The Education Of A Catholic Journalist

By PAUL LIKOUDIS

(Editor’s Note: The article below first appeared in the March 1998 issue of the Canadian periodical Challenge, and is reprinted here with permission. All rights reserved.)

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Twenty years ago this fall, just a month after Karol Cardinal Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, I began a career in Catholic journalism. Whereas the new Pope was fully prepared for his calling, I landed into this work completely unprepared and unaware of the intensely exciting drama at play in the Catholic Church.
Truth be told, I heard the news of the new Pope while sitting at a bar in very northern Maine, directly opposite St. John, New Brunswick. After a hard day’s work putting in guardrails along U.S. 1, I was drinking a bourbon with my co-workers with the Maineline Fence Company. More or less oblivious to the television news that was playing in the background, my ears caught the words that the Catholic Church had a new Pope — a Pole!
The truth be told again, as a typical 24-year-old American male, I had little or no interest in the Catholic Church: but as someone who had loved history ever since learning to read and who had studied European history in college, the news that the first Pole in history was elected Pope was electrifying. I remembered G.K. Chesterton’s famous line that Poland was crucified between two thieves: Russia and Prussia — and I thought maybe we’ll see the faith in Europe resurrected.
In late October, it was already winter in northern Maine. I’d had enough of digging holes by hand on land that was too rocky and too steep for a machine to dig, so I planned to return to Washington, where I’d lived and worked for the government for three years — and left after trying futilely to break into journalism.
During those fruitless job searches, not having any journalistic training or basic skills (such as typing), I did pray countless novenas to St. Paul, the patron of journalists, for a break. But since he didn’t come through in those years, I just assumed he wasn’t listening.
Nevertheless, when I returned to Washington that Thanksgiving 1978, and saw an ad for an artist-illustrator at the National Catholic News service (predecessor of Catholic News Service), I decided to apply, even though I met none of the requirements. Providentially, however, I was hired on the condition I learned to type.
My first days at work were among the most exciting in my life. The Church had a new Pope and I was among the few people in the world able to read his every word nearly as soon as he spoke. Like millions of other Catholics around the world, the election of a bright, young, strong Holy Father was inspiring. His optimism and courage made one proud to be a Catholic and for the first time, I was proud to be a Catholic, too.
But one of the first lessons I learned in the newsroom was that many Catholics, particularly the so-called intelligentsia, did not like this Pope. There was often an incomprehensible hatred and contempt for this very attractive figure. For the first time, I was reading Catholic newspapers from around the country, and syndicated columnists like Andrew Greeley and Richard McBrien, and a handful of others were — within a month of the Pope’s election — ridiculing him.
At first, I could not understand why, but soon I would see, first hand, that there was an enormous “battle for the American Church”- as Monsignor George Kelly wrote in his masterful work of the same title- and I would see this battle on the front lines in Louisiana.
After a mere six months at the NC News, I was invited to join a former co-worker at Catholic News, Tom Barberie, as his assistant editor in Baton Rouge, La., which I did in June 1979. Bishop Joseph Sullivan had just created an international uproar by denying the dissident Catholic theologian, Fr. Charles Curran, a podium at [the Catholic Campus Ministry of] Louisiana State University.
His act was the first decisive action taken against the American Church’s premier apologist for contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, who for ten years had been indoctrinating priests and bishops at the Catholic University of America into the doctrines of the “culture of death”.
Baton Rouge was a war zone. Priests and laity were regularly picketing outside the chancery, dressed in sackcloth and ashes. Sullivan was pilloried in the National Catholic Reporter, Time, and Newsweek. His fellow bishops rebuked him for taking this “unilateral” action without consultation, and he was called to Rome to explain to officials of the Holy See why he created such a controversy.
Sullivan died in 1981, some say of a heart broken by his dissident priests, and in March 1986, the Holy See concluded its examination of Curran’s immoral theology and judged him unfit to hold the title “Catholic” theologian. Curran now teaches at a Methodist school in Texas.
In Baton Rouge, both the editor and assistant editor at The Catholic Commentator were in the eye of a storm. Week after week, the newspaper upheld the teaching of the Catholic Church, defending the pontificate of John Paul II, celebrating his early attempts to clamp down on dissident theologians, his efforts to end liturgical abuses, his championing of workers’ rights, particularly in Poland where he inspired the Solidarity Movement.
Soon, we were gaining a national readership, and just as soon, Bishop Sullivan told us, other bishops were demanding that he buy out our contracts. One day he called us into his office, and told us that [that three prominent prelates] were pressuring him to fire us. He didn’t, but he was forced to hire a consulting firm to “study the deficiencies” of the Commentator.
One of the first things I did as a new reporter in Baton Rouge was fall in love and marry, and soon enough our first child was born. The pressure and controversy of the job led me to look around for work, and when I saw a job advertised at the Catholic Register in Toronto, I applied immediately.
In the summer of 1981, just a month after a Turkish assassin attempted to murder Pope John Paul, I was at the Register, where I learned that the “battle for the American Church” was even more intense in Canada. G. Emmett Cardinal Carter had just had a stroke, and while he tended to be supportive of publisher Larry Henderson, when he was incapacitated, his inner circle, who despised Henderson’s efforts to publish an orthodox Catholic paper, provided an endless source of harassment.
One of the saddest events I ever witnessed took place in October 1981, when I covered the fall meeting of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. The theme of the meeting was, ostensibly, “episcopal collegiality,” but one after another of the bishops, led by the leftist prelates from Quebec, assailed the Holy Father and his aides at the Vatican.
It was an absolutely depressing sight — to see Roman Catholic bishops hitting a man while he’s down, still recovering from the five bullets he took in his abdomen. Added to this spectacle was the rudeness of the Canadian bishops to the pro-lifers who had come to Ottawa to lobby the bishops to promote a clause in the new Charter of Rights to protect the life of the unborn.
Working closely with Larry Henderson as his “special projects” editor, and seeing how valiantly he tried to publish an orthodox newspaper while pleasing the bishops of Ontario at the same time, I learned the unfortunate fact that the “balancing act” he attempted was more or less an impossible feat.
After working in Toronto for a year, my wife and I, now expecting our second child, moved to Buffalo, where I worked as an editor, salesman, and photographer for a group of neighborhood newspapers.
First, my employer was a Catholic businessman, a wonderful man though a hard taskmaster, the father of eight children, who was raised a Catholic and who sent all his children to Catholic schools — where they all lost their faith. Raised on the solidly Catholic west side of Buffalo, the family’s life was immediately involved with the Church: Catholic schools, Holy Name Society, Altar and Rosary Society, Marian Sodalities, Catholic Family Movement etc., and after the [Second Vatican] Council, the family was recruited to be lay leaders in their parish.
But then they were weaned out of the Church by their pastors who preached the “new theology”: no need for fasting; no need for Confession; no Sunday Mass obligation; all religions are the same; the Church tries to make people feel guilty, etc. Working with this formerly Catholic family, I began to see and understand the “Crisis in Catholicism.”
Both neighborhoods where we circulated newspapers, where we lived, were almost 100 percent Catholic: one Italian, the other largely Irish and German. But the Catholicism was largely cultural. Feasts were celebrated, but fasts weren’t. The people went to Mass, but they saw nothing wrong when a priest wore a chasuble festooned with Buffalo Bills helmets. The laity loved their churches, and worked hard to support them; but divorce rates were approximately 50 percent.
The highest abortion rates in the city of Buffalo were in the upper-class Irish Catholic neighborhoods. Pastors at some Catholic parishes would give Holy Communion to people working in the abortion industry, and would prohibit pro-lifers from distributing pro-life literature. In the midst of the pro-life “rescues” at the city’s abortion mills, Bishop Edward Head was either embarrassingly silent, or, should he say something, was even more embarrassing. Fortunately, Buffalo did have a militantly pro-life mayor, Jimmy Griffin, who was never afraid to speak up as a Catholic.
It’s often unwise to draw general conclusions from personal experiences, but another decisive experience in my career as a Catholic journalist was personal involvement in a church-closing routine. Here I learned about the “process.”
For three years, my wife and I, with six children by now, had attended the Tridentine Mass at St. Vincent de Paul Church adjacent to Canisius College and Sisters Hospital. It was a magnificent, breathtakingly beautiful “inner city” church, built when there were 5,000 German Catholic families in the neighborhood, a model of an early Romanesque church. The interior was a dazzling display of light and shadows, magnificent marble, mosaic, and brick work, and a wonderful place to worship God and pray.
The church was also on Bishop Head’s closing list, but before he’d close it, he’d run the parish through a “process” to discern if the church were viable or not. For three years, we “processed” according to all the criteria established by the chancery.
With pastor and people firmly committed to maintaining the church, evangelizing, building up the parish, establishing a sure financial footing for the parish, we thought we could prove that St. Vincent de Paul should remain open. His “bean counters” had predetermined three years earlier the church should close, and so it was.
The announcement the parish would close was made just before Easter 1993, and the wonderful pastor had a heart attack and died shortly thereafter.
It was while going through this ordeal that I joined The Wanderer as its news editor. I was doing some occasional freelance work for the paper, the oldest continuously published independent Catholic newspaper in the United States, when publisher Al Matt asked me if I’d like to come on full time.
Many times during my career, I’ve been asked what kind of training I had that prepared me for my job and I reply that the job that prepared me most was a short stint I did at a big dairy farm, where my job was cleaning the stalls twice a day.
I recall one of the first addresses given by a newly elected John Paul II. Speaking to journalists, the Holy Father told reporters their primary task is to “tell the truth” — regardless of the costs or consequences, the risks or difficulties. By telling the truth, he said, one bears witness to the Truth, which is a person, Jesus Christ. And though others may not want to hear the truth because they find it too hard or too difficult or too uncomfortable, telling the truth — even when no one is listening — has a great value precisely because it creates a climate where truth can prevail.
One time, when Challenge’s publisher Larry Henderson was describing the work of the mass media in society, he said “the devil has all the microphones.” This is true, but it makes Catholic journalism all the more exciting because we know, in the end, we win.