Zac Johnson, Cofounder, Truthly · September 24, 2026
On September 24, 2026, in St. Louis, the Church declared Fulton Sheen Blessed.
He’s one of the patrons of Truthly, the Catholic AI app we’re building. The obvious reason is that he was a pioneer of radio and television, the emerging technologies of his time.
That’s true. But it’s only half the reason.
Before he was famous, he was a scholar. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at Louvain, taught at the Catholic University of America for more than twenty years, and wrote more than sixty books.
But he didn’t wait for people to find them.
In 1930 he began preaching on NBC radio, eventually to four million listeners. In 1940, when very few Americans owned a television, he appeared in the first televised Catholic religious service. In 1952 he went on primetime television and drew as many as thirty million viewers a week. He started one chapter of his autobiography this way: “I was born in the electronic age, when light waves are used to communicate the Word.”
That’s the half people remember. The other half never aired.
He prepared about thirty hours for each twenty-seven-minute episode and delivered it without a script, notes, or a teleprompter. He gave the money he earned from television to the missions. And every day for sixty years, he spent an hour in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. He had promised it at his ordination in 1919 and kept it until 1979, when he was found dead in his chapel.
Late in life he said where his power came from: “The secret of my power is that I have never in fifty-five years missed spending an hour in the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That’s where the power comes from. That’s where sermons are born. That’s where every good thought is conceived.”
Radio and television gave him reach. The hour made him worth hearing.
AI is the new medium of our time. Sheen used the new media of his time to help people understand and live the Catholic faith. Truthly uses AI to do the same.
But we chose him above all for the second half of his example. For him, the medium was never the point. The broadcasts were how he reached people. Christ was where he sent them. He instructed thousands of converts, and he spent his life urging others to keep the hour he kept. We judge the app the same way, by where it sends you: to Mass, to confession, to an hour before the Blessed Sacrament. If Truthly ever became the point, we’d have missed the lesson of his life.
If you’ve never made a holy hour, try one this week. If you’re not sure how, ask Truthly. Then put the phone away for the hour itself.
We ask him to pray for this work, and for you.
The film
Ahead of the beatification, we made an 18-minute documentary about Sheen’s life in partnership with the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, the official promoter of his cause for canonization. In its first week it reached number three on YouTube’s Hype chart, which says more about him than about us.
The Celebrity Priest Who Couldn’t Be Bought
