‘Liberating’ Catholic history

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald 

Inside the Clarion Herald offices on Walmsley Avenue in New Orleans are dozens of dusty hardbound volumes, resting in a large armoire, that contain every page printed by the archdiocesan newspaper since its inaugural issue rolled off the Century Graphics press in Mid-City on Feb. 28, 1963.

Now, through the marvel of digitization, all 61-plus years of Clarion Herald history are available for review or research – free of charge – to anyone typing in a simple word search on a computer.

“You’ve liberated from that cabinet the work you’ve already invested in all these years – the interesting insights and human, relatable stories,” said Todd Jensen, project manager for the Catholic News Archive program of the American Theological Library Association. “Now you can search across all of these issues to find stories that are interesting to people today. You are liberating all of this information.”

Free, digitized history

Following an 18-month effort by the staff of the Clarion Herald, the archdiocesan archives and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), the Clarion Herald’s entire 61-year treasure trove of contemporaneous Catholic history of the Archdiocese of New Orleans can now be accessed free online at www.thecatholicnewsarchive.org.

More than 55,000 pages of the Clarion Herald have 
been digitized – from the broadsheet version of the early 1960s to the present-day tabloid format.

Want to find out what the Clarion Herald reported on the topic of the desegregation of Catholic schools in the archdiocese in the 1960s? It’s there.

Need to refresh your memory about the visit of St. John Paul II to New Orleans in 1987? Every word printed in the issues leading up to his arrival and in the issues that covered his major addresses at the Superdome and St. Louis Cathedral and his outdoor Mass at the UNO Lakefront campus comes back to life.   

What about how the church and the community responded to the destruction of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005? It’s all there.

Just want to relive and identify the members of your Catholic high school graduation class. Their names and photos are there.

Contemporaneous history

“They say newspapers are the first record of history,” Jensen said. “Newspapers capture everything, from the significant national news to the individual heroics in every community. People should be reminded, the people you wrote about were heroic when you wrote about them, and they’re heroic still today. Anybody who’s searching for that name should find that story and be reminded of those sacrifices and heroics. For the first time, you’ve got a Catholic news archive that will have a Catholic perspective of history in the United States.” 

In 2011, a group of Catholic university librarians, scholars, archivists and newspaper editors discussed a novel challenge: There were plenty of historical archives of secular publications but no archives that offered contemporaneous history from a Catholic perspective. They identified an urgent need to digitize Catholic newspapers across the U.S. for access and preservation.

Jennifer Younger, the former head librarian of the University of Notre Dame and then the director of CRRA, said digitizing Catholic newspapers was critical because the scholars agreed that newspapers were a “high-value resource.”

“Online access was our dream,” Younger said. “Catholic newspapers offer a window into life as experienced by Catholics in America. No other sources describe parish life and the civic participation of clergy and lay persons in the detail seen in Catholic newspapers. This is unique. Nobody had done it.”

Effort started in 2016

When the Catholic News Archive officially launched in 2016, it had digitized content from 12 Catholic newspapers around the country, including the Clarion Herald, along with the archives of Catholic News Service, the news agency created in 1920 by the bishops of the United States.

The archive started small and had many gaps. The Clarion Herald, for example, was able to post only its first five years of issues (1963-68) and later added three years of issues in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005-07).   

Younger said the miracle of digitization helped scholars discover a Catholic response to the Nativist (anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant) riots that took place in Philadelphia in the early 1840s.

At the time, the Nativists believed Catholics held sinister, anti-American allegiances because of their obedience to the pope. After the first Nativist riot in 1844, a group of Philadelphia Catholics appointed a committee to write a formal response to the accusations of a grand jury that 
blamed Catholics for the violence.

That response remained lost to history until the Catholic News Archives uncovered the full address in a digest of Catholic news published in the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati in a July 1844 issue.

Younger said students and users everywhere love finding this kind of information online because “it’s so much easier than paging through bound volumes of microfilm reels.”

A boon to students

Katie Vest, archivist for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, says she is thrilled the full story logs of the Clarion Herald have been digitized because the information will help students and researchers. The archdiocesan archives has digitized thousands of parish sacramental records and is working on making more records available online relating to the enslaved and free people of color.

But, her office regularly gets calls from people interested in parish anniversaries and other parish events that are available only through the Clarion Herald.

“It makes me very happy to have the Clarion Herald available for anyone to be able to research, and it makes me very excited to see what happens in the future,” Vest said. “To have the Clarion Herald information available – just to be able to see any major Catholic events or even civil events that happened in the city over the years – allows people to really have a glimpse into what happened.

“We get people who call us wanting to know about ordinations – or they know their parish held this event in the 1970s and they’d really like to look into more. Before that, we would have had to go into the physical records and research it for them.”

The Catholic news archives also include about 16 months (from 1958 to 1959) of the Catholic Action of the South, the immediate predecessor of the Clarion Herald.

Long-range goal

Vest said she would love to have the entire history of New Orleans Catholic newspapers digitized – the French language Le Propagateur Catholique (1842-64), the Catholic Standard (1855-62), The Morning Star (1868-1930) and Catholic Action of the South (1932-63). But, that will take money or sponsorships.

Hardbound volumes and microfilm exist for each of those legacy Catholic publications, but they have not been digitized. Some individuals have stepped up to sponsor the cost of digitization, but that remains an imposing project.

“The historical newspapers are always amazing to look through to see how the city has changed and the church has changed over the years,” Vest said.

While the archdiocesan archives are not open to the general public for genealogy research, Vest said, scholars do have access to the archdiocesan archives by appointment. Those interested in genealogical information can fill out an online form on the archives’ 
website (a site connected to www.arch-nola.org) to request research to be done.

As for the separate Catholic news archive, Younger said the benefits are impossible to understate. The archive had 1 million individual views last year, and it is growing year after year.

“You learn things from Catholic newspapers that you don’t learn from other newspapers,” Younger said. “The news is factual, and the writers, the journalists, are steeped in Catholicism. They understand what the Catholic view is, and they have had access to the people who can talk about it. It gives you a unique perspective on the same. It’s family history, church history and the Catholic perspective and leadership and involvement in city life and in national life.”

One of the governing priorities of the Catholic news archive was to always make access to the digitized Catholic newspapers free.

“The archive is used by people all over the world, and it’s fine for people who work in universities and their library pays for a subscription, but we didn’t want to charge individual users,” Younger said. “That’s why it’s so important. It’s available to anybody.”

Now that her dream has been realized, Younger said she hopes the group’s efforts to spread accurate Catholic information will help millions of people.

“My own feeling is one of – I want to say pride, but maybe I’m not supposed to be proud,” Younger said, laughing. “But, I am very, very gratified and thrilled that we were able to make this possible.”

To search for Clarion Herald stories, beginning in 1963, go to www.thecatholicnewsarchive.org. Click on the “titles” tag, then click on “Clarion Herald”  and then hit “search.” A search box will be activated. Type your search words in the box.

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