Mother Teresa Visited Fulton Sheen Before He Died — and Many Other Times| National Catholic Register

When Mother Teresa visited Archbishop Fulton Sheen after his painful prostate surgery in 1977, a couple of years before he died, they were hardly strangers.

Yet their meetings, which took place over the course of two decades, aren’t well-documented or well-known because they were almost always in private — the type that turn up in endnotes of books published long after the fact.

Even when exactly they first met is a little murky. One source says 1960, in New York. Another puts it around the mid-1960s, in Rome.

But either way, at the time then-Bishop Sheen, in either his mid- or late 60s, was a national celebrity in the United States because of his former television show and well-known internationally because of his books on how to follow Christ. Mother Teresa, in her early or mid-50s, was the head of a growing-but-not-yet-world-famous religious order of sisters ministering to what she called “the poorest of the poor” in India.

Bishop Sheen was also U.S. national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith — for which he was a prodigious fundraiser and a major donor (from his television earnings and book royalties) and thus a conduit for large sums of money to missionary activities around the world. So initially, at least, he was potentially the source of funds Mother Teresa needed for her ministrations to the dying and abandoned.

But money wasn’t the main attraction.

Mother Teresa loved Bishop Sheen’s 1950s book Life of Christ.

“The sisters told me … ‘Mother always carried that book with her.’ And she had the sisters read that during Holy Week,” Father Andrew Apostoli (1942-2017), one of the founders of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, said in an interview for a 2011 documentary, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: Servant of All, which is airing on EWTN this month.

As for Bishop Sheen, he admired Mother Teresa’s work and the way she went about it.

“This is a truly wonderful and saintly lady,” Bishop Sheen told his secretary, Msgr. Hilary Franco, shortly after a meeting with her in a slum in Rome around the mid-1960s, according to the priest’s book Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers.

Both figures are linked by the month of September.

Sept. 4 is the 10th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s canonization in Rome, one day before her feast day, which is Sept. 5. That’s 19 days before the scheduled beatification of Archbishop Sheen, which is set for Sept. 24 in St. Louis.

Lots of Meetings

Meg Greene, author of Mother Teresa: A Biography, told the Register that Mother Teresa first met Bishop Sheen in October 1960, during a fundraising trip to the United States, citing a timeline likely put together by Eileen Egan, an associate of Mother Teresa.

Several years later, around the mid-1960s, an Italian priest who had served in India for the Holy See’s foreign service asked the bishop’s secretary if the bishop would see the nun, whom the priest had met and been impressed by. (The Italian priest was Pio Laghi, later appointed a cardinal after serving as St. John Paul II’s pro-nuncio in the United States.)

So Bishop Sheen went to a “humble structure, little better than a shack” in a poor section of Rome to meet over the course of two hours with Mother Teresa and her sisters, who sat cross-legged on the floor while Bishop Sheen stood, according to Msgr. Franco’s book, which presents the encounter as their first meeting.

“When I deal with people of her and Bishop Sheen’s spiritual caliber, I feel something extraordinary to which words cannot do justice,” wrote Msgr. Franco, who went on to give retreats in Kolkata, India, for the Missionaries of Charity after Mother Teresa died.

“Sheen’s piercing eyes would penetrate the marrow of your soul. Mother Teresa’s charisma, and her face’s distinctive wrinkles (then already forming), conveyed an almost palpable strength, power, and determination,” wrote Msgr. Franco, who also described a subsequent meeting in New York when he, then-Archbishop Sheen and Mother Teresa prayed the Rosary together.

While the American bishop and the missionary nun had vastly different experiences, in some ways they were similar.

Both had an intense prayer life — each spent an hour a day before the Blessed Sacrament. And both had suffered — Archbishop Sheen from the rejection he experienced from his fellow clerics over his falling-out with Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York; and Mother Teresa from her spiritual dryness during a 50-year “dark night of the soul,” in which she felt little consolation in prayer.

Both also got used to being in the limelight.

“I would think that the attraction for both of them was obvious: they were both totally devout servants of Christ, and their actions had attracted international attention,” Thomas Reeves, author of America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen, told the Register by email.

Each made time for the other over the coming years.

“They are also to have met at different times during the 1960s and 1970s when she visited the United States, mainly in Philadelphia and New York City. In 1976 both attended the 41st Eucharistic Congress in August 1976,” Greene told the Register by email.

(In addition to Archbishop Sheen and Mother Teresa, speakers at the August 1976 congress in Philadelphia included Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, now known as St. John Paul II; New York Cardinal and Servant of God Terence Cooke; and Princess Grace of Monaco, also known as the actress Grace Kelly, according to a January 2017 story at CatholicPhilly.com.)

During his retirement in Manhattan, then-Archbishop Sheen visited the Missionaries of Charity’s convent in the South Bronx sometime after Mother Teresa opened it in 1971, a former aide of the archbishop’s, Sister Marlene Brownett (who died in 2024), told Reeves, according to his book.

She is also the source for Mother Teresa’s final visit to Archbishop Sheen in 1977, whose telephone calls from the Pope and from President Jimmy Carter drew far more attention.