<em>Letter from the Editor: January 2023</em>.
In November, the <em>Herald</em> hosted two dinners in America to launch our new non-profit 501c3 Catholic Herald Institute. Our vision is to transform our 135 year Catholic media legacy brand into a multi-media Catholic platform with a global audience and influence to match. The institute will provide us with an unrivalled sister platform to debate and safeguard the most important political, spiritual and moral issues of the day.
The key to the Herald’s identity – which will be 135 years old this year – has always been our writing. At the 2022 PPA Independent Publisher Awards in London, we won a PPA award for best writing – unheard of for a religious magazine and we were also nominated (from over 200 entries) for Consumer Magazine of the Year. Only through original reporting can we hope to influence the future of the church as well as hold the church to account.
Our cover story for the January issue on the Holy Land by Melanie McDonagh is an example of the sort of reporting that we will be publishing more of in 2023 as we launch our Herald Fellowship Programme. Our new network of writers – sponsored by our patrons - will range from Jerusalem to Hong Kong, America to Italy. Only by having original reporters on the ground can we truly cover church and current affairs in a way that allows us to stand out.
McDonagh’s article draws attention to the challenges facing Christian leaders in Jerusalem as a result of the efforts of a number of radical Jewish settler groups, supported by US funding, whose objectives are not aligned with the historic culture of Jews, Muslims and Christians, for over 1500 years, three faiths have given Jerusalem its sacred character. She met with senior Christian religious leaders who alerted the Herald to the near existential threat that Christians churches are facing. Christians numbers in Jerusalem are now down to around 10,000 people, and falling.
In New York, I had lunch in an Italian restaurant on East 52nd street (co-owned by the Order of Malta’s Lieutenant of the Grand Master, H.E. Fra’ John T. Dunlap, who is also a New York attorney) with John Woods, the former editor of <em>Catholic New York</em>, the largest archdiocese newspaper in America. After 27 years of working for the largest archdiocesan newspaper in America, he wrote his last column as editor in November after the Archdiocese announced that it was closing its print edition after a run of 41 years. The newspaper had been launched back in 1981 by Cardinal Terence Cooke, then-Archbishop of New York, and brought in a new era of Catholic community engagement.
In its heyday, with a circulation of 135,000, <em>Catholic New York</em> had a staff of more than 30, including a team of seven reporters, four editors and a full-time photographer. But today it could not survive. Similar stories of papers – not to mention Catholic news agencies - folding are being repeated across the States, including the Portland Sentinel which has also recently been closed down after a run of 153 year after being founded in 1869 by grocer Henry Herman and printer J. F. Atkinson as a way of defending Catholic values in America.
Yet against this background of declining circulation and closures, the Herald – thanks to a 50.1 % controlling stake investment from alternative asset firm Global Emerging Markets (GEM) in New York, headed by GEM founder Chris Brown, with Irish-American Catholic roots - regarded this new diminished Catholic media landscape as an opportunity to expand and become a world leading magazine that influences the church and brings Catholic communities together.
Our new non-profit 501(c)3 think-tank, the Catholic Herald Institute (based at GEM's office in NYC, headed by CEO Mark Ackermann and chair Amanda Bowman), will provide international thought leadership that will allow us to speak out and safeguard Catholic values on the most important political, moral and spiritual issues of the day.
Our spiritual and intellectual mission remains as it was 135 years ago: to defend the doctrine of the faith. But today we increasingly regard America as the heartland of this new battleground. Our institute will be looking at ways of renewing Catholic identity in the US and beyond, especially for the next generation on campus – at a time when spiritual leadership is, alas, on the back foot.
I’m also delighted that we are publishing a new cartoon by Christian Adams, Adams is one of Britain’s greatest illustrators and he follows in the tradition of the late John Ryan (creator of Captain Pugwash) whose satirical cartoons appeared in the Catholic Herald for many years. Educated at Ampleforth, and the brother of the theologian Columba Ryan, he helped<em> Herald</em> readers understand Vatican II. Sixty years on, with the church increasingly divided and at sea, I can't think of a better cartoonist than Adams to hold up a witty lens to the foibles of the Catholic world today.
William Cash
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