The Catholic New World: Observations, by Tom Sheridan

I hope you’ll forgive us for the cover photograph on this issue of The Catholic New World. It is admittedly, as the words concede, blatantly self-serving. Perhaps it doesn’t seem all that special to you that our newspaper—your Catholic newspaper—can be right there on the street with the dailies and assorted other secular publications. But we’re pretty pumped up about it.

And for a couple of very good reasons.

Think presence. Think evangelization. What the heck, think PUBLICITY.

I said it was blatant, didn’t I?

But there’s more to it than that.

As a publication of the church, we have an overriding goal: to tell the stories of faith to the Catholics of the Chicago area and offer information and perspectives on the church here and around the world. The secular media, occupying many more newspaper boxes than we ever can hope to muster, tells only one part of the story of the church, and often only a negative part. There’s so much more. Hey, how’s that for a new slogan: “The Catholic New World: Taking Good News to the street.”

We also serve as an agent of evangelization. No, we’re not knocking on doors of non-Catholics and thumping them over the heads with bibles or copies of TCNW. It’s more important—at least at first—is to evangelize Catholics themselves with a more complete understanding of the faith we share. That’s one reason why TCNW is proud that we’re going to be a part of the evangelization program, Spreading the Holy Fire, which is beginning to spread throughout the archdiocese. (See Page 12.)

More—lots more—on that exciting program in months to come.

We’ve actually had fun getting our newspaper boxes ready for market. OK, we have just two, and only one was ready at press time. Preparing it was an in-house effort: former Quigley student Alfonso Valencia, son of staffer Maria Valencia, painted it; Kathy Gabriel, TCNW’s production chief, handled the signage while Catholic Charities maintenance engineer Glen Golubski installed it; and the whole project is guided by circulation marketing manager Lea Dacanay.

The paper is 50 cents an issue in the box—actually an introductory price we can offer since mailing costs aren’t included. We hope people who’ll pick up a copy at the box will want to subscribe.

Our lone newspaper box is posted this week outside Holy Name Cathedral, taking its place alongside many others purveyors of popular media. Stop by and say hello. Buy a copy for your neighbor. Locations will vary as we move it around to make you think we have scores of them (we don’t, of course; that would costs thousands of dollars we don’t have). In the meantime, I can assure you, ours is the only one that will offer real Good News.

Speaking of good news, here’s some more.

Illinois Knights of Columbus raised nearly $6 million to support church- and community-related projects during 2002. The Knights have long had a special concern for efforts to help the mentally retarded, but other areas they help include Catholic schools, vocations and pro-life efforts. Knights also provided 2 million volunteer hours and donated 22,446 pints of blood.

We can’t put a newspaper box at every KC meeting, so if we could just get each of the thousands and thousands of Knights of Columbus in the Chicago area to subscribe …