Via JMJ

The origin of our name

The Way of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

The letters JMJ stand for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the Holy Family of Nazareth. For centuries Catholics have written them at the head of a page as a small act of dedication, placing whatever follows under the protection of the Holy Family. Via JMJ means “the Way of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph”: the road we walk in their company toward God.

The name keeps us close to Archbishop Sheen, who kept this custom all his life and traced it to his childhood. He wrote the three letters at the top of every page he composed, before anything else. They were the first thing he wrote, and in a sense the reason for all the rest. You can still see them today on the railing of the ramp that leads into his tomb chapel in Peoria.

For us the three letters carry a second meaning, folded gently inside the first. Archbishop Sheen was baptized Peter John, and so in the J we also hear John. Read that way, the initials name three who lead us to Christ: John, Mary, and Joseph. That is our whole purpose set down in three letters, to lead people to Jesus through John, Mary, and Joseph: through Our Lady and St. Joseph, who first gave him to the world, and through John, the name Sheen carried, whose voice gave him again to a century that had nearly forgotten him. More on the JMJ monogram.

---

A community from around the world

Many countries, one devotion

Via JMJ is not a place or a parish. It is a company of Catholics scattered across many countries and continents, joined by a single devotion. Sheen’s voice reached living rooms on every continent in his lifetime, and those who owe some part of their faith to him are found everywhere today. That is the community this apostolate serves, in as many languages as we can manage, so that a reader in Warsaw, in Sao Paulo, or in Lagos can find him as readily as a reader in Peoria.

---

Our mission

To preserve, promote, and share

Via JMJ exists to preserve, promote, and share the spiritual legacy of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen throughout the world. We hope that, following his beatification and, if the Church so grants, his canonization, ever more people will discover his teaching, his writings, his spirituality, and his example of holiness, and be drawn through him to Christ.

Our work is given to evangelization, Catholic formation, prayer and devotion, and the pursuit of holiness in ordinary life.

---

Why he matters today

An old voice for a new moment

Sheen spoke to a restless, distracted age that is not so unlike our own. He met people where they were: on the radio, on television, in the questions they were already asking. Then he led them gently to the truth that gives life. His clarity, his joy, and his unwavering holy hour remain a path anyone can follow. As the Church prepares to call him Blessed, his witness is offered again to a generation that has perhaps never heard him.