This year marks the 140th anniversary of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>’s origins as a newspaper. When the <em>Herald</em> was founded by editor Charles Diamond in 1888, it was launched as a trinity merger of the <em>Irish Tribune</em>, founded in 1884, the <em>Glasgow Observer</em> and the <em>Catholic News</em>, all amalgamated into the <em>Catholic Herald</em>.
Diamond himself was a colourful and controversial Irish newspaper entrepreneur and Irish nationalist MP (and Labour Party candidate) who edited the paper from 1888 until his death, aged 75, in 1934. He founded 37 weekly papers in his lifetime and was once described as “the kind of man who made a good many enemies”.
Diamond edited the paper from a prison cell in HMP Pentonville after he was jailed for six months for “incitement to treason” after writing a leader in 1920 with the headline “Killing No Murder”, calling for assassination in Ireland. According to the <em>Dictionary of Irish Biography</em>, he was known for his charisma and writing “vitriolic and often erratic editorials”.
Despite jail, he continued to lambast in his leaders and even managed to get the <em>Herald</em> sued after writing his final editorial at his house at 22 Prince’s Gate Court, South Kensington, a few hundred yards from the <em>Herald</em>’s present offices on Cromwell Place. His target was the Irish suffragette, feminist and political activist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a contributor to the <em>Herald</em>, whom Diamond accused of being a communist in receipt of a British government pension. At the Dublin libel trial, the <em>Herald</em>’s lawyers argued that Diamond had died “honoured by the Church, and was comforted on his deathbed by a message from the Pope”.
Still, not even a papal blessing from Pius XI held sway with the jury. After winning her libel case and being awarded £750 plus costs, Sheehy-Skeffington applied for a winding-up of the <em>Herald</em>. It was sold after his death for £12,000, passing into the hands of Ernest Vernor Miles, a wealthy conservative – today he would be called “far-right” – businessman who had converted to the Catholic faith in 1932. Like Viscount Rothermere, owner of the<em> Daily Mail</em>, he also held strong sympathies towards Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. This didn’t stop him being given a papal knighthood in 1948.
Miraculously, so it often seems, our title is still going strong, despite holding some historic views (an article in 1935 referred to Mosley’s Blackshirts manifesto as “excellent”) which would threaten to close down any paper now. But then at other times in our history – notably under Peter Stanford (editor 1988-1992) – we have veered significantly to the Left, including a close embrace with the mission of liberation theology in South America.
The <em>Herald</em> has never been a political newspaper. Under my editorship, I cannot recall any single political subject-only leader. We write through a Catholic lens. We are foremost a religious newspaper (now magazine) with a tradition of influencing the Church through “loyal dissent”, to use a phrase coined by Stanford. An example was our fiercely independent coverage of Vatican II, under editor Desmond Fisher, another Irishman.
In 1962, in his first <em>Herald</em> editorial, Fisher wrote that editorial freedom was essential if the <em>Herald</em> was “to carry out what it conceives to be its function and which relieves the hierarchy and the clergy generally of any responsibility for opinions expressed in its columns”.
This soon came to a head. As editor of the <em>Herald</em> from 1962 to 1966, he covered the 1963 and 1964 sessions of the Vatican Council in Rome. His dissenting coverage caused much anxiety within the Catholic hierarchy, especially annoying Cardinal Heenan of Westminster, who complained to chairman Ernest Vernor Miles, who duly recalled Fisher from Rome to London. But Fisher’s objective clarity and unvarnished reports, putting our readers first, helped forge our reputation as the world’s foremost English-language Catholic newspaper. The Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Franz König, told Fisher that he learned “more of what is going on at the Council from your superb reports” than he heard “on the spot”.
The <em>Herald</em> has never been a communications channel for the Vatican or the British religious or political establishment. Instead of seeing our 140-year journey in terms of a changing tide of liberal or conservative influence, I prefer to see the <em>Herald</em> as a vessel steered by a series of very different spiritual captains. When they take the helm, all have the potential to be the <em>Herald</em>’s very own Palinurus, the coxswain of Aeneas’s ship who fatally fell overboard – drugged by the God of sleep and complacency –and washed up at Cape Palinuro some 50km southeast of Salerno in Italy.
Thankfully, the <em>Herald</em> has successfully navigated our way through much choppy water, including Vatican II, <em>Humanae Vitae</em>, sex-abuse scandals, same-sex blessings and the restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass. Our strength lies – like our spiritual cousin <em>the Spectator</em> – in the fact that we maintain editorial independence. This independence has been upheld by all our owners, including Sir Harold Hood, the English Catholic philanthropist who took over from Vernor Miles. In some cases, taking on the editorship has proved to be a form of lay vocation. Of the 16 editors in our history, a surprising number considered a vocation to the priesthood (or the convent). Others, however, such as Richard Dowden, former director of the Royal African Society, have moved on from the world of the Church completely.
A leader from 1935 stated: “The principle of authority is essentially Catholic.” This would most likely have been written by the editor, an Irish-French anti-communist aristocrat named Michael de la Bédoyère, who edited the paper from the time of Diamond’s death to 1962. He nearly went to prison himself – with a threat of the <em>Herald</em> being closed down under a wartime regulation – after writing an editorial in 1945 on the Yalta agreement in which he criticised Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt for appeasing Stalin.
Educated at Stonyhurst, de la Bédoyère planned to become a Jesuit and entered the school’s seminary, but then changed direction. “He couldn’t accept aspects of Church teaching,” says his son, Stephen. “He was a modernist and felt he would be in difficulty if he was ordained and continued with his views. He wanted a Church that was more liberal in a modern sense.” Stephen said that his father regarded his 32 years as editor as a vocation in itself, and that if God had seen that he wasn’t suited to become a priest then he could serve the Church as a layman.
De la Bédoyère was “trained” by Diamond as his successor despite their opposite social backgrounds. While Diamond was a newspaperman, de la Bédoyère was a softly-spoken intellectual who lived in a manor house in Kent, where Jesuits such as Father Martin D’Arcy would visit for Sunday lunch. Commuting to the <em>Herald’s</em> offices on Whitefriars Street, off Fleet Street, close to <em>The Universe</em> (now defunct), he was friends with Eric Gill, GK Chesterton and also with Evelyn Waugh, whom he dispatched to cover the 1938 Eucharistic Conference in Budapest. In 1940, he gave Graham Greene space to defend <em>The Power and the Glory</em>.
He wrote biographies of George Washington and Baron von Hügel (whose diaries were kept at his house) and could have been a theology or philosophy don. “He was a very liberal person, a very understanding person,” says Stephen, “and would never accuse friends or family if they were not living a Christian life. At home, we were all terribly pious.”
He campaigned for the vernacular Mass, and for ecumenism, years before Vatican II. His disillusionment grew with age. In 1964, he edited a book called <em>Objections to Roman Catholicism</em> which included seven essays on what was wrong with the Church – one chapter was titled “Contraception and War”. Yet despite his wanting a more liberal Church, he ended up, like Waugh, despairing of the radical changes that came with Vatican II. His son recalls: “Not long before he died [in 1975], he said to me: ‘I was keen on change in the Church but what’s happened is far, far, beyond what I was imagining.”
“Then, one day, after he had turned senile, he said: ‘You know Stephen, I can’t believe in God anymore.’ He lost his faith as he become increasingly senile. It was a terrible thing. But he did have the Last Rites, twice, and a Catholic funeral. By the end, when he died at the Priory in Roehampton, he was very much living in a world of his own. It was very sad.”
Another editor who thought about becoming a priest was Gerard Noel, who was editor twice, from 1971-74 and then 1982-83. Noel was another aristocrat, a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, educated at Worth School and Exeter College, Oxford, before announcing to his family that he would train for the priesthood in Rome.
“It was partly to escape his mother and partly to test his vocation,” says his son, Philip. “In the end he thought he wasn’t suited to priesthood. But after he left Rome, he was always very close to his Faith and the Church and because he had some talent for writing about religion and Church matters, working for the<em> Herald</em> became a different type of vocation that he was much suited to.”
Noel was associated with the <em>Herald</em> for over 40 years in the roles of literary editor, editor (twice) and editorial director. He was a fixture of London’s clubland, the author of 20 books and a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He was also a translator of official documents relating to the Holy See and the Second World War.
But it was the <em>Herald</em> that was his spiritual home, just as it also became for another <em>Herald</em> lifer, the paper’s long-serving managing director Otto Herschan. He was a pipe-smoking Austrian who served the <em>Herald</em> for nearly 50 years and was also its occasional theatre critic. Cristina Odone, editor from 1992-96, remembers Herschan seated in his office in a cloud of smoke on the floor below the editorial team at the offices at <em>Herald House</em>, on Lamb’s Passage, a Dickensian five-storey building in the City, rented from the Diocese of Westminster. “The whole building smelled of incense from the church below,” recalls Odone. “It was damp and cold but it was a brilliant office. Otto loved that I was always there so early in the morning as I used to get a lift with a banker friend.”
Odone was not the only female editor, as she was succeeded by Deborah Jones (1996-98), who ran the Catholic Animal Welfare group. But Cristina, known for wearing miniskirts in her many Newsnight appearances as editor, was a whirlwind force. She was firmly in the camp that did not regard the editor’s chair as a lay religious vocation, rather viewing it as a career stepping-stone, like Peter Stanford, who left <em>the Herald</em> after writing a book called <em>Catholics and Sex </em>– later a series for <em>Channel 4</em>.
The subject matter did not sit well with Herschan or the board. “It was about the hypocrisy of it all,” says Stanford. “We said that Catholicism or Christianity was forgiving. We spoke, for example, to a woman who ran a group for women who had children with priests. We went to a Catholic divorce society meeting and met all these people weeping as they couldn’t go to Communion. We went to a secret meeting of gay Catholic priests.”
Odone was offered the editorship after working for the <em>Herald</em> as its US correspondent. “Peter rang me up and said: ‘They won’t let me stay on as editor and they’re looking for somebody new. Will you come back from America to edit the <em>Herald</em> as interim editor?’” she recalls. “I was supposed to be getting married to a very nice man. I had a job. I owned a flat in Washington. And I just left everything behind and took up the job. They remembered me as a very pious convent-girl reporter. And I never worked so hard in my life to prove that they should give me the job after 12 months.”
Which they did. But Odone was always careful to keep her own single-girl lifestyle entirely separate from her role as <em>Herald</em> editor. “I think some people who knew me might have been surprised that I was editing a Catholic newspaper. I was quite liberal, even a little wayward. I was 30 years old, wore miniskirts and liked a drink.”
After Stanford’s positioning, Odone brought the Herald back towards the centre. “It wasn’t a radical move. I was seen as conservative,” says Odone. “William Oddie came over with a whole group of Anglican priests who wanted to join the Church, as they were upset over the ordination of women. By welcoming them, I was seen as taking the <em>Herald</em> to the right. Peter had been very good – but very left-wing – on the international front, with liberation theology being his big thing. I thought readers were more interested in the domestic front and that was where we tried to grow readers.”
When Odone took over, circulation stood at around 14,000 copies a week. By the time she left in 1996 (serving as a director afterwards), it had risen to around 20,000. Still, it was some way off the peak of 150,000 under Vernor Miles. William Oddie (1998-2004) replaced Odone and took the <em>Herald</em> in a more trenchant right-wing direction. Looking back, Odone says her tenure was made easier when she appeared on news programmes because the Catholic Church had yet to be rocked by sex-abuse scandals. “When I went on television or radio, I was not fighting to protect a Church that was besmirched – that created a huge cultural shift.”
Odone, above all, wanted provocative and good writing, something we have kept up, having recently won national press awards. She brought in big names like AN Wilson and hired Auberon Waugh as a columnist. Politicians like Tony Benn came to tea in the office. Delia Smith attended board lunches. Odone also convinced Conrad Black to invest as a co-owner alongside Sir Rocco Forte (who continued as a loyal source of shareholder support for some three decades), with Peter Sheppard coming in as chairman after Otto Herschan finally retired. Sheppard and the editorial team, led by Damian Thompson and Luke Coppen, took the necessary step of turning the <em>Herald</em> into a weekly magazine in 2014.
Although Stanford did not view the editorship as a vocation, he found that the job unexpectedly lifted his faith. Raised by strict Catholic parents, at Oxford he went to the chaplaincy only twice. “I wasn’t very devout at that stage,” he says. “I then worked for <em>the Tablet</em> for nine months but it wasn’t until I worked at the <em>Herald</em> that I began to get a sense of the greater canvas underneath. I started seeing projects the Catholic Church was running, which were great. And I thought: I want to be part of this. I’m proud to be part of this.”
But some things never change, as Odone discovered – like the modest amounts paid to contributors. In her day, the going rate was £20 per article. She recalls being at a party when she saw the writer Nicholas Shakespeare running away from her across the room. He finally said: “Please don’t come near me as I know you are going to torture me until I agree to write for you for tuppence.”
Still, she made it up to writers by taking them to lunch, usually at Orso in Covent Garden. “I remember I got the historian Norman Stone so drunk that he said agreed to write 2,000 words for practically nothing.” Of course, that would never happen today.
<em>Photo: The Catholic Herald office [artist's impression]. (Getty.)</em>
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