BLESSED Fulton J Sheen, pray for us!
Today is a day of great rejoicing for the Church Universal, and particularly for Catholics in the USA - another heroic model of sanctity from our own nation is being declared “blessed”! The much-beloved pioneering “media priest,” Bishop Fulton J Sheen, needs no introduction, and the American Church is celebrating mightily as her native son is beatified today in St. Louis, Missouri. If the number of people who have told us they are attending the ceremony is any indication, it will be a packed house! Although we as cloistered nuns will not be traveling to attend the beatification in person, we are certainly present in spirit - and in one other special way …
Decades ago (pun not intended!) Bishop Sheen invented the well-known World Mission Rosary, and event organizers for his beatification wanted to hand out one of these uniquely-colored sets of beads to each of the 70,000+ attendees. Purchasing them would have been prohibitively expensive, but then inspiration struck: why not mobilize the Church Militant to make them? Among others, a call was issued to women religious around the nation, asking if communities of Nuns and Sisters would volunteer to make a given number of Rosaries for the occasion. The response was overwhelming, and by the time we answered the call, we only needed to contribute 100 Rosaries towards the monumental total.
So … if you’re one of those 70,000+ folks crowding the stadium for the beatification Mass today, you might just be holding beads strung by your Sisters here in Whitesville! For the most part it would be impossible to tell which community made which Rosary, and in the long run it doesn’t really matter, as long as you pray fervently with them.
But …
If you happen to get one with a single PINK bead at the end of the white decade, that’s for sure one of ours - we were short exactly ONE white bead for our 100th Rosary!