The Catholic Herald is a London-based Roman Catholic quarterly magazine, founded in 1888 and a sister organisation to the non-profit Catholic Herald Institute, based in New York. After 126 years as a weekly newspaper, it became a weekly magazine in 2014, changed to a monthly magazine in 2020 and a quarterly magazine in 2026. In early 2023, a 50.1% controlling stake was purchased by New York based alternative asset firm GEM LLC. It reports 565,000 online readers a month, along with 25,000 weekly registered newsletter subscribers and a print readership distributed in the US and UK, Roman Catholic parishes, wholesale outlets, the Vatican, Cardinals, Catholic influencers, and postal/digital subscribers.
With historical writers including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and GK Chesterton making the Herald their spiritual home, it publishes leading Catholic writers, international news and comment from around the world, from George Weigel to Piers Paul Read. It describes itself as "a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values". In 2022, the Catholic Herald was nominated for Consumer Magazine of the Year at the PPA Independent Publisher Awards and won the PPA award for 'Writer of the Year', the first time the magazine had won a PPA Award. The Guardian have described it as having a "distinguished pedigree" and being "the nearest Roman Catholics in this country have to a proper weekly newspaper".
History The Catholic Herald was established as a weekly newspaper in 1888. It was first owned and edited by Irish Derry-born Charles Diamond, a journalist and newspaper entrepreneur, until his death in 1934. In 1920, Diamond edited the Herald from jail after writing an editorial leader article that supported Irish nationalism and allegedly encouraged assassination in Ireland.
After his death the paper was bought by Ernest Vernor Miles, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism and head of the New Catholic Herald Ltd. Miles appointed Count Michael de la Bédoyère as editor, a post he held until 1962. From 1888 to 1962, the Herald only had two editors and was based for many years in a large building on the corner of Whitefriars Street and Fleet Street opposite The Daily Telegraph building and close to its rival newspaper, The Universe. During his time as editor, he transformed it into a much respected intellectual newspaper, which often brought it into conflict with the more conservative members of the Roman Catholic Church. Circulation increased to over 100,000.
During the late 1930s, owner Vernor Miles published a number of articles, like Viscount Rothermere in the Daily Mail, which displayed some moral ambivalence towards the rise of fascism in Europe. The Herald, however, condemned Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts' street fights, anti-Semitism and worship of State power over God.
De la Bédoyère's news editor was writer Douglas Hyde, also a convert who arrived from the Communist Daily Worker.Kevin Morgan. "Obituary: Douglas Hyde", The Independent (London), 29 September 1996 After resigning from the party in 1948, he converted to Catholicism. After his conversion, he gained an international reputation in the late 1940s and 1950s as a critic of communism.
De la Bédoyère almost went to prison for criticising what he saw as Churchill's appeasement of the "godless" Soviet Union. It was a dangerous moment for the Herald when Churchill turned his ire on the magazine. The paper's editorial on the Yalta Conference, in which De la Bédoyère strongly criticised Churchill and Roosevelt stance towards Stalin, lead to Churchill being reassured by his right hand man, Sir Desmond Morton, that De la Bédoyère was not a British traitor.
De La Bedoyere was followed as editor by Desmond Fisher. As editor of the Herald from 1962 to 1966 he covered the Second Vatican Council, after which he worked for RTÉ. He was in Rome in 1962 before the council was set up and covered the 1963 and 1964 sessions. Fisher's Vatican II coverage caused some ire in the Catholic hierarchy, not least Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster, England. Indeed, the Catholic Heralds owners, likely influenced by Heenan, recalled Fisher to London.
The Heralds independence was of great importance to Fisher. In 1962, in his first Catholic Herald editorial, Fisher wrote that a lay-owned and independent Catholic paper had "a freedom that is journalistically necessary if it is to carry out what it conceives to be its function and which relieves the hierarchy and the clergy generally of any responsibility for opinions expressed in its columns."
In the 1980s, when Peter Stanford became the editor, the publication openly supported left-wing politics in South America. Stephen Bates of The Guardian says that in the later 1990s and early 2000s under William Oddie, the publication moved to the right and published criticism of liberal bishops and Jesuits. Bates went on to say that editor Luke Coppen, installed in 2004, takes a more embracing stance towards Catholics of all political hues. During his tenure, Oddie lost a libel suit against Bates.
Many bishops in England, Ireland and Scotland, including Dublin's Archbishop John McQuaid, disagreed with the Heralds view of Vatican II events. McQuaid called it "very objectionable." Yet when Fisher resigned, many other bishop-attendees to Vatican II wrote in to say they agreed with the Herald.
Fisher had grown up in Derry in the 1920s, during The Troubles that led to partition in 1922. After graduating from University College Dublin, where he was a classicist, he moved to London in 1952 to become London editor of The Irish Press. Fisher's reporting of the Second Vatican Council was said to be so incisive that Cardinal Franz König of Vienna said he learned more from reading Mr Fisher's reports than from being there.
Desmond Albrow followed Fisher as editor during the later sessions of Vatican II. Writing in an editorial in 1968, entitled 'Publish and be Banned' (30 August 1968), following the publication of the Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, Albrow voiced the views of many Catholics in Britain, and elsewhere, after the encyclical letter condemned the use of artificial contraception – a papal missive which a Herald editorial stated was "a Roman time-bomb: a theological and pastoral blockbuster".
Albrow was also the editor responsible for bringing the paper's celebrated 1960s cartoonist John Ryan into the Herald which began 'what was to become an entertaining visual chronicle of the post Vatican II Catholic church'. Ryan had attended Ampleforth and was able to speak to ordinary Catholics as he had been educated in the liturgical practice of the pre-Vatican II church in which his audience had also been raised. Ryan's cartoons gently mocked the clergy and curia of Rome and his work became an integral part of the Heralds weekly news coverage of church affairs as Ryan 'lived and breathed his subject'.
From the 1970s to the 1980s, the Heralds commercial survival was partly due to the tight budgeting of the Heralds pipe smoking managing director, Austrian Otto Herschan. He was first appointed as managing director in 1961 by Vernor Miles.
Herschan's sense of economy ensured that editorial costs were controlled through forensic accounting and a distaste for any unnecessary spending, down to questioning the cost of interval ice-creams for the theatre critic. His memoir, Holy Smoke?, revealed that his speciality as managing director was to invite Catholic grandees to write for negligible sums. Writers such as Delia Smith would be paid by being taken to lunch at the RAC Club.
Albrow was followed by aristocratic journalist Gerard Noel, author of 20 books, who had met with Pope Pius XII at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo in 1947. He had two stints as editor, from 1971 to 1974, and then 1982 to 1983. Stuart Reid, later deputy editor of The Spectator, edited the paper briefly in 1975, to be succeeded by Richard Dowden.
Dowden was followed by Terence Sheehy (1983–1988). Educated by Jesuits in London and Dublin, Sheehy was appointed as a 'caretaker' editor in 1983 after working for The Irish Catholic in Dublin from 1942 to 1946. Sheehy did not step into the doctrinal and liturgical wars that were dividing the church in the 1980s as he set out a populist agenda for the paper to help its commercial interests. Employing young journalists straight from university, he steered a middle course at a time when Catholicism was starting to divide into factions as Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, clashed with more progressive elements of the church. For a traditionalist, Terry surprised readers by not censoring the voices of divorced, gay and progressive Catholics to be aired.
He reported the various scandals that emanated from the Vatican and vigorously resisted censorship from cardinals, bishops and papal nuncios for a more 'deferential' line Terry always insisted that the Herald needed to remain a strong independent voice in the church. An example was his campaign to encourage the Vatican to give their blessing to the Marian shrine at Medjugorje, in former Yugoslavia. Although when the Bishop of Mostar was opposed to the reports of the six visionaries, Terry published articles and reports from the pilgrims who had their own experiences there. In the end, the Herald influenced the Vatican to revisit their views in a more favourable way on the visions.
In 1988, when Peter Stanford became the editor, the publication openly supported left-wing politics in South America. He was editor from 1988 to 1992 and resigned, to concentrate on writing books.
Cristina Odone edited The Catholic Herald from 1992 to 1995. Odone was an Italian-American journalist, educated at Marymount School and Oxford University. She clashed with Otto Herschan, by then also chairman and Herald shareholder, who was largely liberal in his church politics. Herschan first fell out with columnist Alice Thomas Ellis, an orthodox Catholic of traditional persuasion, after she wrote a piece condemning the late Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Rev Derek Worlock. The saga helped to end the editorship of Odone, whose resignation letter was printed on the front page of the Catholic Herald.
Odone was followed in the editor's chair in October 1996 by Deborah Jones, a former teacher, who once considered becoming a nun. Although Jones did not apply for the editor's position, chairman Otto Herschan sought her appointment as the board wanted to ensure that the newspaper's coverage was uncontroversial. Jones was a liberal Catholic, described as an 'ardent supporter of the modern church reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s'.
She lasted two years before being replaced by William Oddie. Stephen Bates of The Guardian says that in the later 1990s and early 2000s under editor Oddie, the Herald moved in a different direction to the right and published criticism of liberal bishops and Jesuits. Oddie was appointed as editor in 1998 at a time when Conrad Black, also owner of The Daily Telegraph and Jerusalem Post, owned a 47% stake in the Herald whilst a similar stake was held by hotelier Sir Rocco Forte and the remaining 5% by chairman Peter Sheppard.
In 1996 Oddie had already caused controversy when he published an article, under Odone's editorship, asking: "Can Catholic loyalty to the Crown be sustained in present conditions?" He argued that the Queen had "given royal sanction to the secularisation of Christian marriage" by encouraging the Prince of Wales to divorce; also in removing the Princess of Wales's HRH designation, the Queen had "devalued motherhood". At the time of his appointment, The Tablet, speaking for the liberal Catholic establishment, published an open letter on Oddie's appointment, chiding him for "failure to understand the Catholic mind".