Let him rest in peace already!
TV Bishop Fulton Sheen has been dead for nearly 40 years, but the battle over his remains continues — resurrected yet again Tuesday when a Manhattan appeals court overruled a 2016 decision to disinter the famed clergyman’s body from a St. Patrick’s Cathedral crypt and send his remains back to his hometown parish in Peoria, Ill.
Sheen’s Yonkers niece, Joan Sheen Cunningham, sued to transport his body back in Peoria because that parish is willing to push for his sainthood.
Peoria church officials said that according to Vatican rules, an application for sainthood must be made in the parish in which the body resides. Sheen’s kin have said the New York Archdioscese told them that the application process was too arduous for it to undertake.
Cunningham filed suit against the New York Archdiocese two years ago when church officials refused to give up the body, and she won her bid.
But the archdiocese appealed, and in Tuesday’s split ruling, the appellate judges wrote that a former Sheen assistant, Msgr. Hilary Franco, claimed that his clergyman boss wished “to remain in New York even after his death.”
The appellate panel has ordered “a full exploration of Archbishop Sheen’s desires” through a post-mortem hearing.
Cunningham, who is 90 and recovering from back surgery, was upset by the decision.
“I’m sorry that it’s being dragged out forever and ever, amen,” she told The Post.
“I was very close to my uncle from the time I was 10-years-old, I saw him two days before I died,” she said.
But a New York church spokesman said, “We believe that Archbishop Sheen clearly stated his intention in his will, written just days before his death, that he be buried in New York, where he conducted his ministry, and where he lived most of his years, including at the time of his death.”
Besides, New York checked with the Vatican and was told that Peoria could make an application for sainthood regardless of whether it had Sheen’s body, officials said.
The archdiocese spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said, “It is our hope that the Diocese of Preoria will re-open the cause for beatification and canonization of Archbishop Sheen. There is no impediment to his cause progressing, as the Vatican has told us there is no requirement that the earthly body of a candidate for sainthood reside in a particular place.”
Sheen hosted his award-winning TV show “Life Worth Living” in New York from 1952 through 1957.
In his will, written just five days before he died in December 1979, Sheen said wanted to be buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. He ended up under St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan after then-Edward Cardinal Egan convinced Cunningham to allow the move.
But once his home parish, St. Mary’s Cathedral, took up his beatification cause, Cunningham divined that if Sheen “knew during his lifetime that he would be declared a Roman Catholic saint, it would have been his wish to be interred” in Preoria where he was ordained.