Patrick Jamieson, Victoria, BC

While long an admirer of the Prairie Messenger, based as it was in Muenster, SK, my direct acquaintance began on April Fools day, 1982 at 9 pm. My wife was out for the evening, leaving me with the sleeping children to do some reading related to my job with the Catholic Health Association of Canada in Ottawa. We lived in the Glebe district of the city. I can still picture the kitchen wall phone ringing wondering if it was Penny checking back on the kids.

It was Father Andrew Britz at the PM asking if I was interested in applying for the job of editor. Brother Bede Hubbard was leaving the position and Grant Maxwell had suggested my name. I was rather flabbergasted to say the least. Since 1978 I had been with CHAC and really liked the job, again Grant Maxwell had given my name to its Executive Director Father Everett McNeil who seemed the ideal boss for my stage of things.

I said I would come for an interview and Father Peter Novecosky was on the selection committee, as well as Father Andrew and the Abbey’s business manager. I was to be the first lay editor of the venerable and esteemed publication. I took the job and Peter was one of my sub-editors, so I was his boss on the job and he was my boss for the job.

I remember his great enthusiasm for a hockey player named Wayne Gretzky. I’m afraid I had left most of my enthusiasm for hockey back in the 1960s with Frank Mahovlich and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Peter struck me as a sort of farm boy from not too far from Muenster and Humboldt where St. Peter’s comprised of a college, a farm and a printing press as well as the monastery proper, all about 70 km from Saskatoon along the Yellowhead highway toward Winnipeg.

The Abbot at the time was Jerome Weber, another familiar name in the district. A short man of genial disposition who had lost an eye in a farming accident, so he wore a patch, giving him a distinctive memorable look.
Like most religious communities after Vatican II, the numbers of Benedictines at St. Peter’s was dwindling. Peter was actually the last vocation. The college had graduated a number of people I was very impressed by, including Dennis Gruending, MP and CBC radio host.

One previous editor had been James Grey who was Grant Maxwell’s mentor and hermit on the grounds at Muenster. A sort of luminous if not numinous Thomas Merton figure. Andrew Britz was transparently the rising intellectual after Bede Hubbard left. Father James was still around and I visited him at his hermitage a couple of times.

After Andrew died, Peter ended up as both Abbot and editor. He was very kind and gracious but transparently overwhelmed by it all. I only lasted a year after the hope and promise of a stable work and family situation for the next twenty-five years. Such is life, but it did not augur well over the long term and unfortunately the PM closed its doors seven years ago.

I was said to be too political by the business manager but fighting bishops and the right wing was what it needed to survive thrive and grow. After four years in Nova Scotia learning my trade, ICN was born out of the ashes of the progressive Catholic papers Western Catholic Reporter, Catholic New Times and the 100 year legacy at the Prairie Messenger.

Peter was enigmatic to my experience. I may not have been quite ready for the job but more to the point they were not ready for a lay editor.

I remember first arriving at St. Peter’s on a glorious June day. The canola crops glistened gold in the fields. That area was known as the sure crop region, around Humboldt. The farm seemed idyllic as a setting . At age 35 I was set for 25 years in the perfect situation…monastery, college, press all in the pastoral rural prairie setting where progressive Catholic journalism had taken root in the 1920s, the historic English language version of the legendary Prairie Messenger.

My tenure would be short lived, no big surprise. It only proved an apprenticeship for the ICN five years later, but the idea that the PM itself would end seemed unthinkable. Peter was its last editor and the Abbot who pulled the plug in 2017. In the 1990s Catholic New Times out of Toronto would fade away and later Doug Roche’s Western Catholic Reporter was folded up by a regressive bishop who has just been promoted to Vancouver, so the future of the BC Catholic is suspect .

That paper has never been suspected of being progressive since editor Gerry Bartram was let go for being gay. But the idea that ICN, the runt of that litter of post Vatican II papers should be the last one standing shows God has a vivid sense of humour.

When I left the PM, I asked Peter for a bound volume of my year’s work there and he graciously agreed. I think the last thing he wanted was to be the editor in chief. There would be a few more to follow me including a religious Sister and Andrew Britz, who it was apparent to me from the start should wear the mantel left by Michael Pomedli and Bede Hubbard as award winning editors while at the PM.

Peter was very kindly. It was the gruffer Andrew who popped in one afternoon to let me know they would no longer be requiring my services. It was an interesting adventure and our introduction to a very interesting experiment called Saskatchewan, which has moved radically to the right since the days of Tommy Douglas, Allan Blakeny and Roy Romanov as premiers.

Penny and I had three daughters, settling into a rental in the village of Muenster with its hot and cold running mice. Sam the cat was the answer, Sam who turned out to be Samantha who gave birth in Martha’s crib after we moved to Saskatoon.

A rude awakening for our youngest who called her sisters ‘godders’. The marriage failed shortly after that and the kids grew up in Saskatoon, a lovely little city with a warm sense of community. I took a job with Bishop William Power on my own in Nova Scotia for four years where I inadvertently honed my journalism skill as the stringer for New Maritimes as its Cape Breton correspondent. My editor Gary Burrill became a United Church minister like his father and eventually the elected leader of the New Democratic Party and valued friend to this day.