The reading
A name chosen before the birth
Bonnie and Travis Engstrom had put their unborn son under Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s patronage and intended the name Fulton. Sheen, a son of the Diocese of Peoria, had spent his public life teaching the Catholic Faith to a mass audience and had bound that work to a daily Holy Hour. The parents’ prayer was not invented after the crisis. It was already the child’s name.
Sixty-one minutes
On 16 September 2010 James Fulton Engstrom was born without a pulse, after a labour that had been planned at home and a heart rate that, until the emergency, had been described as sound. For sixty-one minutes there was no heartbeat. As the team prepared to record a death, he breathed and the heart established itself. His mother has connected those sixty-one minutes, in her own telling, with the hour Sheen spent each day before the Eucharist. That is her reading, not a finding of the medical board.
What the physicians expected
The family were told to expect blindness and a life without walking, speech, or the ability to feed himself. The child did not take that path. He grew up in Washington, Illinois, able to do what the prognosis had withdrawn. A recovery of that kind, after that interval, is what the Church later asked her physicians to judge.
How the Church examined it
The Diocese of Peoria opened an inquiry. Monsignor Jason Gray, a Priest of that diocese, led the investigation from 2011. A board of medical experts advising the Holy See’s office for the Causes of Saints accepted the recovery as medically inexplicable on 6 March 2014. Theological advisers agreed on 17 June 2014. Pope Francis approved the miracle in July 2019. A beatification was planned for December of that year in Peoria and then paused, after a request from some Bishops of the United States for more time, while the question of Sheen’s remains was unsettled. On 24 September 2026 the beatification was celebrated in St. Louis. James, then sixteen, carried a relic of Blessed Fulton Sheen.
Reading
How to read The child who was born without a pulse
A beatification miracle is not a proof that every prayer is answered with a cure. It is the Church’s judgement that, in this case, the Church may safely offer the person’s public veneration and ask his prayers. Most sick children are not restored. The Gospel does not promise that they will be. What the Church claims here is narrower and more serious: that God has given a sign by which Fulton Sheen may be called Blessed.
The sign sits inside a life already known. Sheen’s preaching, his Holy Hour, his books on the Cross and the Mass, are why a family in Illinois knew whom to ask. The miracle does not replace that teaching. It is why the Church now permits the title Blessed, and why his talks remain in this App under his name.
Church status
How this sign has been received
Church-approved
The recovery is the approved miracle for the beatification of Fulton Sheen. It is not a Marian apparition and not a Eucharistic prodigy. It is an intercessory healing, examined first by physicians and then by theologians, and accepted by the Pope.
Medical experts of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, 6 March 2014. Theological commission, 17 June 2014. Approval by Pope Francis, July 2019. Beatification, St. Louis, 24 September 2026. The title in this App is Blessed Fulton Sheen.
Investigation
What has been examined
The question put to the physicians was whether a newborn without a pulse for sixty-one minutes could be expected to survive intact by any treatment then in use. Their answer, accepted by the Holy See’s medical board in 2014, was that the recovery was inexplicable in the natural order as they could account for it. This page does not invent a laboratory paper that was never published. The record is the cause of beatification, not a journal article written for its own sake.
Sources
- America Magazine, 8 July 2019, “The miracle that moved Archbishop Fulton Sheen to beatification,” reporting the Engstrom account and the papal approval.
- St. Louis Review, August 2026, on James Fulton Engstrom, the sixty-one minutes, the 2014 votes, the July 2019 approval, and the paused 2019 date.
- Catholic News Agency, September 2026, Bonnie Engstrom and Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria on the beatification in St. Louis on 24 September 2026.
- Diocese of Peoria and the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation, public accounts of the inquiry led by Monsignor Jason Gray.
For the classroom
The child who was born without a pulse (16 September 2010 · approved 2019 · beatification 24 September 2026, Washington, Illinois). Grade in this encyclopedia: Church-approved. James Fulton Engstrom was born without a pulse and remained without one for sixty-one minutes. His parents had asked the intercession of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The Church later accepted the recovery as the miracle for Sheen’s beatification.
