on philosophy on economics, which was saying that religion is anti-human.

Charles Darwin is saying man is only an animal. And Sheen would say, We need to stop and understand that, because this is what now defines what he was fighting and what's going to be facing the rest of the West in particular. And he said, if man is just an animal, Then, man, there is no sin, and if man is conceived without sin, then everybody is immaculately conceived. And he said, did God send philosophers or theologians to answer these problems? In that same year, 1858, well, I think hopefully everybody had that connection, he sends our Blessed Mother, and at the end, she says, I am the Immaculate Conception.

And answers all of those errors in just one statement. So, we can't unpack that all now, but the point is, Our Lady has been sent in to deal with the crush the head of the serpent in all of these ways, but humanity hasn't responded in the way that it was asked to do, even in Fatima, and she was a huge lover of Fatima, and he saw the ominous signs of the miracle of the sun. He said, Will it augur the day where man uses the atomic energy?

Not for conversion like our Blessed Mother did, but for the destruction of the world. He said, you know, the fact that man reaches a point where it has become afraid of the smallest particle of matter. I think maybe there's something smaller now, but the atom.

He says, that's how far man has fallen because we've separated ourselves from God, and so Our Lady has always been that solution, and she's also the one who's forming the saints of our times, and she, as you know from The World's First Love, he beautifully takes us through. All that I said was actually just taken right from there, is he maps this out for us. So, the fact that Once again, here, you, myself, everybody who's listening to this, and people who know Sheen, really love him, and see the prophetic nature in its deepest levels, see that he's given us a blueprint, and heaven's given us a blueprint through Sheen.

That is going to equip us to fight every one of these battles and to be part of that final conquest of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and that's how I see all of these pieces coming together, and like I said, since his feast day will constantly remind us on December 9th, because he said in the retreat that I listened to, that very first one, These are his exact words. He says, I pray every single day of my life that I will drop dead before our Lord in the bus of sacrament on the feast day of Our Lady.

And he says, I don't know if the good Lord is going to grant me this, but I do know that if he doesn't, when I see him, he's going to be very embarrassed. So, when I was studying, I was like, I want to know what happened, and then it was December 9th, and at first, I got all upset, bent out of shape. I'm like, oh my gosh, why wasn't it the 8th?

But I've already given some clues of why December 9th is even bigger, but the other part, though, is that December 9th is the original feast day of Our Lady, of the Immaculate Conception, when it was first celebrated in the church going back to the 5th and 6th century.

And so, it was very still prominent at the time when Our Lady appeared in Mexico City, and our country is consecrated to Our Blessed Mother under the title of the Immaculate Conception. And Sheen was a man who represented East and West. Many people don't know he was by ritual.

Yeah, I had no idea. So, he was Byzantine. He could do Byzantine rite. Exactly, and he was the first bishop who celebrated the Byzantine rite in English in America, and this was in 1954. Wow. It'll come to me, but it was in Pennsylvania, and over 120,000 people were there.

Like, how did I not know this? So, you know, and the reason he was by ritual was because he did it to identify with the suffering church in the East under communism. And so, I see him, she was such a bridge builder in the popular world, the celebrity world, the political world, in the atheist world. He just was everywhere, and God used him in extraordinary ways, and that's why I see him as being, he's America's saint, because he was raised through all of what Americana really is, and no other saint has had that like he has.

But he's also bigger, and that's why I'm so excited, because what's going to happen shortly is going to be a launch for something I think is what we haven't quite prepared for, but in a very good way, we're going to be shocked. And I do think that his army, especially those who have been part of it for a while, are going to find...

New energy, clear direction, and I think be part of the turning of the tide as things continue to get worse. I mean, it's inevitable. Evil gets exposed, it gets more desperate, but I think we're going to start to finally see in a very concrete, tangible, very obvious way, the power of the Holy Spirit starting to work, and I believe she has something to do with that. That's incredible. Well, it's going to be, I mean, we could probably talk for three hours about Fulton Sheen, but for those of you, I hope that I have whetted the appetite through these questions.

For anyone watching, I would highly recommend, if you want to dive into this for 12 brief hours before the celebration of this incredible moment in American history, in world history, on September 23rd, highly recommend Fulton Sheen. America's Saint, the one-day conference, and Dr. Howard will be there. Our own Kelsey Reinhart will be offering a keynote address. So, highly, highly recommend. We're going to put all of the information on how to sign up for that, how to get there, where to stay.

It's all on the website, and it's also, on the website, you will also find more information on the Fulton Sheen Movement and the Institute headed by Dr. Howard, and I will be praying for you. I won't be able to be in St. Louis, but... Grace knows no bounds, and I'll be united with you all in prayer. I hope that God gives you so many consolations, and that venerable, soon-blessed Fulton Sheen just blesses you abundantly on that day through Our Lady.

Dr. Howard, is there anything else that you'd like to, just anything we didn't get to that you think is really important here? I mean, a little bit. Well, yeah, I mean, I do think that, I think we covered a lot. Your questions were great. They are right to the key points, and I do think that what separates the conference, people ask, what is it about this conference? And the first thing I say is incredible. There is no other. There are some smaller events and things leading up, but You know, we have a pilgrimage that leads up to the conference that begins on the 19th and ends at the beatification, but this conference is, you know, you mentioned Kelly Reinhart, she's going to be there.

These are people who are formed by Sheen, who have suffered, you know, for like the same causes as Sheen, and you're not just getting a raw, raw, like, oh, like, we love Sheen. It's... This is what we want to have as the impact of Sheen on everybody who encounters him. So, everybody there is somebody who's in the arena of Sheen, and we have two Byzantine priests who are going to be there, Father Jason Chiron, they may know, Father Thomas Loya. We have Arthur Brooks, who continues.

Fascinating. Yeah, I mean, he talks about happiness from a neuroscience point of view, and this is exactly what Sheen talked about. He says the evangelization that's coming is going to be... Using all of these kinds of new sciences and taking what's good.

And in a language that now the modern world will relate to, and using them as a springboard, then, to divine truths. Arthur's fascinating to listen to. So, anyway, this whole day is going to happen. Of course, we're going to have a holy hour. We have Bishop Joseph Coffey from the Military Archdiocese who's going to be there, Sister Dee Dee Byrne, John Yep, Catholics for Catholics. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He's not going to be beatified again. The canonization will not be in America.

A lot of people don't know that. The canonization will be in Rome. This is the one time to celebrate what I firmly believe is the beginning of the refounding of this country, and I say that very, I know, intentionally. I believe we are at a refounding moment because the lifespan of democracies is 200, 250 years. Here we are. It kind of feels like it. Yeah, absolutely. So, I hope they'll all join us. We do have a virtual way to join us as well, and if you can't make that, join us on the Pilgrim Mission Guadalupe in November.

All right. Let's slip that in. Yes. Oh, sure. Thank you so much, Dr. Hart. It has been a pleasure, and once again, all the details will be in the YouTube description, and you can find it in the loop.