(LifeSiteNews) — In the mid-1970s Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen provided a prophetic statement during a retreat which is being recalled and shared across social media as his inevitable beatification draws closer.
Speaking in an address on confession, the venerable servant of God was disgussing sin and its resulting weight of guilt on overall health when he turned to the question of what these impacts could mean in the United States following the infamous U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision which decriminalized abortion.
“Just think, my dear ladies, of how many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul,” the archbishop considered.
Fulton Sheen’s old clip on abortion is going VIRAL.
“Just think of how many mentally disturbed women we are going have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul.” pic.twitter.com/kQh8chy6nv
— Sign of the Cross (@CatholicSOTC) January 13, 2026
“For the present, they justify it on the grounds that everyone is doing it, and it’s only ‘scar tissue’ anyway,” he reproached.
“As one doctor said to a girl who came in and said, ‘Well, it’s only a little scar tissue. Would you dismember it?’” to which the pro-life doctor responded, “‘What did you intend to call the scar tissue?’”
“So in years from now, the guilt will come out in a peculiar way, though at present, there may not be any,” Sheen predicted.
Since then it has been repeatedly affirmed that women are more likely to suffer mental health issues after abortion than after giving birth to their child.
For example, a study released last summer found that abortions were associated with more than doubled rates of “mental health-related hospitalizations,” including psychiatric disorders, substance abuse, and attempted suicide.
Another 2024 study found that a year after procuring an abortion, women exhibited a 50 percent higher likelihood of first-time psychiatric treatment and an 87 percent higher likelihood of personality and behavioral disorders.
These findings corroborated other studies which found that post-abortive women experience an 81 percent increased risk of mental health problems, that almost 10 percent of all mental health problems in women are directly linked to abortion, and that such women have a 61 percent increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Sheen provides examples in his address of how the sacrament of confession and absolution from a priest also improves mental and even physical health.
While the Catholic evangelist and media personality was expected to be beatified in 2019, in his home Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, the Vatican announced just a few weeks prior that the ceremony was to be postponed.
It was later revealed that the delaying of the beatification was triggered by Bishop Salvatore Matano of the Diocese of Rochester, New York, as a precautionary measure while that diocese sorted through more than 70 sex-abuse lawsuits which had been recently filed at the time.
Sheen was Bishop of Rochester from 1966 to 1969. A probe by Church authorities, who also revealed their results to civil authorities, found no allegations of abuse or cover-up on Sheen’s part. However, in their last-minute statement on December 5, 2019, the Rochester diocese cited concerns about advancing Sheen’s beatification “without a further review of his role in priests’ assignments.” While acknowledging that it had done its “due diligence in this matter,” the statement said that the beatification process needs “further study and deliberation.”
Msgr. Jason Gray, executive director of the Archbishop Fulton John Sheen Foundation, announced to OSV News at the end of 2024 that “Sheen is clean … Not one accusation has been raised that impugned Sheen.”
The Foundation affirmed they had examined “all of the pleadings” relevant to claims against the Diocese of Rochester, and “there hasn’t been anything that was brought up there” implicating Archbishop Sheen.
Reports have now circulated across social media that the Vatican is poised to announce a date for the beatification of the famed televangelist and venerable servant of God in perhaps the fall of this year.