John Wilkins
Editor of the Catholic magazine The Tablet driven by zeal for the reforming Second Vatican Council
JOHN WILKINS, who has died aged 85, was a successful and long-serving editor of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly. Editing a Catholic paper, he once remarked, was like walking a tightrope. To succeed, you had to strike a balance between two often conflicting loyalties – to the institutional Church and its bishops, and to the wider Catholic community, people whose views were not always the same as their leaders’. During his 22 years as editor of The Tablet, Wilkins pulled it off so well that he managed almost to triple its circulation, while retaining its position as essential reading in the corridors of power in the Vatican. The Pope himself was said to consult his own private copy every Friday.
After a successful spell at the BBC External Services in its Central Talks and Features department, Wilkins took over as editor of The Tablet in July 1982. In the wake of the modernising Second Vatican Council, which had met in Rome from 1962 to 1965, the paper had supported the reform agenda to such an extent that it had earned the displeasure of the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Heenan, of the Vatican, and even of Pope Paul VI, by its refusal to endorse the 1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae, which reiterated the Church’s ban on all forms of artificial contraception.
The Tablet’s stance had seen a collapse in circulation for the weekly, down to 8,000, placing a question mark over its future.
Wilkins had been working there as an assistant editor from 1967 to 1971, at the height of the row, with Cardinal Heenan remarking at one stage that he no longer regarded The Tablet as a Catholic paper.
And while Wilkins never retreated, once editor, on the decision to cast a critical eye over this landmark papal ruling, he nevertheless managed to rebuild trust with the hierarchy of the Church at the same time as attracting a new, younger audience by dint of better newsgathering, crisper production values, quality writing and an unwavering adherence, when he judged it necessary, to the principle of loyal dissent.
He was, remarked one prominent admirer, “a friend of the Church, not its slave”.
Continuing vigilance that the major changes agreed by the Second Vatican Council should be implemented – especially that resonant phrase that, henceforth, the Church was “the people of God”, rather than a theocracy where elderly, male clerics told everyone else what to do – remained the hallmark of Wilkins’s journalism, both at The Tablet and elsewhere after his retirement in 2003.
John Anthony Francis Wilkins was born on December 20 1936; his parents, Edward and Ena (née Francis), were church-going Anglicans from Nonconformist backgrounds. His was a modest start in life, but he received a scholarship to attend Clifton College, Bristol, and went on to study Classics and Theology at Clare College, Cambridge. He did his National Service in The Gloucestershire Regiment.
He drifted at first after graduation into the petroleum industry, working for Esso, but in 1964 joined the staff of the pioneering ecumenical quarterly, Frontier, founded and edited by the diplomat and Anglican eminence Sir John Lawrence. Lawrence and his first wife, the art critic Jacynth Ellerton, became substitute parents to Wilkins.
It was while at Frontier that he found himself drawn ever closer to the Catholic Church as a result of reporting on the Second Vatican Council. When Vatican II ended in 1965, he converted. “I found it a revelation that a Church could change so much by going down to its roots,” he remembered. “It became clear to me that the Church of England did not have a doctrine of development that would have allowed it to grow organically in this way.”
Wilkins contributed to several Church publications, including the Catholic Herald, but in 1967 he became assistant to the newly appointed editor of The Tablet, the distinguished publisher Tom Burns. Wilkins’s energy, creativity and eye for detail kept the paper going during troubled times. His departure, in 1971, to the BBC did little to arrest the decline in circulation and influence.
Once back and in charge, he breathed new life into a publication that had first appeared in 1840. In his first editorial, appearing soon after Pope John Paul II’S triumphant visit to Britain, the first by a pontiff since the Reformation, Wilkins made plain his determination that the paper would henceforth be addressed to Catholics of all shades of opinion, rather than “any particular party”.
His methods could be controversial. He culled loyal, long-serving staff and replaced them with younger graduates and fresher thinkers. No article or news item, however short, avoided being amended, cut and rewritten by him, all in lurid red ink, often to the dismay of well-known contributors – and without Wilkins doing them the courtesy of explaining why such a major redraft had been necessary. Such attention to detail was a mammoth task, carried out on slender resources, and it inevitably took over Wilkins’s life.
He was not at his best in social gatherings, where his manner could be that of an over-excited academic, and small talk was not his forte, but he always had an eye for a big name and charmed a distinguished roster of contributors to write across a range of viewpoints, political and religious, from Hugo Young to Mary Kenny, Bruce Kent to Bryan Appleyard. Though the fees they received were minute, they helped to push circulation over 20,000, revive The Tablet’s finances and restore its must-read credentials among Church decision-makers.
There were periods during his editorship when walking that editorial tightrope proved particularly hard. He once described how in the 1990s he was inundated by letters from male and female religious, urging him to reduce the coverage he gave to allegations about paedophile priests, but he was steadfast in refusing to collude with any official cover-up. And when in 1994 Pope John Paul II decreed that not only was women’s ordination out of the question, but it must never even be discussed by Catholics, Wilkins continued to air the frustrations which many of the faithful – both male and female – felt at the exclusion of women from the altar.
Two decades is a long time to continue in such a demanding job, and by the turn of the millennium he was running out of steam, while the board of The Tablet had grown to feel that the paper was too staid, too concerned with the battles of the past, and therefore in danger of alienating a new generation of readers.
Wilkins was gently nudged into retirement, his reluctance made stronger by the decision in 2003 to pass over his own anointed internal candidate as the next editor and appoint instead an outsider from Fleet Street, and a woman to boot, in the form of Catherine Pepinster from The Independent on Sunday.
She continued to push the circulation up.
He was appointed MBE in 1998 for his services to journalism, and received a Doctorate of Divinity from Heythrop College in 2015. He remained active in parish life and in Catholic circles until his death, writing and lecturing on the Second Vatican Council, and on the challenge of editorship.
His one relaxation, rarely enjoyed, was bird-watching. He was unmarried. John Wilkins, born December 20 1936, died April 25 2022