Fulton Sheen: James Fulton Engstrom
The Church accepted the restoration of a newborn who had no heartbeat for 61 minutes as the miracle needed to beatify Fulton Sheen.
RecordVatican decree · 6 July 2019 · beatified 24 September 2026
- When
- 16 September 2010; decree 6 July 2019; beatification 24 September 2026
- Where
- Goodfield and Peoria, Illinois
- Who
- James Fulton Engstrom; his parents, Bonnie and Travis Engstrom; the midwife, paramedics, and the team at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.
Finding
Msgr. Jason Gray led the diocesan inquiry, which closed on 11 December 2011. About a thousand pages went to Rome: the pregnancy record, the hospital chart, and a year of follow-up. On 6 March 2014 the medical board of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints voted unanimously that survival without cognitive or developmental injury was beyond scientific explanation. The theologians agreed unanimously on 17 June 2014. Pope Francis recognized the miracle on 6 July 2019. A beatification planned for Peoria that December was postponed. On 24 September 2026 Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, as delegate of Pope Leo XIV, beatified Sheen at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis. James, then sixteen, carried a relic in the procession. A further miracle, occurring after the 2019 decree, would still be required for canonization.
Evidence
James Fulton Engstrom was born at home in Goodfield, Illinois, on 16 September 2010, without a pulse. A knot in the umbilical cord had stopped his circulation. The midwife, and then the paramedics, gave CPR as he was taken by ambulance to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, a few blocks from the cathedral where Sheen was ordained in 1919. Bonnie and Travis Engstrom had already taken then-Servant of God Fulton Sheen as one of the child’s patrons, and they asked his intercession through the birth. At the hospital the team was preparing to record a time of death when James’s heart began to beat and he drew a breath. Sixty-one minutes had passed. He spent seven weeks in neonatal intensive care. By his first birthday the specialists found none of the brain injury that an hour without oxygen would ordinarily leave, and he has grown up without that deficit.