Modern-day parables change lives

First, as they say, some personal news.

On June 30, after 32-plus years as executive editor and general manager of the Clarion Herald, I will retire from a job that has been the joy of my professional career and the touchstone of my spiritual life.

Two years ago, I began seriously thinking about what it might be like to take lazy walks with our grandchildren while some of them can still fit comfortably on my shoulders.

With their weight increasing and my shoulders drooping from the bell curve of time, it’s time.

Second, a little business. No doubt careful readers have deciphered hints within these pages in the last few months that the Clarion Herald, founded in 1963, is facing challenging financial times. That is true, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans is currently engaged in a process of envisioning what kind of external communications vehicle it will employ to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to the half-million Catholics in southeast Louisiana.

Last year, the archdiocesan Presbyteral Council voted to eliminate all parish and school-parent funding for the Clarion Herald, beginning July 1, 2025. That represents a budget cut of more than 50%. The rationale for the priests’ vote was the skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums that every parish is dealing with.

As you might imagine, it is difficult to envision the Clarion Herald existing in its current form without that sustainable revenue stream. (The other half of our income comes from advertising revenue and the annual Catholic Communication Campaign).

The good news, however, is that the Clarion Herald has money in the bank to help seed a new communications strategy for the archdiocese. Over the years, through reductions in our staff and cuts to our printing expenses – as well as careful stewardship of the funds we had been given – the Clarion Herald was able to build a rainy-day fund.

Even with the incredible response of readers – who have mailed in checks of $5, $10, $20 and even $1,000 to “Save the Clarion Herald” – our fund-raising efforts over the last eight months have netted a little more than $25,000 – eternally heart-warming but not enough to bridge the looming budget cuts.

The Clarion Herald has enough money to continue publishing as normal for several months beyond July 1, but doing so would necessitate exhausting those financial reserves when it might be considered more prudent to use those funds to give life to a future communications strategy. 

That is what Sarah McDonald, the archdiocesan communications director, is doing now by working with several internal and external groups on a plan. All options remain open. When that plan becomes more defined, we will let our readers know.

In the end, God is in control.

When I became editor and general manager of the Clarion Herald in 1993, we had a team of 13 people who produced an award-winning newspaper that has served its readers with love, care and respect. We now have five full-time staff members, and they are handling this uncertainty with grace and determination.

What’s it like to be a Catholic journalist? I did not realize it when I left the sportswriting business, but what we write in these pages changes lives. Jesus taught using parables. We try to do the same.

Two stories come immediately to mind.

One was a short item on Bridge to Naim, a group for the newly widowed that met regularly to help people process and move beyond their grief.

It was a short story, maybe 250 words. But somehow, a widow found it buried at the bottom of an inside page, which is evidence of the serendipity associated with a printed newspaper. 

She stumbled across it.

And it changed her life.

“After her husband died, this woman literally had become a prisoner in her own home,” said Rosemary Schellhaas, then the coordinator of Bridge to Naim. “She would never go out, not even to church. After she read the story about the group, she decided to take a bus down to Canal Street and buy herself some makeup and a new outfit. And then she decided to come to a meeting.”

Those stories are the reason the Clarion Herald has existed for 63 years.

Another parable might have been headlined “The Prodigal Father.”

None of his family mem­bers or coworkers could identify the resurrec­tion moment for Ray Watts, because his Easter story un­folded largely hidden from their eyes. For most of his 20s, 30s and 40s, Ray was a drinker and a smoker and a gambler, a man who couldn’t keep a job.

His self-destructive habits and inability to keep a job led to a divorce, which placed a monumental burden on his wife to rear three kids alone. Pat Watts, Ray’s eldest child, remembered him as a shadow father.

When Pat was play­ing Babe Ruth baseball and digging in at the batter’s box, he sometimes would glance down the line and there, standing silently behind the right field fence, was the fa­ther he never knew.

“He would come to a lot of my games,” Pat said, recall­ing his father, who died after Katrina at the age of 72. “He just seemed to know when we were playing. He kept his distance. He really wasn’t involved because his nerves were so bad, and he didn’t like being around a lot of kids. Even when I was young he was on prescriptions. Over the years he mellowed out.”

But before Ray did that, he dropped out of his family’s life. Judi, his former wife, worked two jobs to keep the children fed, and she attended Our Lady of Holy Cross College to earn a teaching degree that allowed her to teach in the public schools.

She got her degree with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average.

“She had an affinity for working with inner-city kids,” Pat said. “She kept a roof over our heads. We had to move a lot when I was young, and I didn’t know why. We had a car that wouldn’t go in reverse, so we had to park on a hill.”

When Pat was 19, he got a call from his father, who was living at a cheap hotel and didn’t have the money to pay his bill.

“Maybe that’s when reality set in for him – to have his 19-year-old son paying his hotel bill,” Pat said. “Maybe he said to himself, ‘I can’t go through any more of this.’”

Ray was homeless when he was referred to Catholic Charities, which offered him a place to stay and asked him to do some interior painting at Ciara House, a group home for chronically mentally ill adults, in exchange for his room and board.

Something happened inside Ciara House that transformed a life. After Ray finished the painting job, he stayed on as a paid cook and counselor, and for the next 21 years, he found meaning in his life through helping others and trying to repair the damage he had caused within his own family.

The man who was too ner­vous and too unreliable to be around noisy kids was a rock during Katrina, when he and two other staff members shuttled 13 men­tally ill clients to Brandon, Mississippi, where they stayed for nine weeks in a small house provided by St. Paul Church.

Ray did all the cooking and kept the residents calm. His own “bedroom” was a tiny storage cubicle, just spacious enough if he bent his knees.

“When we evacuated, he went out and purchased ev­eryone a little radio – with a little earphone,” said Dorothy McKnight, a coworker at Ciara House. “Those radios seemed to keep all the clients calm at night. They would sleep with it in their ear. Ray didn’t like a lot of noise.”

Even though Ray had recon­nected with his children and grandchildren and often gave them generous birthday and Christmas gifts, his family did not realize the extent to which he was beloved by his colleagues until his funeral.

“I guess stunned is the word,” Pat said. “My sis­ter Polly said Ray had led a double life. We didn’t have a Norman Rockwell existence. Nobody has Norman Rockwell. You can’t change the past. But he was in another dimension over there.

“My sister was bug-eyed hearing all the stories of what he did. She kept saying, ‘Is this the same Ray?’ I guess so.”

The Gospel demands telling and retelling these resurrection parables, and the Clarion Herald staff has done that for 63 years.

I thank God for our readers – and for their loyalty, inspiration and faith.   

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