The battle over the bishop’s body continues. A court in New York ruled last month that Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s closest surviving relative, his niece Joan Sheen Cunningham, could transfer her uncle’s body to Peoria, Illinois. The Diocese of Peoria, which prepared the cause for Sheen’s beatification, has declared that unless it gets the body of the late bishop, it will not permit the beatification to proceed. Sheen is currently buried in the crypt under the high altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and the trustees of St. Patrick’s have appealed the court ruling.

The facts are relatively straightforward: Archbishop Sheen, despite having been the bishop of Rochester, New York, where custom would have dictated that he be buried, asked to be buried in New York City. Upon his death in 1979, Cardinal Terrence Cooke decided to bury Sheen in St. Patrick’s. Peoria submits that Sheen, had he known that he would be beatified, would have wanted to be buried in Peoria, where the diocese has prepared a shrine for his body in the cathedral...