Following Fulton
On Miracles, Messes, and My Guy Sheen

It’s a bittersweet feeling. That band in college you tracked down in questionable venues. Of course, I’m dating myself here, showing up at the record store on Tuesdays to peek at whatever obscure new releases came in. Then you’d force burned CDs on your friends, family, and coworkers, insisting they listen to this hidden gem you had connected with so closely.

Then comes the bitter part. Sometime later, you hear them on the radio, in a commercial, or catch the music video on TV. The next tour comes around and suddenly they’re playing actual venues, packed with “fans” singing along to the hits, and you start seeing people on the street wearing their merch.

What was “yours” is now “theirs.”

But isn’t that exactly what you wanted years ago when you were passing their tracks around like gospel tracts?

Well, yes.

And no.

That’s how I feel about soon-to-be Blessed Fulton Sheen.

The beatification is just around the corner, and my algorithm is filled with Sheen bios, pictures, quotes, merch, and so, so many people claiming Sheen as their guy. And yes, this is what the canonization process does. It brings a local person of heroic virtue to a global scale. When your “Servant of God” moves fast toward the universal altars, he becomes a little less yours.

And you’re happy about it.

But it does something that burns too.

“That’s my guy.”

Your local friend becomes a celebrity overnight, but to you he’s just Fulton.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Sheen was wildly popular well before I was even born. But when I found him in the early 2000s, he was obscure enough, with the exception of older people who had actually lived during his lifetime and still had fond memories of him, that it felt a little like finding something hidden.

I found Sheen in my 20s, but somehow, I feel like I came into contact with him much earlier than that. We share a birthday. I was born on May 8th.

I was channel surfing in my dorm room late one night when I came across this man wearing what appeared to be a “cape.” His theatrical style perplexed me. His glowing eyes almost paralyzed me. His wit and wisdom tickled my intellect, even though I wasn’t yet Catholic.

He reminded me, perhaps, of a grandfather I never knew but had always yearned for. From then on, I was hooked. He has played a crucial role in my formation and conversion. No other person has had a greater influence on my life or the way I think.

From there, Fulton became one of those people who seemed to keep showing up in my story.

During my first marriage, we had tried for nearly a decade to conceive a child. I prayed often for Fulton’s intercession. I even had a little shrine with a letterhead he had signed and an actual press-release photograph I had gotten on eBay. It was from some interview he had given.

On June 19, 2014, I was on a work trip in Springfield, Illinois. It was storming like something out of a horror film, but I had made up my stubborn mind that I was going to make a pilgrimage to the place where Fulton Sheen was ordained a priest, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois.

GPS wasn’t really on your phone yet, so I had to print out MapQuest. It was the worst storm I’ve ever powered through, but I was sure that Fulton would get me there. I pulled up, walked to the door of the cathedral, and braced myself to open the doors. To my surprise, they were locked.

So I knelt down by them and was content with just making my prayer request from there when the door opened. It was a deacon cleaning up, and he let me in to pray. His tomb was still in NYC, but I did the best thing I could do. I lay on the marble where he lay and asked him to pray that I might be gifted with a baby.

Prayers aren’t always answered in the most obvious and clean way.

A short time later, a former employee of mine, a rather troubled but special young woman, started asking me to mentor her. She was raised in a secular environment and knew nothing of the faith, but she had a resilient, sharp mind. Naturally, I used Fulton Sheen to help catechize her.

I got transferred two hours away, and it somewhat stopped my friendship with this woman. Since I was moving, I got her a gift, a book by Fulton Sheen entitled Your Life Is Worth Living. In the jacket, I wrote her a personal message on how Fulton Sheen changed my life and that I hoped he would help her too. I wrote that if I was ever lucky enough to be blessed with a child, I would name him or her Fulton.

Over the years, I had little to no contact with her. But early one December, she contacted me via Messenger in confidence. She told me that she was pregnant and that she was planning to have an abortion. She asked if I could bring her to the clinic.

I froze and didn’t know what to say. Immediately, and without thinking about it, I started talking to Fulton Sheen in my car. I remember sitting in my car, just looking at my work and not going in. How was I, lovingly and with charity, going to tell her what the Church teaches, what natural law teaches?

I tried my best to logically make a pro-life case, but her mind was made up. She said she was offended, hurt even. She apologized to me but said she was having an abortion.

I prayed daily, and I asked for Fulton Sheen’s intercession. I even wrote the Fulton Sheen Foundation, asking them to pray and to tug on his shoulder as best they could. But she wouldn’t answer my emails, and I feared the worst.

Ghosted.

Then, three months later, she contacted me. She said, “I’m either having an abortion or giving you this child.”

I met her for dinner, and the first thing she asked was, “Are you naming the baby Fulton?”

On August 24, 2015, we brought Fulton Grace home from the hospital. She is a beautiful, athletic, sassy 11-year-old. She has graced our lives, and I’m so blessed that she calls me DAD.

But like I said earlier, prayers aren’t always answered cleanly or clearly. And they’re not always accepted and taken care of once they’re granted.

Around the 10-year anniversary of this story, a religious sister working for the canonization cause wrote me. She was following up. She wanted to know how Fulton was and if she could share the story in the newsletter.

It took me days to respond to her.

To be honest, I didn’t talk about Fulton Sheen for about a decade. I felt like I threw his gift away. You see, I had gotten divorced. Moved across the state. Annulment. Remarried.

And even though I’m a Catholic in good standing now, and my wife and I are both very prayerful, fruitful, and happy, it’s a wound and a hurt that I carry around.

Like I squandered a miracle.

No one who gives you a child to take care of expects you to get a divorce. That’s not necessarily the vision they have when they trust you with something so monumental and priceless.

I finally found the gall to write back:

Dear Sister,

While I wish I could say it has been a fairy-tale ending, life has taken its own turns. It’s easy to recount the triumphs, like David slaying Goliath and being called a man after God’s own heart, while omitting the more painful chapters later in the story. One thing I deeply admire about Venerable Fulton Sheen is how, in his autobiography, he did not shy away from acknowledging his flaws and human frailty, things often hidden from the public eye.

The truth is, at the time, I was in a civil marriage that was later declared invalid by the Church. We had placed all our struggles on infertility, believing a child would heal our wounds. But as you know, a child does not fix a marriage; rather, it reveals what has been broken all along. Within a few years, we divorced. Divorce is a painful reality, one that no amount of positive framing can erase, especially for the children involved. We have since both remarried with the Church’s permission, and we remain grateful for the one undeniable fruit of our relationship: the privilege of saving Fulton Grace from an abortion appointment. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.

Cody

She soon wrote back, and to my surprise, she wasn’t scandalized or judgmental in the least. Her tone was incredibly loving and hopeful about grace and redemption. She said, “No ‘Disney-esque narrative’ was expected; this is even more beautiful and so profound. Truly, this is the Lord’s story! It brought me to tears immediately. No coincidences, to be sure! God makes all of it work for the best, seems like.”

We’ve stayed in touch ever since, and she has constantly prayed for Fulton Grace.

And as Providence would have it, I was on another work trip three hours away. I finally got to pray at the tomb of my hero, tour the museum, and meet the sister who had been so prayerful and supportive.

She eagerly showed me around, and when we got to the exhibit that showcased Sheen’s Byzantine garments, I blurted out that my wife was an iconographer. And we talked about the possibility of a Sheen icon for the upcoming beatification.

Hortencia ended up putting around 150 hours into the project, and it meant a lot to her to be part of it as a kind of spiritual reparation and healing for any hurt or lasting mark our choices may have caused in the past.

Prayers are continuously answered. Just not in a way that makes sense or fits into the exact box of the way you want it.

On September 11, I got to deliver not one but two icons. One to the family of James Fulton Engstrom, the little boy whose miraculous recovery after being without a heartbeat for 61 minutes was attributed to Sheen’s intercession and helped clear the way for his beatification. The second to the sisters at the Fulton Sheen Museum, donated in thanksgiving for Fulton Grace.

So when I say, “That’s my guy,” I know how ridiculous that sounds. Fulton Sheen was never obscure in the grand scheme of things. He belonged to millions long before he ever belonged to me.

But he was there in my birth, in my conversion, in the books I passed around, in the prayers I prayed, and eventually in the name of my daughter and the icons made in her honor.

So yes, I want everyone to know him.

I want the Church to raise him up.

I want people to discover what I discovered, and the message he preached so well: that grace still finds broken clay pots, and redemption is never out of reach.

I just also understand, now, the guy standing in the back of the packed venue thinking:

I followed them before they were cool.