Alan Hustak, Excerpted from the May 17, 2012 edition of The Globe and Mail

  Neil McKenty liked to argue just for the hell of it and he made a career doing it.
   The irreverent Jesuit who left the priesthood and went on to become the cornerstone of Montreal talk radio, died Saturday morning, May 12 at the age of 87. During his 14 years as a CJAD telephone talk show host in the 1970s and 80s, he brought a degree of civility to the charged political atmosphere in the province after the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, and in the referendum that followed. In its heyday, his program Exchange attracted as many as 85,000 listeners, or more than a quarter of the city’s English-speaking audience. He later did a television talk show, McKenty Live, on CTV for three years.

  Neil McKenty liked to argue just for the hell of it and he made a career doing it.
   The irreverent Jesuit who left the priesthood and went on to become the cornerstone of Montreal talk radio, died Saturday morning, May 12 at the age of 87. During his 14 years as a CJAD telephone talk show host in the 1970s and 80s, he brought a degree of civility to the charged political atmosphere in the province after the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, and in the referendum that followed. In its heyday, his program Exchange attracted as many as 85,000 listeners, or more than a quarter of the city’s English-speaking audience. He later did a television talk show, McKenty Live, on CTV for three years.
   While he was in his element behind the microphone, McKenty was rarely happy being a public figure. He quit his radio show at the peak of his career in 1985 to finish a biography, In the Stillness Dancing, about an obscure Benedictine monk, John Main, who was influenced by oriental religions, and started a Christian meditation movement. McKenty then bared his own soul in a no-holds-barred courageous autobiography, The Inside Story, in which he revealed, among other things, that he was biopolar, was a recovering alcoholic who contemplated suicide and that he never took his vows of celibacy seriously.
   “There were two Neils,” said his long-time friend Jim Reed. “The one who needed an image of himself, and the other who loathed the image that others had of him. He was a super, super guy, but he was distracted by the pain of living.”
   Neil McKenty was born in Peterborough, Ont., on Dec. 31, 1924, and grew up in Hastings. His father, who ran a hardware store, was an alcoholic who preached a hard religious line. McKenty and his younger brother were educated by Jesuits at Regiopolis College in Kingston. As a teenager, McKenty worked as a stringer for the Peterborough Examiner. He took his B.A. at St. Michael’s College in Toronto before entering the Society of Jesus as a novice in 1944. He was ordained in 1957. He worked in New York as a summer relief editor on America Magazine, published by the Jesuits, and spent time in London.. He returned to study history at the University of Toronto where as his doctoral thesis, he wrote a biography of Ontario premier Mitchell Hepburn.
   Influenced by Fulton Sheen, a popular U.S. clergyman who had his own television program,, McKenty went on to take a communications arts degree in 1964 from the University of Michigan.
   It was during a visit to Rome that he began to have serious misgivings about the institutional church. He described it as “a bloated structure, top-heavy with oppressive authority.” By 1969, he made a decision to leave the priesthood. “When it came to preaching, I had a lot going for me,” he explained in his autobiography. But he was unable to reconcile the fact that the words the congregation heard, while theologically sound, did not ‘jibe with my feelings about those words in my hear.”
   After leaving the Jesuits, McKenty worked in Toronto for the Harry E. Foster Charitable Foundation for the intellectually disabled and helped organize the first Special Olympics held in Quebec.
   In 1972, he was hired by CJAD in Montreal to do talk radio. Sidney Margles, the station’s former director of information and public affairs, said McKenty was hired by his questioning mind: “He was intelligent, a natural communicator, a seasoned analyst, impressive and well spoken.”
   McKenty said one of his proudest moments on air was getting former prime minister Brian Mulroney to take questions from listeners after Mulroney said he wouldn’t. “His refusing to take calls on a radio talk show made as much sense as going into a television studio and refusing to turn on the lights,” he said. “The Toronto Star got wind of it, and on the morning of the show, put the story on its front page. By the time Mulroney arrived at CJAC, the station was packed with reporters. Mulroney was in a rage and proceeded to excoriate me for causing him political embarrassment. But he was an astute politician, so he squared his shoulders, adopted a thin smile, went on the air, and answered the callers’ questions.”
   Although McKenty abandoned the priesthood, he embraced an ecumenical approach to spiritual discipline. He kept a blog and had a regular column in The Senior Times, called Pit Stop. He continued to rail against the Vatican. He deplored what he considered to be the second-class treatment of women by the institutional church and he found it odd that while a married Anglican could become a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, a Catholic married man could not.
   His last column, published in the May edition, challenged the church to take a more nuanced approach to its teachings about homosexuality. He wrote that he did not believe in a God who would condemn a person to an eternity in hell for a single, unrepented moment of sexual pleasure.
   McKenty leaves his wife of 40 years, the former Ontario government speechwriter, Catherine Fleming Turnbull, with whom he wrote Skiing Legends and The Laurentian Lodge Club.
   The funeral was held on Saturday, May 19 at the Notre Dame de Neiges Funeral Chapel in Montreal.