In October 1940, Father Fulton J. Sheen wrote an airmail letter to Helen Mosier, a TWA stewardess he had met on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco. She was engaged to be married and taking instructions in the Catholic faith. Sheen’s letter, recently unearthed and shared by Saint Joseph’s Battalion, reveals his timeless teaching on the foundation of happiness in married life.
“God love you,” Sheen wrote. “I am thrilled to know you are taking instructions. Your ‘intended’ must be a very fine character to have influenced you in the direction of the faith. And God be thanked, you are responding to God’s grace. Happiness in married life is conditioned upon common denominations, and none is more basic than the faith. It really takes three to make love: Two human hearts and the Sacred Heart who draws them together.”
Sheen was consistent throughout his life: the secret to a happy marriage is not better communication or more effort, it is loving God first. When both spouses place God at the center, their love becomes sacrificial, ordered, and eternal. Without God, love becomes self-centered and fragile. With God, it becomes the foundation that sustains everything else.
The key to marriage is not finding the right person. It is becoming the right person through the grace of God. Sheen wrote that in 1940. It is just as true today. And the letter, written with humor, warmth, and pastoral care, shows the heart of a future saint who never stopped pointing couples to the Sacred Heart.
