Bishop Tylka: Price of Sheen beatification tickets offsets ‘very significant cost’ of event
"We understood from the start that...there were going to be significant expenses."
Tickets for the beatification Mass of Archbishop Fulton Sheen were released last week, three months ahead of the event, which will take place Sept. 24 at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis.
Tickets range from $15-$25 in price. Priests wishing to concelebrate at the Mass must buy a $25 floor ticket for entrance.
The cost of the tickets - particularly for priests - has generated some criticism.
But Peoria Bishop Louis Tylka told The Pillar that organizers believe the costs are necessary to offset the expenses of holding an event at a major sports arena - which comes with both the opportunity to include more participants and also its own set of restrictions and limitations.
Tylka spoke with The Pillar about the ticketing process, the beatification Mass, and other events planned as part of the celebration in September.
That interview is below. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The Diocese of Peoria has announced the ticketing process for Fulton Sheen’s beatification and put tickets up for sale. How has it gone so far? How many tickets have you sold?
I believe we’re close to 20,000 tickets from the launch.
Now that does not include group [ticket requests], which we have to manually process. We have probably close to — I’m guessing — another 15,000 tickets already that are being requested by groups. That’s a very labor-intensive piece of the puzzle.
The complexity of the whole ticketing process is we have to deal with the platform of Ticketmaster, and they have limitations on what they can do or are willing to do, even though we’re paying a lot of money for them to do this.
And then how do we manage the reality of the groups: the religious, the priests, the seminarians, schools and stuff?
So it’s been quite an ordeal to try to devise all of it.
On the Ticketmaster site, it looks like tickets are mostly sold out. Most of what’s left are upper level tickets. I understand that lower tiers are where you’ve held tickets for pilgrim groups.
Is the idea that more tickets will be released over time?
Yes. Because we have to do the manually accounting and assigning of groups, that meant we had to hold back a significant number of tickets so that we could manage those group requests.
We started getting group requests via emails to the [Fulton Sheen] Foundation before the actual tickets were released. And of course, after we released the tickets, the number of group [requests] jumped significantly.
In time, as we are able to manage the group sales, there will be at least one more, if not two or three more tranches of tickets that will get released in the coming month.
It is unusual to have to pay to attend a Mass. Some people have been asking whether charging to go to this Mass is a form of simony.
What would you say to that?
Well, canon law says that you cannot charge to go to Mass in a church. We’re not in a church.
The reality is that we’re doing the beatification Mass in a public football stadium, and that comes with a very significant cost.
We could have done this in our cathedral with less than 1,000 people. It would’ve been a lot easier to plan and a lot less complicated and costly.
The venue itself has a significant cost that we have to meet. Ticketmaster has their own costs. We have security to pay for, the workers that operate the dome.
All of those costs have to be absorbed somehow, and therefore tickets were put on sale.
It’s no different than a year ago in Chicago when they had the Mass at Rate Field for Pope Leo. You had to purchase a ticket to be able to get in the stadium. Not because the archdiocese wanted to charge people to get tickets, but the reality is that you’re getting into public venues with a lot of costs that come with renting those facilities.
Using the facility that we’ve chosen so that we can maximize participation, we understood from the start that that was going to create challenges as well as opportunities, and there were going to be significant expenses to that.
We did not get to choose who we wanted to use to platform tickets for us. Ticketmaster is the contracted agent for events at the Dome at America’s Center, and therefore we had to go and work with them the best we could, to keep the tickets at the lowest cost as possible. In addition, as we are planning the expo, there’s opportunities for people that, again, are costs to us.
There’s also a $25 fee for priests to concelebrate the Mass. How did you come to that decision?
Well, everybody who enters the Dome for the beatification needs a ticket.
In order for a priest to come in to concelebrate, they have to have a ticket, and every ticket has a cost.
My feeling is that we should not treat priests and religious and seminarians any differently than we’re treating the general lay public who are helping us to cover the cost of the event by purchasing the tickets that are required to enter. So I’m not charging a priest to celebrate the Mass. The charge for the priest is to get him the ticket to get in the building.
The floor ticket price is a $25 ticket. The priests are going to be seated in a section right next to where the Sheen family is seated, and that’s going to be sitting next to a section of folks from the diocese, and all of those tickets are $25 a piece.
We had two generous donors come forward to say, “We would like to cover the cost of tickets for the sisters.” We have not had a generous donor come forward to say, “I’m going to cover the cost for the priests.”
The other reality for the priests is that, beyond having a ticket which they need to get into the facility, we are providing a commemorative chasuble to the first thousand priests who register.
Has there been any thought of seeking sponsorships to help cover the tickets for priests, or anyone else who wants to attend or can’t afford it?
I would say at this point, logistics makes everything difficult because the registration has been already opened.
So at this point, it would be us having to go back in and issue reimbursements to those who have already purchased the ticket.
And truthfully, we’re continuing to work to get sponsorships — I mean, the ticket prices don’t cover the whole expense of the event.
If you could imagine the expense of the Dome: Your first expense is to rent it, and all that does is open the doors. And then you have security, and you have to have a production company.
And as we continue to develop the plans and are solidifying them, we want to make sure that everybody who’s in the Dome, whether they’re sitting on the floor in the higher sections — 200, 300, 400 sections — we want them all to feel that they’re truly participating in this sacred event.
There are only two Jumbotrons in the football stadium at the end zones. The expense for our production company is quite significant because we’re hanging somewhere like nine or 10 additional Jumbotrons, so that you will not have a seat that won’t have access to a screen.
So we’re trying to make it as powerful and intimate as you can when you’re bringing 75,000 people together, but that comes at a great cost.
How many clergy are registered to attend so far?
We have over 400 priests registered. We have 175 seminarians registered, 130 deacons and 65 religious so far.
To concelebrate the Mass, priests are required to have a letter of suitability from their diocese. One priest told me that his diocese won’t send a letter of suitability until right before an event, just in case something were to change about his status in the meantime. But he said that in order to concelebrate, he needed to submit a letter of suitability significantly in advance.
Have you heard that feedback, and is there a way to best address that?
The letters of suitability come from the diocese. I can’t tell another diocese how to handle letters of suitability. This is a very complex process, and we have worked with the Archdiocese of St. Louis so that we can coordinate the letters of suitability, which is why they are coming to us and will be shared with the Archdiocese of St. Louis —- so that we’re in constant communication with them to make sure that we are getting the letters and such. We simply can’t hold out.
There shouldn’t be a problem in getting a letter of suitability from your diocese for an event that’s less than three months away now. But again, I can’t speak for another bishop as to what his policies and procedures are.
John Paul II celebrated a big historic liturgy in St. Louis in 1999. Will you use any liturgical elements from that Mass? The altar or ambo or anything like that? How do you decide which liturgical pieces to use?
Well, obviously when the Holy Father John Paul II was [at the Dome], which was over 20 years ago, that was the largest indoor gathering [in U.S. history] at the time.
There were 102,000 people, because they used all the exhibit halls as seating for that Mass as well. We did look at a number of things as far as staging goes and a number of the items, which of course the archdiocese was willing to make whatever they had available.
We ended up choosing to use some of our own stuff for the beatification. Some of the things though, we’re relying on the generosity and help of others. So if you can imagine, how do you give communion to roughly 75,000 people in a relatively short period of time?
Well, we have ciboria that are being borrowed from places like Indianapolis, with the National Eucharistic Congress and other dioceses that have held such large events.
We do have some items coming from the Diocese of Rochester that are personal to Sheen that will likely get used as well. So it’s a mixture of things, but we’re not using anything specific to when Pope John Paul II was there.
Besides the Mass, what other events will people participate in as part of the beatification celebration?
We’re bringing together more than 70,000 people for this historic celebration of the beatification Mass, which of course is the most important event of the day. We know people will be arriving throughout the morning, so we wanted to make sure that they had opportunities to have things to engage in — to offer them the chance for adoration, the sacrament of reconciliation. The expo is going to be a wonderful opportunity to see probably 100-plus vendors of Catholic merchandise and apostolates and groups that are working to spread the gospel. So an opportunity to see and learn more.
And then of course the beatification pre-Mass program’s going to begin around 10:00 am. For several hours, we’re lining up a program where people will hopefully be inspired and reflective upon why it is we’re gathering. We’ve invited several folks to participate in that. Cardinal Dolan’s going to give a reflection. We have Matt Maher for some music. We have Sister Josephine Garrett giving a reflection. So there’s a whole pre-beatification Mass program for those who just want to be in their place in the Dome, they’ll have the opportunity to have that time of reflection.
Of course, it all continues afterwards because after the beatification Mass is the opportunity to venerate the relics. And since that will certainly take some time for those who wish to do so, we’ve opened the expo to allow folks several more hours to visit those groups.
We continue to encourage people to consider joining us and first pray for us, pray for the planning and everything, that it’ll all come together. Secondly, pray for the beatification itself and that it really be a moment of grace for the Church. And then if you can be there, great, join us. We’d love to have you.
If not, certainly be aware that it’s going to be broadcast and streamed so people can participate even if they’re not in St. Louis, and consider joining in some of the events around our holy hours leading up and the Masses of Thanksgiving, the Sheen Awards the night after. There’s lots to do and participate in celebrating Sheen at this point.