In 2019, when my Religion in the News project started at the Free Press, the very first story we published was about Father Sam Argenziano—a priest who had served the Italian Catholic community in Winnipeg faithfully and well for decades. The story made the front page.
I liked to tell people back then: “There’s a priest on the front page of the Free Press—and he’s not even in trouble!”
Fast-forward to today. There’s another priest in the Free Press. Not on the front page, but not on the faith page, either. My story about Winnipeg’s new Archbishop, Murray Chatlain, is in the local section.
(And when his predecessor, Archbishop Richard Gagnon, retired from his post, I wrote a story about him, too.)
These stories show the goals of the project: To provide balance to religion coverage and to highlight the role faith plays in the city. The bad things will also be reported; there was a story in the paper about a Manitoba lawsuit for Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse in the 1980s the same week.
But those aren’t the only stories about religion that need to be told—as the project, and the story about Archbishop Chatlain, shows.
Read about Winnipeg’s new archbishop in the Free Press.