United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

35 GOD CALLS US TO PRAY THE FOUNDATIONS OF PRAYER —CCC, NOS. 2558-2758

THE HOUR THAT MADE HIS DAY

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen believed that his daily hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament was essential for his ministry as a priest. For him it was like “an oxygen tank that revived the breath of the Holy Spirit.” Sheen said the idea of having a daily hour of prayer came to him one evening in 1918 while he was a student at St. Paul Seminary in Minnesota. He began his Holy Hour observance the next day and maintained it for the rest of his life, usually early in the morning before Mass.

He was born in El Paso, Illinois, in 1895, to a hardware store owner and his wife. His parents first enrolled Fulton at St. Mary’s grammar school in 1900. Later, he was educated at St. Viator’s College in Bourbonnais, Illinois, and then at St. Paul’s Seminary in Minnesota, before being ordained in 1919. Later, he pursued graduate studies in philosophy at the Catholic University of America and at Louvain University in Belgium. His bishop brought him back to the Diocese of Peoria, where he served as a parish priest for a year. He was permitted to become a pro fessor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he taught for twenty-five years. God had also given him the gift of preaching, a talent he used for the Church’s work of evangelization, first on a radio program called the Catholic Hour for twenty-five years, and later on television’s Life Is Worth Living series for five years. He is sometimes credited with inventing the medium of television evangelism.