Whoever said the Post didn't have a prayer of making it to its 25th anniversary?
VATICAN CITY — I happen to be in Rome, where I was 25 years ago when the National Post first rolled off the presses.
“When you get to Rome, if you notice anything interesting, send us something.”
With those words in August 1998, Ken Whyte, founding editor of the National Post, launched my work in these pages. I was headed to Rome for my seminary studies and Ken was the impresario of Conrad Black’s new national newspaper. Five years ago, on our 20th anniversary, I told the story of how those laconic words led me to filing, soon after our Oct. 27, 1998 launch, some 2,000 words on Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on faith and reason. The Post was going to be a different kind of newspaper.
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I was not then a regular contributor, but I was an early one. Nearly 1,300 columns later, the Post has been a constant presence in my life. Since my regular column began in 2004 — every week, sometimes more than that, for nearly 20 years — the Post is always in the back of my mind, if not at the front.
I look at the world in several ways. As a Christian believer, as a Canadian, as an Albertan (though living in Ontario for most of my adult life), as a priest, as an economics professor, as the heir to an expansive Catholic culture to which my parents introduced me.
An engaging preacher is always looking at the world from the perspective of the pulpit. How might this or that incident or episode or encounter contribute to the mosaic of a sermon? How might this shard of reality be a prism through which the light of the gospel is refracted?
What is true of the preacher ought to be true of the professor in the classroom, too. All of life provides seeds that might bear fruit in teaching. Seeing clearly one aspect of the truth about things helps to see other truths clearly, too.
It certainly has been that way for me as a one of the longest-serving Post columnists. I am rarely not thinking about what that next column will be. More often than not, it is a matter of choosing between competing ideas in any given week for my column. Sometimes, I don’t choose and write two.
There are writers, including some very fine ones, who find all this something of a burden. Perhaps a blessed burden, but a burden nonetheless. Happily for me it has been a thoroughgoing blessing — and one hopes for my readers, too, though some of them take the time to let me know that reading me is burdensome.
While the priesthood is my most fundamental identity and mission, column writing has enhanced it. The priest, like the columnist, tells a story in the pulpit and at the altar. It’s the most powerful story, the world’s deepest story, the story of creation and fall and redemption and beatitude. It’s a story about that which is most real.
Children’s stories begin “once upon a time.” The preacher’s story begins with time itself and points toward eternity. “In the beginning” is a marvellous story, and man begins by giving names to reality, telling a story about all that is. We are storytellers, and language shapes who we are and what we become.
Newspapers — more gloriously spread across the breakfast table than scrolling across a screen — tell passing stories. At their best, they connect today to yesterday and this place to other places, and convey not only what is new but what endures.
For the priest-columnist it is a grace to live in a particular way the encounter of time and eternity, the transitory and the permanent. I was given that grace from the beginning of my priesthood; my column was on the front page the day of my ordination.
I didn’t expect that to be the case. I remember vividly as a high school student visiting the newsroom and printing presses at the magnificent Calgary Herald building off Deerfoot Trail. The entire place excited me, from the buzz of the newsroom to the clatter of the mammoth presses. I thought then that to be newspaper columnist — they had the private offices where deep thinking was to be done — would be about as much fun as someone could have while working.
I fully expected that I would sacrifice that aspiration when I entered the seminary. Priests don’t write columns, not for national newspapers, and especially not for the most engaging, enlightening and entertaining newspaper to come along in decades. Except if that paper is run by Black and Whyte, who had the imagination to believe that if something was not being done it may just be the right time to do it.
A few years back I stopped by the Herald building and stood in the cavernous rooms where the printing presses used to be. It was a profound sadness, like standing in the ruins of a vast abbey. The building, which, perched on the hill, looked out upon the city of man and beyond to the glory of God’s creation in the mountains, had something of a sacred sense to me.
The National Post of 1998 was a like magnificent addition to the bustling city square, alongside the concert hall and across from the cathedral. Then it seemed everyone moved to the suburbs.
The Herald building was sold earlier this year to U-Haul. It will become a self-storage facility, which is something like a mausoleum for the living. Fitting, in a sense, for an industry that is supposed to be dying.
Perhaps. But the Post lives! It’s still a blessing for writers and readers alike. And storytelling never dies.
National Post
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