As veteran Canadian journalist Brian Stewart made his way to the frontlines of war, political upheaval and humanitarian crises around the world, more often than not, he would find religion where he did not expect it.

Whether it was covering the darkness of famine in Ethiopia, civil war in El Salvador, inevitably, Stewart, as foreign correspondent for CBC News, would find the first glimmer of light in the form of those who were already there.

“ I was stunned by the fact that the only people here are these small, religious groups. There'd be a Catholic missionary here, or Catholic nuns who got through a civil war to go in and help the starving — those religious groups were there on the ground, and they led us around to the worst poor,” Stewart recalled. 

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“We weren't the first, and even though we were praised for being the first, they were. I always remember that debt to them, as well as this awe of what kept them in this unbelievably horrible and dangerous place.” 

Stewart relayed his story Aug. 12 at Toronto's University of St. Michael’s College about the changing role of religion in the news, drawing on his own decades of reporting from around the world. “On the Frontlines: Brian Stewart on Journalism & Religion in the News” was presented by Canadian Catholic News and the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute as part of CCN’s “God in the City,” a summer seminar organized to provide training to aspiring Catholic journalists.

Stewart reflected on a career in which religion repeatedly emerged in unexpected places. Prompted by interviewer John Longhurst, faith columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press and prominent religion reporter in his own right, Stewart would go on to highlight his experience of religion, namely broad Christian and, in particular, Catholic presence, appearing at seemingly every turn across the globe in the years to come. 

“I  arrived in El Salvador two months after four American religious women were murdered by the death squads, just a year after Archbishop (Oscar) Romero was murdered while giving his Mass. Across Latin America was this horrible period, but the Church was in there fighting,” he said.

“At the same time, Pope John Paul II’s fight to stand up to communism was having positive effects in places I covered such as Poland, but that also crossed right across Eastern Europe.  In the same span, the Church was fighting apartheid very impactfully in many areas in Africa, and did a great deal of good.

“These were huge influences that religion was having in the world, and even as the Church went into a quieter period and is not nearly as influential today, there was a time when it was shaking the world.”

Through his own sights, Stewart began to emphasize the distinction between feeling compassion and putting compassion into action. For him, the remarkable aspect of the many religious workers he encountered wasn't simply that they cared about suffering, but the way in which they organized themselves around preventing it. 

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His 2004 convocation address titled "On the Front Lines" for the 160th-anniversary convocation of Knox College at the University of Toronto crystallized his view, where he described organized Christianity as being remarkably close to “the raw truth” of war, famine and human suffering, as Christians were repeatedly present where those crises were unfolding. 

Having begun his professional career in 1964 as a reporter for the Oshawa Times, the longtime CBC foreign correspondent still recalls what initially drew him to the practice. 

Fascinated as a child pulled towards war stories and major international conflicts as they unfolded on television, Stewart watched journalists cover world-changing events like the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising, both in 1956. He revealed to the audience that his motivation eventually became deeper than his early desire to experience history, but to bear witness to it above all else. 

“ There was a personal desire and excitement of being at a point where you see history being made and you realize that people will be writing about that very day 500 years from now, but it was 1972 when I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speech on the need to be a witness to the horrors of the world, especially in the darkest places,” he said.

“I fell in love with the writings of Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet, who also wrote along the lines of witness. I then knew that if writers and poets can witness, journalists can too, and that’s what drove me more than any other aspect.” 

Stewart would have no shortage of darkness to witness when his work in the mid-1980s as correspondent for CBC News brought him to Ethiopia, where he was the first to tell the world the appalling story of the famine gripping the country. There, investigating reports of a severe famine in the country’s northern regions, Stewart found himself receiving what he had wished for. 

“ It was probably the most profound effect I've had in my life, and it really changed me, my journalism, the world I live in and certainly changed Canada in many ways,” he said. “ I remember reporting it was like seeing the world after a nuclear holocaust. The dust clouds spread across the countryside, (there were) hundreds of thousands of people desperately trying to make it to feeding centres, families dying along the road, people appealing for help everywhere.” 

And of course, the religious on the ground providing aid. 

Stewart shared his hopes for religion to find a similar resurgence in the minds of the media and the world in this current day, teasing that the problem isn't simply the lack of reports on faith, but rather that mainstream news is sharing the wrong stories. Instead of focusing on internal theological disputes and quick controversies, he hopes journalists can return to highlighting faith involvement in areas of war, inequality, global diplomacy and the highly relevant debates around faith and artificial intelligence. 

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Regardless of the exact beat and how the reporting on it may look, Stewart ended by ensuring that religion, much like it was in Ethiopia so many years ago, is waiting there with its own unique stories ripe for the telling. 

“ The poet Carolyn Forché says, ‘This has a feeling of the end of time,’ and while I don't agree in terms of the end of the universe, something is ending in the world we know it to be. There are very few organizations with the power and heft of, say, the Roman Catholic Church, to step into areas where the world's going to be looking for it,” he said.