National Post (National Edition)
FATHER DE SOUZA ON 20 YEARS SPENT WRITING ON RELIGION FOR THE POST.
This week Rome is observing the 20th anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the election of St. John Paul II as pope. Actually, most are marking the 40th anniversary, but I think of it as the 20th of the 20th — which has a lot to do with the National Post.
I arrived in Rome in August 1998 to begin my theological studies for the priesthood. Before I left Canada I had been invited to a meeting with Kenneth Whyte, the first editor of a new national newspaper set to launch that fall. We had mutual friends in Alberta — our home province — from whom Ken had heard that I wrote a bit for the Catholic press and was headed to Rome. He told me that his new newspaper, the National Post, intended to give better coverage to religion and wondered if I might help.
Better than what? Well, The Globe and Mail, which had taken a somewhat anti-religious turn in the 1990s, finally editorializing in 1997 that right-thinking people desired religious faith unburdened by historical facts or limited rigid dogma. The Globe intimated that insistent truth claims rendered religion unsuitable for the give-andtake of a pluralistic society. The Globe preferred a more congenial faith that did not make demands on the important business of life.
Ken thought that the Post could do better than that, taking religious believers seriously on their own terms as valid subjects for news coverage, and as full contributors to Canada’s common life. I agreed. How could I help?
“When you get to Rome, if you notice anything interesting, send us something,” Ken responded, laconically and enigmatically.
Two months later, Rome was celebrating 20 years since the election of her current bishop. Papal 20th anniversaries are rare — the last one has been a century previous.
By 1998, John Paul had already reached historical-figure status — vanquisher of communism, restorer of Catholic confidence, global pilgrim, hero to youth — as we would see in Toronto at World Youth Day in 2002. The 20th anniversary could have been a valedictory lap, the chief shepherd receiving the grateful laudations of his flock.
Instead, John Paul put two things at the centre of the celebra- tions. There was the canonization of Edith Stein, the Jewish agnostic philosopher whose search for truth led her to become a Carmelite nun. She would be murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis. Her last recorded words, when rounded up by the deportation detail, were, “Let us go and die for our people.”
The other signal moment was the publication of Fides et ratio, his encyclical letter on the relationship between “faith and reason.”
A philosopher whose search for truth led to faith, and a papal document defending reason; that seemed “interesting” enough for Ken. So I sat down to write my first submission for this new newspaper, only launched a fortnight previous. I had no idea to how to write for a national newspaper. I sent them 2,000 words, using my dial-up Compuserve account.
They ran the whole thing, complete with a striking photograph of John Paul, an entire page under the headline, “World’s Champion of Reason.”
You wouldn’t find that at the Globe. But it found an audience, and soon you would find the theology student in Rome in the pages of the National Post every few months. In 2004, I became a weekly columnist and have appeared in these pages regularly since.
It began with that 20th-anniversary column 20 years ago. Rereading it now, it stands up quite well, as I suppose one would expect when explicating an encyclical from a 2,000-year-old Church.
“The proclamation that the truth can be known by human reason illumined by faith is a necessary antidote to so much of what ails the twentieth century,” I wrote two decades back. “And that proclamation needs to be heard by many of the forces that shape our culture. It needs to be heard by those in the university and the media who argue there is no truth, in which case human existence is reduced to an absurd and cruel joke: A creature designed to seek for something that can never be found. It needs to be heard by religious leaders who ask for faith in things that contradict our reason, a request that asks people of faith to cease the most human exercise of all: the movement from curiosity through inquiry to knowledge. It needs to be heard by those who argue that we cannot know the truth and that what we call ‘truth’ is only what the current powersthat-be determine it to be.”
Today I might add that it needs to be heard by the purveyors of “fake news.”
So 20 years later I am back in Rome. Now John Paul is a saint and it has been 40 years since his election. Now, some 750 National Post columns later, the paper and its readers are still here, despite near-continual doubts that we would survive.
Twenty years is as nothing in the Eternal City. But in the life of one writer it is something. And so a word of thanks to my editors and readers over two decades.
If I notice anything interesting, I will send you something.
IF YOU NOTICE ANYTHING INTERESTING, SEND US SOMETHING.