23/09/2026
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In 1943, at the height of World War II, an anonymous tip reached the FBI: Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen was speaking hard truths about the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. The United States and the USSR were wartime allies against N**i Germany.
Some feared that criticizing Moscow could harm the war effort. So the Bureau opened a file on the priest who would later become one of America’s most famous Catholic voices.
Agents followed him. What they found was not a threat to national security. They noted that he liked chocolate ice cream, kept a demanding and almost monastic schedule — including his daily Holy Hour each morning — and once talked a police officer out of a speeding ticket. The investigation went nowhere. The file was later closed.
By the early 1950s the same FBI — and J. Edgar Hoover — had reversed course. They invited then-Bishop Sheen to address a graduating class of new agents. The man once treated as a possible risk had become a national figure: radio preacher, television evangelist whose program reached more than 30 million viewers, Emmy winner in 1953, and national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith from 1950 to 1966.
A 2023 documentary, Follow That Bishop, uses this little-known FBI episode to retell the larger story: writer, missionary promoter, and evangelist who spoke far beyond Catholic circles.
The film also recalls the 2010 miracle accepted for his cause — the sudden recovery of a stillborn infant in Illinois after 61 minutes without heartbeat or breath, a boy now a healthy teenager. Pope Benedict XVI declared Sheen Venerable in 2012. Tomorrow, September 24, he is scheduled to be beatified in St. Louis.
The FBI once wondered if a priest who named Marxism and Stalin by name was dangerous. History answered differently. He was dangerous only to comfortable silence.