Loyal defiance based on foresight

LORD David Cecil used to say that it would be no excitement to be told that one was going to meet a lady "with a future", compared to the prospect of meeting a lady "with a past".
The past is naturally stressed elsewhere in this unique edition of the Catholic Herald which, because it has a dramatic history, does not mean that it does not have an equally important role to play in the future.
The Catholic Herald has always been a paper to defy current trends without necessarily opposing them. When most weeklies in the country were, for example, beginning to lose circulation, namely in the early seventies, this paper actually began to increase its circulation.
One reason for this may have been the editorial policy of this period which, following soon after the largest Council in history, maintained that true traditionalism consisted in what Newman had long before defined as "development" of doctrine.
It was thus that Vatican II completed Vatican I in stressing the "collegiality" of the Church as a necessary complement of that papal infallibility which had been defined nearly a century before.
The Catholic Herald went to great pains to demonstrate that it was possible to be a loyal Catholic who could think in a personal but never in a selfish way. Selfishness kills community worship and it was one of the major achievements of Vatican II that it established the concept of a Church worshipping as a community rather than as a regimented group of isolated individuals.
This concept is now so much taken for granted that we have, in the wake of a natural reaction against exaggerations, almost forgotten that the second Vatican Council did achieve a great deal. It could not perform miracles and created some divisions within the Church. But this was something that has happened at every Council at least since that of Chalcedon in the year 451.
Always needed, in the Church, was a "safety valve" to which puzzled members of the faithful could resort in times of stress and strain. Both before and after the most recent Vatican Council, this paper provided such a safety valve by saying in public what many, including priests and bishops, were saying in private.
You do not get much in the way of thanks for performing such a service but one Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster told the then editor of this paper that it had more influence among English Catholics than he had himself. It could, he explained, say things which he himself would like to say but could not for fear of being misunderstood.
This remark was also a reminder that the Catholic Herald was primarily an English and Welsh paper which had a primarily English (and Welsh) outlook within a
European context. Its sister papers in Ireland and Scotland were always, with equal firmness, based, in outlook, within the environment wherein they circulated.
This has meant that the Herald is truly catholic (with a small "c") in having always tried to espouse objectively rather than in sectarian fashion the aspirations of a community whose roots are divided between England,
Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
The Irish have sometimes criticised us for being "too English", the English for being "too Irish", etc. Perhaps this is another way of saying we have always been "too catholic".
We have fought for many causes which were officially unpopular at the time but which were later to become accepted parts of normal Catholic life. But when we felt that the pace of change was possibly becoming too precipitate we said so in no uncertain fashion, sometimes to the dismay of those who wrongly supposed that the Catholic Herald was a "dangerously liberal" publication Thus, as indicated elsewhere in the saying of G K Chesterton, the Catholic Herald has been able to give some sort of idea not just what England is like but Europe as well. Many clerics in Rome, particularly in the years after the Council, went on record as saying that they relied on the Catholic Herald to discover what was happening behind doors only a short walk away from where they themselves lived and worked. The Herald's foreign correspondents, in other words, have always been renowned for their sensitivity to trends within the Church which others failed to suspect or foretell.
This, hopefully, will always be one of the paper's primary functions and objectives. It is not an easy task and to have thrown the paper open in the past to the voices of so many different sons and daughters of the Church, while remaining loyal to the body which Christ founded, has caused offence only to those of little faith and even less true understanding.