Canadian Catholic News

[Toronto – CCN] – During his time as a foreign correspondent and senior reporter with the CBC in the 1980s to early 2000s, Brian Stewart kept bumping into religion.

Whether that was interviewing world leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa, reporting from El Salvador, or the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, religion was not far away.

“I was surprised to see how relevant religion was for my reporting,” he said, noting that, like many other journalists at that time, he believed religion was an outmoded and spent force.

“I came to see that religion was part of many major stories, although it took a lot to convince my editors that was true,” he said.

Stewart will be speaking about his life as a foreign journalist, how religion was often part of the story, and about the role religion plays in world events today at a public presentation sponsored by Canadian Catholic News and the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute at Father Madden Hall, University of St. Michael’s College, Aug. 12, at 6:30 p.m.

He will be in conversation with John Longhurst, faith page columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press and former religion reporter at that publication.

The free public presentation is part of God in the City, a summer seminar organized by CCN to provide training to aspiring Catholic journalists.

Of his time covering the Ethiopia famine — he was the first North American journalist to break that story, which led to the iconic Live Aid concert in 1985 — Stewart said it was an example of “organized Christianity in action . . . I never reached a war zone, or famine or crisis anywhere where some church organization was not there long before me.”

Those Christian aid workers were “sturdy, remarkable souls who were usually too kind to ask ‘what took you so long,’” he added.

While his reporting helped Canadians know and understand what was happening in hot spots around the world, it took a toll on him personally.

“I witnessed horrible things,” he said, adding he was surprised not to have experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder like many other foreign correspondents.

What he did suffer was something diagnosed as “moral injury,” which he described as “a wound on the soul, an affront to your moral compass based on your own behaviour and the things you have failed to do.”

Due to that injury, Stewart experienced a breakdown in the 1990s. Through professional care, he has recovered. But, he said, “there is no escaping the heavy spiritual lifting from it . . . I did some good, no question. But I didn’t do as much as I could have done, or as much as those incredibly magnificent aid workers.”

One place Stewart sought solace during the hard times as a foreign correspondent was in religion. This included regularly visiting a church in London while stationed there with the CBC.

“I would sit there and listen to the choir practice, or sit in silence. It was a tremendous comfort,” he said, adding he also read the free Bibles in hotel rooms. “I needed the guidance that religion provides.”

Today, interest in organized religion is waning in Canada and other western countries. But Stewart, who identifies as agnostic, still believes the media should be paying attention to it.

“There is a clear spiritual hunger everywhere,” he said. “Religion needs to have more light cast on it by the media. Reporters need to rediscover its importance around the world. Not to cover it is absurd.”

Stewart is author of On the Ground: My life as a Foreign Correspondent.

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