The Fulton Sheen Movement has announced plans for a “Fulton Sheen Rally” — an all-day event on Sunday, July 14, at Annunciation Byzantine Catholic Church in Homer Glen, Illinois.

To promote the cause of beatification and pray for powerful graces for the Church through the intercession of Archbishop Sheen, the event will include prayer, celebration, inspiration, feasting and active participation in advancing the cause of the archbishop.

Peter Howard, founder and president of the Fulton Sheen Movement, explained that holding this rally is important, especially this year focused on the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage and Congress. “There is no one who is a better icon for the entire Eucharistic Revival than Venerable Sheen and his 60-year promise of his daily Holy Hour, which he said explicitly was the reason why he had power to convert souls and why people listened. So that has the potential to draw even more,” Howard said.

This Sunday’s event will feature speakers, including Howard; Jason Jones, founder of the Vulnerable People Project and dedicated advocate for the marginalized; and Father Thomas Loya, pastor of Annunciation Church, who has contributed an original hand-drawn image of Fulton Sheen and the Eucharist for the raffle. A co-purpose is for people to sign the petition for the Venerable’s beatification Mass, which was postponed several years ago.

“This rally is about a ‘proclamation’ of what Rome already says he is,” Howard said, adding that current events warrant a return to Venerable Sheen’s teaching.

“Since last year’s rally, the world has marched toward a more formalized World War III, the threat of nuclear war closer than it is has ever been, and the United States is nearer now than ever before to a complete moral, economic, societal and political collapse,” he said. “All of these things were warned of by Venerable Fulton Sheen, who feared what Abraham Lincoln feared about the future of America — that if America collapsed, it would happen only from within.”

In light of that, he said this rally is to increase the volume of the growing voice of Catholics around the world “who want to see Archbishop Sheen highlighted as the spiritual and intellectual leader to save America and the West from its spiritual apathy along with its cultural, political, moral and intellectual bankruptcy.”

He continued, “Fulton Sheen was given to America and to the world because God blessed him with laser insights into the root causes of all the evils we are facing throughout the world. Moreover, he understood and communicated very clearly the way we are to reverse course and make the Church and humanity the greatest it’s ever been. He understood the roots of division that now plagues the Church. Sheen is an example of never forgetting the vulnerable throughout the world.”

This makes Fulton Sheen even more relevant today, Howard underscored.

“What St. Thomas Aquinas was intellectually for the Church of the high Middle Ages, giving it a philosophical and theological compass for the development of the Church and Western civilization, Fulton Sheen is for the modern world,” he said. “But Sheen went further. He was the modern-day St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier, in evangelizing peoples all over the world. Sheen took 2,000 years of wisdom and teaching of the Fathers, doctors and magisterium and translated them so that not only Catholics could discover truth on all matters of living, but the whole world. Sheen combined the Petrine and Pauline missions for the Church like no other saint in the modern world.”