PEORIA (CNS)—In a celebration blending religious and civic pride in one of Peoria’s most famous and influential historic residents, the street outside St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria was given the honorary designation of “Bishop Fulton Sheen Avenue” Feb. 4.

 

Four newly erected signs on a three-block stretch of Madison Avenue just north of the city’s downtown have the honorary name.

 

St. Mary’s Cathedral would be the site where, in 1919, Archbishop Sheen was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria. It is now where his remains are interred.

 

“And it is from these very streets that Fulton Sheen went on to change the world, not just the Catholic world, but the world, with a message that life is worth living,” said Msgr. Stanley Deptula, executive director of the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, quoting the title of Archbishop Sheen’s popular television series in the 1950s.

 

Archbishop Sheen died in 1979. Pope Benedict XVI declared Archbishop Sheen “venerable” in 2012.