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History of the Catholic Register |
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Monday, 25 September 2006 |
The
Catholic Register, Canada's oldest English Catholic weekly in
Canada, traces its roots back more than 170 years to 1830 when
Ontario's pioneer bishop, Most Reverend Alexander Macdonell, started The Catholic at Kingston. That paper was followed by The Canadian Freeman.
A second strain of history for The Register began in Toronto with
the original Catholic Register of 1893. This paper was taken over in
1909 by the Catholic Church Extension Society.
 The first P.F. Cronin.
That day, two previous Catholic papers - The Catholic Weekly Review and
The Irish Canadian - folded to make way for the newcomer which was to
provide a more Canadian, less ethnically partisan journalism.
In 1942, the Kingston and Toronto papers joined a number of other
diocesan journals to form the Canadian Register. Its role was to
provide a larger, more uniform and high quality journalism and be a
forum for the defence of the Catholic Church in Canada. The paper's
name was changed back to its original in the 1960s.
Over the decades, the Catholic Register has been in the forefront
of public debates concerning the Church. Whether it be education,
military conscription in wartime, the battle against poverty or human
rights, Register pages have been a forum for discussion and presenting
the Catholic viewpoint.
The bishops of Ontario have played a vital role in the history of
The Register, at times sponsoring it in their own dioceses. They also
bought a new press for the paper. The press was brought from England
and placed in a renovated two-storey plant at Kingston, Ontario, which
served as main printing plant and headquarters of the Catholic press in
this province for several decades.
 Over the years, the newspaper has changed its ownership structure several times. Currently it is owned by the  Archdiocese of Toronto.
Looking back at Catholic papers over the years, one can see that
styles and formats have drastically changed. Layouts of early papers
would be considered rather heavy and dull by today's standards. Quite
often the papers were one-man publications, the editor depending on
mail and slow couriers, and using brush and glue to advantage in
borrowing from other papers. Compare this with today's Register which
gets its news by internet from distant parts of the globe.
 In
the early papers, there were small headings and long columns of type
rarely broken by photos. News writing could hardly be distinguished
from opinion pieces. At times there were strong defensive attitudes in
the opinion columns.
With a change in the social attitudes in Canada, the Catholic papers have developed with a more open, confident look and stance.
A significant change in the direction of the Catholic press came
with the Second Vatican Council, which further reflected openness,
optimism and ecumenism. In the 1960s and 1970s, a time of enormous
upheaval in the Church, the Catholic press often came under sharp
attack, even when only reporting storms in the Church. Today The
Register tries to present a broad spectrum of views from within the
Catholic community, as well as views from those outside the faith which
would, in the opinion of the editor, help Catholics better understand
their world.
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CR History 
