Good news. (Don Wycliff in person).

ON WYCLIFF HAS HAD INK IN HIS BLOOD EVER since his first job delivering newspapers with his brother. These days he's more likely to be delivering opinions, as the Chicago Tribune's public editor and a member of the paper's editorial board. After years of covering the news, he is now paid to ponder the events of the day and to try to persuade readers to see the issues as he does.

But on Sundays, he takes a break from CNN and the Sunday papers for something more important. After picking up a couple of elderly ladies who need a ride and greeting the Haitian couple who always sit in the pew next to him, Wycliff settles in for worship at St. Mary's Church, an integrated parish in the suburb of Evanston.

"This is a refuge," he says of his parish. "It's a place where I get my gas tank filled up to get through the next week. It's a family." As he approaches his mid-50s, Wycliff admits, "These are the things that really matter to me now."

It wasn't always so.

Back in the late '60s, a bearded and Afro'd Wycliff decided religion was no longer relevant. "Frankly, the church didn't seem to be speaking to what black concerns were at that time," he remembers.

While some might attribute this temporary loss of faith to his choice of a profession characterized by cynicism, Wycliff insists the newsroom actually drove him back to church. "For the first time in my life I was in a world that wasn't mainly Catholic," he says. "That's when I realized I needed to regularly be with and talk to people who thought the way I did."

The church even influenced Wycliffs choice of journalism as his life's work. He was working on a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago in 1969 when the civil rights struggle literally erupted outside his door. The shooting of two Black Panther leaders was a wake-up call for the young graduate student. "I felt like a wallflower at the orgy, a bystander at the parade," he recalls.

After devouring news reports about the incident, Wycliff began to see journalism as a career--indeed a vocation--that could make a difference. "There was an issue of justice at stake," he says. "That's what the whole teaching of the gospels and the church is all about."

Wycliff learned that first from his devout parents, then later from the nuns at Holy Family School in Ashland, Ohio, where the Wycliff children were the first black students. Although he often felt like an outsider, Wycliff remembers the white parishioners as accepting and welcoming, for which he credits the pastor. Even at the University of Notre Dame, where Wycliff was one of only a few dozen black students, he can't recall any overt examples of racism.

"One of the gifts my parents gave me was that they taught me not to dwell on that sort of thing, to expect the best from people and you'll get the best," he says.

It seems to be working. "Sometimes I simply can't believe my life. It's a miracle," he says. "So I go through life with this sense of obligation to do what I can to make things better where they're bad, to point out injustice, to lobby on behalf of those who need it."

This concern for others can be traced to his Catholic upbringing. "Catholicism fosters a certain way of looking at the world," he says. "It colors everything I do, the way I think, the way I look at issues."

Wycliff writes frequently about racial issues and often is a lone voice in the newsroom in support of school vouchers because "Catholic schools are the only salvation for a lot of black kids."

Recently one of his duties at the Tribune has been to talk to irate readers upset with coverage of the priest pedophilia crisis. They find little sympathy with this editor. "We're not guiltless in the news media, by any means," he says. "But this one the official church has brought on itself. It really grieves me."

But Wycliff has not lost his faith. "To me, the church is the parish," he says. "You can build communities that really matter in the daily lives of people in those local churches. That's where God's work becomes our own."

DON WYCLIFF

CHICAGO TRIBUNE PUBLIC EDITOR

PARISH: St. Mary's in Evanston, Illinois.

FAVORITE BOOK: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (I reread it every year).

I'D LOVE TO MEET: Pope John Paul II.

WHERE I GET MOST OF MY NEWS: The four or five newspapers I read daily.

SONG THAT MOST INSPIRES ME: "A Change Is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM THE BLACK CHURCH: There is more rejoicing over one lost sheep that's found than over 99 who have never gone astray.

SOMETHING MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME: Only my confessor knows for sure.

By HEIDI SCHLUMPF, an associate editor at U.S. CATHOLIC.