Where Sheen Saints Are Forged
Sheen Strong is personal Catholic formation in the discipline of Fulton Sheen — body, mind and soul.
Where Sheen Saints Are Forged
Sheen Strong is personal Catholic formation in the discipline of Fulton Sheen — body, mind and soul.
Where Sheen Saints Begin
The Daily Holy Hour
Could you not watch one hour with me?
Matthew 26:40
Sheen Strong is a discipline, not an app.
“There is no evil propensity of the heart that is so powerful that it cannot be subdued by discipline.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
We will give you everything you need to make this hour a discipline: the readings, the reminders, the record, the word that calls you back. What we ask in return is that you take it seriously. The Forge is for those who truly want to be forged into saints who are Sheen strong. If that is you, take your place.
Free — all thirty days, with nothing to pay at any point. Enter your name and city and we will light your flame on the map below. You will hear from us before we begin.
Every flame on the map is a real person who has committed to the daily Holy Hour. When you take your place, your city joins them — so someone praying alone at five in the morning can see they are not alone at all.
We will email you about the thirty days and about membership in Sheen Strong. Your city appears on the map; your name and email never do. How we handle your information.
Find your city on the map below. You are expected on November 10.
Between now and then, one thing worth doing: decide when your hour will be, and tell someone you have decided.
Every flame is a city where someone has committed to the daily Holy Hour.
Lighting the globe…
Blue Marble imagery: NASA
“No habit of sin is unbreakable with the help of God’s Grace; habit patterns only condition the will—they do not determine it.”
— Fulton J. Sheen, Lift Up Your Heart
Sheen wrote that in a chapter on why the ego dreads its own betterment. A few lines earlier he had dismissed “a nibble here and there of self-discipline” — it may “scintillate the nerves and fill us full of vanity, but it brings no enrichment of the personality.” A few lines later he names what does the breaking: “At any moment, under the impulse of Grace, the will can reject old habits.”
What he rejects is not effort. It is effort that thinks it is enough. Beneath his whole account lies the principle at the heart of the Christian life: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it — gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. Grace presupposes a nature to work on. So the work is genuinely ours; the hour has to be kept, and keeping it is hard. But what the hour accomplishes is not our achievement. We bring the discipline. Grace transforms it, and us.
That is what we mean by a discipline: not self-improvement, which has nothing beyond itself to perfect it, but the training that belongs to a disciple — a nature put deliberately in the way of grace. Thirty days of a kept hour, the silence and prayer where, as Sheen puts it, the soul “makes itself receptive to new insights and energies which come directly from God.”
This is not a course about prayer. It is thirty days of praying and building the habit, with something from Sheen waiting each morning and a record of your own kept only by you.
Every day
A passage of Scripture and a passage of Sheen's own words, quoted exactly and cited, building day by day across the thirty. You read them in the hour, before the Lord — not before it.
Every day
Before you leave the hour: did you keep your full time, and what did the Lord say to you? Two questions, asked the same way each day. No one reads your answers but you. Each day opens only when the one before it is kept. Every sixth day, no new reading: you look back over the week with the Lord — what struck you, what changed, what you carry forward.
The ideal
Make the hour before the Blessed Sacrament whenever you can reach a church — that is where He is truly present, and it is the ideal Sheen held out. When you cannot get there, make it at home, in whatever place you can pray.
Through the thirty days
A short word as the thirty days begin, and on every sixth day.
Sheen held the hour as the goal from the first day. For Catholics he taught that it should be made before the Blessed Sacrament — and that if you cannot get there, you make it at home. He allowed real flexibility in how it is kept, and we will guide you the whole way.
Every day you come before the Lord for one hour. Before you leave, you record whether you made the full hour — and if not, how many minutes you kept. An honest answer always completes the day.
I am Dr. Peter Howard. I have spent the last 30 years of my life studying and being formed by Blessed Fulton Sheen — his theology, his spirituality, his mission, and the hour that held it all together.
Beginning on November 10, alongside everyone whose flame you see above, I will be making the hour with you to set your heart and the world ablaze with the fire of the Holy Spirit.
The thirtieth day is December 9 — Blessed Sheen's feast day. It is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of the final spiritual conquest of which he was sent to lead us.
The thirty days is free, and always will be. What comes next is membership in Sheen Strong — the formation that follows the hour.
“You will have to fight many battles, but do not worry because in the end you will win the war before the Blessed Sacrament.” — Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay
