History of Catholic news cooperative traced to papal visit

I was living in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, when Pope John Paul II visited Halifax in 1984. Sadly, I sort of ignored the visit back then. I was in my gnostic stage and probably attending Christian Science services if I went to church at all. In fact, I spent a whole year around that time not taking any medicine at all, not even an aspirin for a headache, or a decongestant for a cold, because casting off all reliance on material medicines and trusting in God for a year was a prerequisite for becoming a Christian Scientist. But then, this Christian Science gal in my neighborhood told me I would have to give up the meditation I used to do that was taught by a Jewish convert to Christianity whose theology was a little Arian (though I didn't know it at the time.) So she would not recommend me. I got rejected by the Christian Scientists.

Someone said I was like a woman with many dogs on a leash all pulling me in different directions. I was into Mary Baker Eddy. I was into Roy Masters. I was into Emmanuel Swedenborg. So the pope was barely in my peripheral vision. I remember in the 1990s receiving one of his books at work. When I was a CBC TV producer, I used to get several books a week from various publishers. I was so clueless, I opened up Crossing the Threshold of Hope, thinking I would find it dry and lifeless. "Be not afraid . . ." and the room started to become lighter, the book seemed to glow.

But that's a big digression, from the story I worked on this summer when things slowed down, tracing the history of Canadian Catholic News, a cooperative of Catholic papers.

You can read a condensed version of the history I did here.

The Canadian Catholic News (CCN) news cooperative began as the gleam in the eye of Father Andrew Britz and was conceived 25 years ago to prepare for the 1984 visit of Pope John Paul II.

The Benedictine priest who edited the Muenster, Sask.-based Prairie Messenger wanted to see Catholic papers across the country working together to fill a vacuum in national Canadian coverage.

"We were news-deprived when it came to information about the Church in Canada," said Montreal's Catholic Times editor Eric Durocher, who with Britz is credited as co-founder. "The only consistent source of national information was the weekly mailings we received from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB)."

Cooperation was essential to address the "information gap," Durocher said. But it was "easier said than done" in a country that values regional distinctiveness and a Church with diverse pastoral approaches.

One big problem was getting the two Toronto papers involved. Initially The Catholic Register and Catholic New Times were cool to the idea of CCN. "I think they thought they were the centre of the Canadian Church and they didn't need all this fancy stuff - us people in the hinterlands needed it - but they quickly changed their minds," Britz said.

The differences went deeper. The Catholic Register under former CBC national news broadcaster Larry Henderson had become a strongly conservative voice, while the now defunct Catholic New Times founded by Sister Mary Jo Leddy and Father Gregory Baum represented a more social justice focus.

The other big problem was technical. Back then there were no fax machines, no accessible Internet and email, no easy electronic means of easily sharing news copy, let alone photographs. The editors then relied on Canada Post's "snail mail" or couriers.

But Pope John Paul II's anticipated visit to Canada led to CCN's conception.

"The papal visit really made it possible to set up Canadian Catholic News," Britz said. "People knew they wanted to cover the story of the pope's visit, but they couldn't have someone in Halifax, someone in Vancouver."

Back in the early 1980s at the CBC, we used manual typewriters and five part canary yellows--yellow letter-sized newsprint with five carbon copies. You really had to pound those keys. The news came in via a teletype machine that would spill a coil of newsprint on the floor. One of my early jobs in the business was lining up the early morning weekend regional radio news, arriving in time to prepare the 6 a.m. (? or was it 7 a.m.--anyway it was early) newscast. I'd come in and start cutting up the snaking pile of stories. Then I would cut them up and rewrite them in CBC broadcast style. I'd call the police to find out if any murders or other news had happened. Same with the fire department. I'd have to get up around 3:30 a.m. to get to work to prepare for that news cast.

In those days, we used to edit radio tape with a razor blade, and splice with tape. Boy oh boy have things changed. What did we do without the Internet? Well, we had a clippings library, where someone cut up newspapers and kept files that we could access.