Sheen’s sainthood cause suspended September 10th

By Catholic News Service

The canonization cause of Archbishop Fulton Sheen has been suspended indefinitely, according to a statement issued Sept. 3 by the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, where the archbishop was born. The suspension was announced “with immense sadness,” the diocese said. “The process to verify a possible miracle attributed to Sheen had been going extremely well, and only awaited a vote of the cardinals and the approval of the Holy Father. There was every indication that a possible date for beatification in Peoria would have been scheduled for as early as the coming year.” Archbishop Sheen, who gained fame in the 1950s with a prime-time television series called “Life Is Worth Living,” died in New York in 1979. The diocesan statement said the Archdiocese of New York denied a request from Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, president of the Archbishop Sheen Foundation, to move the archbishop’s body to Peoria. Deacon Greg Kendra, in a Sept. 3 posting on his blog The Deacon’s Bench, said the reason for the request was for “official inspection and to take first-class relics from the remains.” A Sept. 4 statement from Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the New York archdiocese, said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York “did express a hesitance in exhuming the body” absent a directive from the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes and family approval. The statement added that Archbishop Sheen’s “closest surviving family members” asked that the archbishop’s wishes be respected and that he had “expressly stated his desire that his remains be buried in New York.” -

 See more at: http://www.catholic-sf.org/ns.php?newsid=1&id=62683#sthash.pDdlTB1l.dpuf