Dear Friends,
After the article last week on the beatification of Blessed Fulton Sheen, I wanted to include something on the miracle approved by Pope Francis that allowed the beatification.
On September 16, 2010, in a bedroom in Goodfield, Illinois, a planned home birth ended in silence. Bonnie Engstrom had carried a healthy pregnancy. Labor had been ordinary. When the midwife placed the newborn in her arms, Bonnie said the baby did not cry, breathe, or move. An undetected knot in the umbilical cord had tightened during delivery and cut off his oxygen.
James Fulton Engstrom was stillborn.
His parents had already chosen his name and his patron. Before he was born, Bonnie and Travis Engstrom had placed the child under the care of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the Peoria-born priest and later bishop whose radio and television ministry had reached millions in the mid-twentieth century.
They began to pray for Sheen’s intercession by name. The midwife started chest compressions. Paramedics continued them on the way to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria. At the hospital, the team exhausted every measure. For sixty-one minutes there was no pulse. Doctors were preparing to record a time of death when the heart started—strong, regular, and sustained.
What followed was as unexpected as the revival. Physicians warned of catastrophic organ failure and irreversible brain injury after so long without circulation. An MRI atthree months showed none. James met every developmental milestone.
Independent medical review later found no scientific explanation for survival without lasting damage. The case file, roughly a thousand pages of records from pregnancy through a year of follow-up, went to Rome.
On March 6, 2014, the medical consultants to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved it unanimously. Theologians did the same on June 17. Pope Francis authorized attribution of the healing to Sheen’s intercession on July 6, 2019.
That decree supplied the miracle required for beatification.
I hear there are five or six other possible miracles to verify. Perhaps Blessed Sheen will one day be known as St. Fulton Sheen. Let’s pray for that!
With gratitude and joy for the days ahead!
Fr. Seth