Only one editor of the Catholic Herald has ever been sent to jail. But Charles Diamond was a major figure in our history: the paper’s founder and, from 1888 to 1934, the man at the editor’s desk. The Herald was founded in the era of Cardinal Manning, when the cause of workers’ rights was at the heart of the Church’s life; Diamond referred to the newspaper as “the organ of Catholic industrial democracy” – not a slogan we considered reviving for the cover of this first monthly edition, but one which indicates the seriousness of the man.
Diamond’s Catholic Herald was, then, not a paper which stood back from the world, but one which engaged with it energetically – and, it must be admitted, sometimes recklessly. (His six-month jail term was for “soliciting others to commit murder”, after he published an article which covered, with what a jury felt to be too much sympathy, an assassination attempt on the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.)
That tradition continued, in a less aggressive form, after Diamond’s death in 1934. The group of laymen who took over the paper promised to cover the news from a Catholic perspective. There was, they thought, “a real need for such a paper on account of the strong current running in opposition not only to the mission and the claims of the Church but even to the Christian life itself.”