Venerable Archbishop Sheen and Easter: Hope in the Risen Jesus

On Easter Sunday in 1951, then Monsignor Fulton Sheen delivered his Catholic Hour radio program, challenging his listeners not to be like the “friends of our Lord” who were “too pessimistic and despairing.”

“Well indeed may Our Lord say on this Easter Day to his friends:  Why are you troubled in heart, despairing and cast down? … Have we lost the Christian virtue of hope?”  And our hope, then Monsignor Sheen emphasizes comes from the knowledge that we will never be separated from the love of Jesus.   

Soon after his election as our new Holy Father, first missionary of the Church, Pope Francis spoke also on this subject, “Let us never yield to pessimism…or discouragement: let us be quite certain that the Holy Spirit bestows upon the Church, with his powerful breath, the courage to persevere and also to seek new methods of evangelization, so as to bring to Gospel to the uttermost ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8).”   

Ending his radio broadcast for that Easter Sunday more than six decades ago, Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen signed off as he always did:  “Pray for missionaries.”  Pray, in essence, for those who then and today continue to remind the lost and forgotten that they are not abandoned, but loved by the Lord who suffered, died and rose for each and every one of us!