It’s not easy being a Catholic trying to live one’s faith in school and workplace today.

In recent weeks The B.C. Catholic has told about Christian education students studying to become teachers, and the intense pressure they’re under to conform to secular ideologies.

We’ve had an article by a municipal politician who wrote about the challenges of being a Catholic while serving on city council.

This week we feature a filmmaker whose Catholic faith has been an obstacle to working in the film industry. He has had to make choices that compromised his career but preserved his conscience and faith.

Maybe opportunities for career suicide by religion are becoming more frequent and intense. But it’s never been easy to be a faithful Christian. Jesus warned us to expect suffering and persecution, and for 2,000 years he’s been right.

There was a time when I thought the answer was to retreat. I was working in mainstream journalism, with the privileged role of participating in discussions that helped form the editorial views of a daily newspaper on everything from politics to social issues.

As time passed, I became increasingly amazed at the absurd parallel universe I was working in and the positions we would adopt. As a Catholic whose knowledge of his faith was a mile wide and an inch deep, I wasn’t prepared for some of the confrontations I wound up in. I didn’t know how to respond to such remarks as:

“You’re a Catholic; you can’t force your beliefs on everyone else.”

Or, “This is a secular newspaper; there’s no room for promoting religious-based morality here.”

Although my arguments were usually not religious ones, they happened to be consistent with Catholic positions. So it reached the point one day when an editor remarked, only half-jokingly, that, “We’re going to have to get Paul to abandon his faith.”

The journalists I worked with and still fondly remember were very well-meaning people. All of us were staking out positions we thought were in society’s best interest. But I steadily felt like we were adopting stances not based on any foundation or truth, but for fear of breaking from the rest of the journalistic pack and being perceived as out of touch.

To their credit, I was never pressured to adopt positions contrary to my moral beliefs, and I was even graciously given a weekly column to express my views uncensored. I don’t know that would be the case today.

But if I’d had a stronger grounding in my faith back then, I might have been able to do a better job of challenging their errors. And the sad truth is, if Catholic students had asked me at the time about a possible career in journalism, I probably would have recommended they avoid it. It felt like journalism and Catholicism were inherently at odds with each other.

Providentially, friends helped me relearn my faith and the rationale and teaching behind it, allowing me to keep my conscience, my faith, and my job. I also came to realize journalism and Christianity are inherently at odds with each other – because our faith is inherently countercultural. We must be in the world, says St. Paul. But we’ll always be at odds with the world.

So today I’ve come full circle in my thoughts about Catholics becoming journalists. Even though our faith is at odds with some of modern medicine, Catholics are called to practise medicine. The Catholic faith is contrary to the way politics can operate, but clearly there is a need for more Catholic politicians. Our faith’s opposition to some of today’s journalism is all the more reason for Catholics to enter journalism.

Today, my advice for people of good will considering journalism or any field where moral issues are multiplying is to know your faith, have courage, and get in there and make a difference. God has a job for you to do.

pschratz@rcav.org
twitter.com/paulschratz