Peace to a Restless Journalistic Soul

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 5/1/03)

In his New York Times obituary of Robert G. Hoyt, founding editor of the National Catholic Reporter, Peter Steinfels says the Reporter "substantially changed the way Roman Catholicism was covered and understood in the United States." The same could be said of Hoyt, who died April 12 in New York at the age of 81.

For a few years in the late 1960s, Hoyt was one of the most important people in the Church in America. His influence remains, "for better or for worse, and probably some of both," I explained to a daughter who'd never heard his name.

It was a name that once meant a lot to me.

I first encountered Hoyt in the early '60s, when he was editing the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocesan paper and I was a very young reporter with the Catholic news agency in Washington. He'd broken into the Catholic press in 1946 and in 1950 was part of a brief, doomed effort to launch a Catholic daily in Kansas City. I knew nothing of that. All I knew was that he'd written an editorial criticizing some coverage of mine — a gesture I found doubly upsetting because I admired his work.

I shot off an indignant reply accusing him of shooting the messenger who brings bad news. He replied with a kindly, thoughtful note conceding I had a point. From then on we were friends. Later, on assignment in Kansas City, I had dinner at the Hoyts' ramshackle old place. They took me on a nighttime auto tour of the city. The children treated me to their own puppet show. I was charmed.

When Hoyt and others began the independent National Catholic Reporter in 1964, many Catholics were electrified. I was one. Here was Catholic journalism as it ought to be — a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Catholic periodicals of those days tended to be pallid and tightly controlled. Most practiced what Hoyt dubbed the "farther franker" rule — the farther away from an embarrassing story you were, the franker you could be in covering it. He set out to change that.

I contributed a number of pieces to NCR in those early years, and somewhere along the line he made me a surprising offer: Would I care to be the paper's first Washington bureau chief? Considering what lay ahead — for the Reporter and also for me — I made one of the better decisions of my life and told him no thanks.

Change set in. NCR took sides in the contraception debate and became advocate more than reporter. The paper's mood of aggrieved dissent deepened as the war in Vietnam intensified. As a writer, Hoyt had always been a worrier — now one got the feeling he did little except worry. Circulation dropped.

Hoyt and his wife, the mother of his six children, were divorced, and he married again. In 1971 internal conflicts led to his firing from the Reporter. Eventually he found his way to New York and there lived out the rest of his journalistic career.

The Reporter has had ups and downs since Hoyt. But his achievement, mixed and ambiguous, stands. If Catholic journalism is a more honest enterprise today than 40 years ago, he had a lot to do with that. And if dissent is entrenched in American Catholicism, that also reflects Hoyt. The big need now is to make it clear that the significant linkage in the Church is between honesty and orthodoxy, not honesty and dissent. In the meantime: Peace to Hoyt's restless, journalistic soul.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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