From OSV News:
St. Mary Catholic Church in El Paso, Illinois, will become part of the first parish in the world named for Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria announced Sept. 26 following a Mass of Thanksgiving at the parish where Blessed Sheen was baptized.
According to Bishop Tylka, St. Mary’s Church in El Paso is slated for merger with St. John Parish in nearby Benson. The newly created parish will be named Blessed Fulton J. Sheen on Dec. 9, the first observance of Blessed Sheen’s feast day.
The Sept. 26 Mass in Blessed Sheen’s hometown had another special significance. Offered two days after Archbishop Sheen became “blessed,” it was celebrated by an American bishop baptized by Blessed Sheen.
Bishop John O. Barres of Rockville Centre, New York, chairman of the board of trustees of The Pontifical Mission Societies, U.S.A., celebrated the Mass at what was Bishop Sheen’s hometown parish for about the first five years of his life.
Bishop Barres celebrated Mass in the “new” church, consecrated in 1899, but Sheen was baptized in the “old” St. Mary’s Church, on the site of the current parish hall adjacent to the new sanctuary, four years earlier on May 12, 1895.
“One-hundred-thirty-one years later, and immediately after his beatification, it is good that we are here,” Bishop Barres said during his homily. “For here, at St. Mary’s, in the sacrament of baptism, Fulton Sheen became a new creation. Here, original sin was washed away and new life in Christ was bestowed. Here is where the Holy Trinity entered his soul, where the adventure of holiness — the lifelong joy of following the Lord Jesus — was placed before him and where the call to mission — to be an ambassador of Christ — was conferred.”
