Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
The three letters stand for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the Holy Family of Nazareth. For centuries Catholics have written them at the head of a page, a letter, or a child's school exercise as a small act of dedication: whatever follows is offered to God, in the company of his Mother and his foster father. It is a prayer no longer than a breath, and it quietly turns ordinary work into something given.
Sheen wrote them on everything
Fulton Sheen kept the habit all his life, and traced it to his childhood. At the top of every page he wrote, every manuscript, every set of notes for a broadcast, he first put the letters JMJ. Countless pages of his survive with those initials in the corner. They were the first thing he wrote, and in a sense the reason for all the rest: the books, the broadcasts, and the sixty years of a daily Holy Hour were the everything else that followed from that dedication.
You can still see the letters today. At his tomb in Peoria, the railing of the ramp that leads into the chapel carries the same three letters, so that anyone who comes to pray passes beside the words he wrote his whole life long.
Why we took the name
We are called Via JMJ, the Way of JMJ, the way of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The name says in three letters both where we are going and in whose company, and it keeps us close to the man whose legacy we exist to share. What Sheen wrote at the top of every page, we try to write at the top of this work.
A community from around the world
Via JMJ is not a place or a parish. It is a company of Catholics scattered across many countries and continents, joined by one devotion. Sheen belonged to the whole world before he belonged to any one of us. His voice reached living rooms on every continent, and the people 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.