Here comes the popemobile! From the media platform overlooking the crowd, our Catholic Standard photographer Jaclyn Lippelmann and I had a perfect view of Pope Francis smiling and waving as he rode the popemobile just beneath us, as 25,000 people gathered outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington cheered at his arrival there. Moments later during his first pastoral visit to the United States in 2015, Pope Francis presided at a Canonization Mass for St. Junipero Serra, the famous 18th century Franciscan missionary to California.
As the editor and a writer for the Catholic Standard newspaper and website of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, I’ve been blessed to witness historic events, but more importantly, to tell the stories of the everyday faith of Catholics living in the nation’s capital and the five surrounding Maryland counties.
Forty years ago today, on Dec. 4, 1984, I first stepped into the Catholic Standard newsroom as a cub reporter.
After earning a journalism degree from the University of Missouri that spring, I had taken the first plane ride of my life and landed at National Airport and was greeted at the gate by my Uncle Paul, Aunt Joyce and my cousin Bryan. They drove me around downtown Washington, and I was thrilled to see the U.S. Capitol, Lincoln Memorial, the White House and Washington Monument illuminated at night. Growing up in the woods of Missouri, I knew those landmarks as photos in my social studies book or from scenes from the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. I still have a sense of wonder when I see those buildings and monuments today.
That summer, Bryan – who was 15 and a street-smart sophomore at Gonzaga College High School in Washington – helped me navigate commuting to my internship with the Catholic News Service, which was then located downtown. I took my first city bus and Metro rides, and I like to joke that Bryan helped show his country cousin how to walk across the city streets. After seeing me nervously look both ways and hurry through the crosswalk, he waited until the pedestrian light was flashing “Warning! Don’t go!” before he slowly sauntered to the other side of the street.
My CNS internship extended through the fall, and I learned that the Catholic Standard newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington had a job opening for a staff reporter. During my job interview with Edgar Miller, who was then the paper’s executive editor, he told me they were looking for someone with more experience. Somehow, I was hired anyway, and I stepped into the aforementioned newsroom and began my Catholic Standard reporting career. For one of my first articles, I covered an anti-apartheid protest at the South African Embassy.
Perhaps providentially, nine months after my arrival at the Catholic Standard, another new reporter, Richard Szczepanowski, joined our team in September 1985. Richard proved to be not only a gifted writer, but a whiz at laying out the paper, deftly wielding an X-Acto knife with very few injuries in an era when articles were cut out and pasted manually. When technology advanced, Richard learned how to lay out pages on the computer. Our early computers, of a vintage that could now be displayed in the Smithsonian, had black screens and large green letters. Now we have laptops, and Richard has even written and transmitted stories from his iPhone.
In 1995, I became the Catholic Standard’s editor, and Richard in recent years has served as our managing editor. Along with many talented and faithful colleagues and friends, we produced the Catholic Standard over the years as it evolved from a weekly to a biweekly to a monthly newspaper and added a website and social media. I like to joke that Richard and I are like brothers, Cain and Abel.
My best partnership from the Catholic Standard came when I worked with my future wife Carol when she was a reporter at the paper and I was the assistant editor. We were good friends before we started dating, and we shared an eventful and humorous (for me) adventure covering Mother Teresa one morning. (That will be the subject of a future retrospective column.) Maybe that experience, plus Carol staying with me as I learned how to drive her stick-shift car on the way to our honeymoon in romantic Charleston, South Carolina and a beach house at Cape Fear (!) cemented our relationship, which now spans 32 years of marriage and includes three wonderful children, Joe, Anna and Matt.
Before our marriage, Carol had what turned out to be the good fortune of losing her job at the Catholic Standard due to budgetary challenges. She then worked for three decades as a reporter for the Catholic News Service, before her current job as the news editor of the National Catholic Reporter.
Thousands of articles and four decades later, I like to say that in my years working at the Catholic Standard newspaper and website, I’ve covered everything from CYO Peewee girls’ soccer in the pouring rain to the pope in Rome. I’ve had the excitement of covering presidents and popes, been inspired by the faith of the people at our parishes and schools, and experienced the sadness of reporting on the clergy abuse crisis.
Some of my favorite articles over the years have included:
- A 1992 profile of Father Joseph Byron, a priest with Alzheimer’s disease who continued serving the people at Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Potomac for as long as he could. I led the award-winning article with a quote by Santiago the fisherman from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea – “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
- A trio of stories that I will highlight in a column in our January 2025 Catholic Schools Week edition – a 2014 article on how students at Mary of Nazareth School in Darnestown rallied to support a father who had Lou Gehrig’s disease; a 2011 story on the first graduation at Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School in Takoma Park; and a 2011 article on how 71 boys at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Bethesda had their heads shaved to show solidarity to a beloved teacher battling cancer.
- In 1987, I wrote a profile on Deacon Thomas Forbes, who grew up working on a farm in Southern Maryland and never learned to read until he felt called to the diaconate at the age of 59. After a career driving a truck, setting water meters, cutting pipe and digging ditches for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, he knew that he couldn’t become a deacon until he learned to read, because deacons proclaim the Gospel at Mass. After tutoring and four years of preparation, he processed down the aisle at the Church of the Incarnation in Washington for his first Mass as a deacon and read the Gospel confidently. Msgr. Thomas Wells, who then led the archdiocese’s diaconate program, said, “The first time I heard him read, I had chills go up my spine – you think of that kind of dedication. It was also a thrill to see a whole world open up for somebody. The guy is just filled with love, and he just wanted to do the work of God.”
- With the Rocky Mountains as his backdrop, Pope Saint John Paul II celebrated the closing Mass for 400,000 young people from around the world attending World Youth Day in Denver in 1993. The pontiff encouraged them to walk with Jesus like the apostles once did, and bring Christ’s love back to their homes, schools, workplaces and communities. I wrote a roundup story for the Catholic Standard and covered World Youth Day as an excited correspondent for EWTN, the Catholic television network. Describing the young pilgrims – who at one point closed in on me and danced in the background while I was trying to do a stand-up report – I said, “They come from many different lands. They speak many different languages. But they share one faith.”
- I also had the thrill of covering Pope Saint John Paul II’s visit to my home area of St. Louis in 1999. I wrote, “Seventy-two years after Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight across the Atlantic, a new ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ gripped that city last week as Pope John Paul II was greeted by large enthusiastic crowds during his two-day visit…” Before an ecumenical prayer service at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, the pontiff met with civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, and during his visit there, he challenged Americans “to put an end to every form of racism.” Later at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, my extroverted mom spotted Rosa Parks and hustled over to shake her hand and say hello.
- In 2008, as the editor of the Catholic Standard, I led our newspaper’s coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Washington. At a dramatic Mass in the newly opened Nationals Park, the pope encouraged people to bring Christ’s hope to the world through their prayers, by the witness of their faith, and by their charity. After arriving at the altar set up near center field, Pope Benedict smiled warmly and lifted his outstretched arms toward the 50,000 people in the stadium, as if to embrace them. During his homily, the pontiff’s voice seemed to break as he decried the suffering caused by the clergy abuse crisis in the United States. After the Mass, Pope Benedict went to the Apostolic Nunciature and quietly met with a small group of abuse survivors, listened to their stories and prayed with them in the chapel there.
- Then in 2015, I was in the balcony at the U.S. Capitol to report on Pope Francis as he became the first pontiff to address a joint meeting of Congress. The pope encouraged lawmakers to work together for the common good, on behalf of the poor and immigrants, and in defense of human life and the environment. Then right afterward, the Holy Father visited the poor and homeless served by Catholic Charities in Washington and the volunteers and staff members engaged in that work. “May the Lord bless each one of you, and may he also bless Catholic Charities and the faith-filled work they do for the poor and marginalized of your city,” the pope said.
- In November 2020 as I was eating breakfast at home, I received the surprise news that Pope Francis had named Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory as a new cardinal. I quickly wrote and posted a story on our website, and then raced 90 miles to Southern Maryland, to cover the cardinal-designate as he celebrated a Mass that Sunday morning at Holy Angels Church in Avenue. After the Mass, I asked him what his elevation to the College of Cardinals meant to him personally, to be the first African American cardinal, and what that would mean to the nation’s Black Catholics. The newly named cardinal’s voice broke slightly as he said, “I’m deeply humbled. I know that I am reaping a harvest that millions of African American Catholics and people of color have planted. I am deeply grateful for the faith that they have lived so generously, so zealously and with such devotion.”
- In 2023, I covered a family reunion in Southern Maryland of descendants of people enslaved and sold by the Jesuits in 1838. In that infamous sale of 272 enslaved men, women and children, most of them were forced to leave the religious order’s Maryland farms and were transported to Louisiana plantations, where they toiled harvesting sugarcane and cotton. Proceeds of the sale helped fortify the future of Georgetown College, which had been struggling financially. The reunion brought together descendants whose enslaved ancestors had been taken to Louisiana, with descendants of enslaved ancestors who had remained in Maryland. Toni Ann Semple, a singer from Queens, New York, said the weekend was about getting connected to her family roots. Her sister Bernadette Semple, a retired Navy commander who works in cyber security, praised the strength of her enslaved ancestors, saying, “They were resilient. They were faithful.”
- In October 2024, I covered a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle for Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy and the matriarch of her large family who had died at the age of 96. President Joe Biden and former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton offered tributes to her. Singer Stevie Wonder sang the Our Father and a rousing version of “Isn’t She Lovely,” and country singer Kenny Chesney also sang, as did Sting. An especially poignant moment came when Martin Luther King III praised Ethel Kennedy for living a “luminous life of faith, love and service.” He noted how Robert and Ethel Kennedy had visited and offered support to his mother, Coretta Scott King, and her children at their home after the assassination of his father, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1968. Then after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated two months later, Coretta Scott King visited Ethel Kennedy at her home to express her condolences and support. The two women who shared a bond due to the loss of a beloved family member to gun violence later worked together to promote gun control legislation.
- Also in October 2024, I had the fun experience of covering Olympic champion swimmer Katie Ledecky as she returned to her alma mater, Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, to talk to students there. After winning four more medals at the Summer Olympics in Paris and becoming the most decorated U.S. woman Olympian with 14 Olympic medals including nine gold medals, Ledecky was asked by a young girl at Stone Ridge if she ever got tired of swimming. “I love it!” Ledecky assured the girl. The Olympian told me that her Catholic faith remains a source of strength in her life, and she relies on what she learned at Little Flower School in Bethesda and at Stone Ridge. And yes, she still prays Hail Marys before each swimming race.
When our esteemed editor Tom Rowan retired in 1991 after working for the Catholic Standard for nearly 40 years, I noted that his tenure approximated the time that Moses and the Israelites spent wandering lost in the desert looking for the Promised Land. Joking aside, I have never felt lost in my four decades at the Catholic Standard, except for a few times before the advent of GPS. I found my life’s work as a journalist chronicling our Catholic family of faith in the Archdiocese of Washington, and experiencing God’s grace every day in that work. I’m grateful to God, my family, my colleagues and my community for the blessings and adventures I’ve had. And a special thanks to my cousin Bryan for teaching me how to walk across D.C.’s streets.
Now on to writing the next story on my list…
