Half-century career measured not in years but interconnecting loops

It’s rare, I am finding in retrospect, that life proceeds in a straight line, where events progress in a long march — or slog — forward.

Approaching retirement after 50-plus years in Catholic media, I am experiencing time lacking firm beginning and/or ending points, but rather as a series of interconnecting, yet somehow ever-changing loops.

In fact, my connection to the Catholic press did not begin with my reportorial internship in early 1975 at The Catholic Sun while a journalism student at Syracuse University nor my first editorship and management position at The Vermont Catholic Tribune in Burlington in 1979. No, it began in the back of my parish church vestibule as a precocious 7-year-old news consumer, fascinated with reading — in a non-reading household — at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council.

My pastor, at the time, saw my interest and told me to take as many Catholic newspapers and magazines as I wanted, and waived away that I didn’t have money to put in the slot on the publication rack to pay for them. He could never have known how his kindness impacted my life. And those publications’ staffs and editors — some of whom I met later in my career — could have no idea that their articles, their photography, their headlines, their graphics, their vision would change the arc of my life, and lead me — no, shove me — to join them for the last half-century in this co-ed fraternity of communicators.

That connection has sent me working in editorial and management positions in six different decades in the East, the Midwest, the far West and the South, with three different diocesan newspapers in three states, an international wire service, an online news aggregator and a publishing house where I ran a book division. It also included teaching in a college journalism program and accepting freelance assignments from dailies, alternative weeklies, glossy magazines, all drawing upon — explicitly or implicitly — that faith in which I was formed.

It has been a blessed life and a career that has kept me engaged with that connection of faith and national and world events, including, among many others: reporting on repression in Central America during the 1980s and 1990s; walking the streets of east Jerusalem to report upon and photograph the first Intifada, being threatened by Israeli security forces; working with CPA colleagues to bring Eastern European communicators a sense of the values of Western-styled journalism after the fall of Soviet oppression; covering the nuclear-freeze movement promoted by faith-based groups; representing a diocese at one of the first major clergy sex-abuse conferences, well before most of the world was to learn, painfully, of the Catholic Church’s involvement and take stock of a tragedy that continues to haunt it.

I have had opportunities to personally grow over the years by being a member of the Catholic Media Association (and CPA before) in ways that I’m not sure I would have found in other media niches.

I’ve had the privilege to discover my voice and speak out through editorials and commentaries against the death penalty, injustices within the criminal-justice system, governmental inactivity in the face of climate change, the poisoning of waterways and water systems through agricultural or industrial pollution, gender discrimination, societal dislocations and attacks on the rights of each person to life from womb to tomb. I’ve also had the chance to reflect in print on spirituality, health and wellness, aging, parenting and marriage, drawing on births and deaths, divorces and weddings, life-threatening surgeries and life-inspiring successes within my own family.

In the case of each one of the articles, online posts, books, photos and thought pieces, there was at its core the presence of faith, more important and more pronounced than the soundness of any of my own opinions. I also became aware of these experiential loops: Whatever I saw, I had the advantage of perspective from standing on the shoulders of my colleagues before me; and, our best work was done when focused on the lives of those individuals we serve, their stories, struggles, challenges, triumphs.

And, when, on my first assignment, I was literally threatened with excommunication by a diocesan official and somehow salvaged my job and, more importantly, the assignment then published — that’s a whole other story to tell at another time — I experienced another of those life loops: My colleagues, especially when I am in a pinch, have my back.

Changes in life while Catholic media races to keep up

My career has been the beneficiary of and faced the challenges of dramatic changes in the field. Beginning in journalism when college grads considered that jobs obtained were jobs secured — and for decades or even life — I’ve seen organizations I’ve worked for, including Catholic News Service, The Catholic Observer in Springfield, Mass., and now the Clarion Herald newspaper in New Orleans, that I thought would easily outlive me, sadly did not.

A fourth experiential loop: Media, stressed in a world of communication expansion and contraction, cannot be promised of tomorrow, as change is the only constant.

I also watched how my desk did not have to be limited to a brick-and-mortar office, as I managed and worked as a telecommuter before it was a thing, beginning in 1989, and continued that and remote working 30 of the last 36 years, able to be where my family needed to be.

In referencing family, it was on the job in Vermont that, in a pinch, I hired a gritty, never-say-can’t, never-accept-no, freelance photojournalist. I am proud to be married now for more than 40 years to Mary Carty, a successful and award-winning photographer, former AP correspondent, book author, web editor, playwright, musician, visual artist, and amazing mother and spouse, not to mention my rock.

Despite 50-plus years of the long hours and seemingly no way to stem the growth of the piles of work, there was and is still the sense that we journalists and communicators need to find ways to raise our games to better meet the moment and connect with our audiences. And we can’t do it alone.

I have had opportunities to personally grow over the years by being a member of the Catholic Media Association (and CPA before) in ways that I’m not sure I would have found in other media niches, working on such projects as the consultation service to grow struggling publications, peer-to-peer mentoring program, the Catholic Press Leadership Institute I founded and the Fair Publishing Practices Code. Another recurring experiential loop: Connection becomes critical in self-development, found in accepting opportunities to serve group development.

And as I conclude this phase of my life, what am left to take with me to the next? Some of that connective tissue of my life experiential loops include:

• The importance of speaking truth to power, whether societal or ecclesiastical, extends beyond any job. God gave us the gifts of mind, heart and voice, which, if not on full display in conflict or differing viewpoints, is to shun the divine present of presence.
• Purpose seems to grow more, not less, with age. What a sacred gift, what a divine inspiration is found in passion to reach out beyond oneself.

I’ll be found then in retirement, though not to be retiring, on some of those passions: daily creative writing in my just-refurbished studio at the edge of our Vermont property, working to promote the arts, practicing my double bass, studying and cooking Italian, cycling or running daily, traveling and, hopefully, forever connecting, forever communicating, growing, being challenged and challenging.

Lombard, an award-winning editor and journalist, received the St. Francis de Sales Award in 2019. This article first appeared in the September 2025 edition of The Catholic Journalist.