Canadian born Conrad Black was at one time the third largest newspaper magnate in the world, publishing The Daily Telegraph in London, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, Canada's National Post and hundreds of community newspapers in the U.S. through his interest in Hollinger International.
In June of 2007 he was convicted of fraud based on charges of diverting funds for personal benefit from Hollinger when the company sold certain publishing assets. His conviction is currently on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now he writes from prison in Florida on How I woke up from spiritual slumber and inched at a snail's pace to Rome.
Former Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black was an agnostic until his 20s, but, after trips to Rome, Lourdes and Fatima, found he could not shut out a sense of God.
My religious upbringing was casually Protestant, a respect for Christian tradition and high religious tolerance, but no encouragement to be a practising or seriously believing Christian.
I am attracted to conversion stories and Black's is quite interesting, particularly as he sets the context with his observations on Quebec as it changed from a religious culture.
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When I moved to Quebec in 1966 I was astounded by the omnipresence there of Roman Catholicism....
My research revealed that only the Church had sustained the French language in Quebec, the demographic survival of French Canadians, and the prevalence of literacy, provision of health care, and even most capital formation (as in the caisses populaires and credit unions attached to almost every parish), for nearly two centuries after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759....I saw the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, and later in most other places, as fiercely dedicated to the kingdom of God, resistant to opportunistic fads, concerned to modernise without eroding faith, armed with intellectual arguments quite equal, at the least, to those of their secular opponents or rivals, and almost always a champion of human rights when it wasn't in common cause with less altruistic elements against the anti-Christ of Communism.
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The almost exclusive Church provision of education and health care to French Quebec was overly prolonged and averse to competition, but the resulting savings in salary costs of teachers and nurses enabled the government of Quebec to devote most of its budget to what is now called infrastructure. Duplessis built thouands of schools, the new campuses of Laval and Montreal Universities, the University of Sherbrooke, hundreds of hospitals and clinics, thousands of miles of roads, the first Canadian autoroutes, and he brought electricity to 97 per cent of rural Quebec. Quebec was even a pioneer in disability pensions and day care.
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to a secular one
Now the same people were performing the same educational and paramedical tasks in the same buildings for the same population at 10 times the cost to the Quebec taxpayers, and were frequently on strike, as taxes and debt soared, the birth- rate collapsed, the separatists advanced, and the cultural rights of the non-French were re-defined as "revocable privileges".
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Now the impecunious parishes, scanty congregations and the apparent anachronism of the contemporary Church seemed to produce a sharp division between those clergy buoyed by the challenge, feeling themselves like the monks of the Dark Ages squatting in forests and on mountain tops, agents of spiritual and cultural preservation, and those who were just the detritus of the old Church, parched, wizened, and passing slowly on. In Quebec as in France, those who persist in the practice of the faith are not the oldest, poorest, most desperate, though those are there, but a very random group, including elegant young women, evidently successful men, bright students, unselfconscious, curious, and assured. The spiritual edifice of the Church functions obliviously to market share, and there is a common strain of intelligent and hopeful faith, regardless of fashion, age, or economics