ONE JOURNALIST'S BEGINNINGS : Faith, family & race.

I can as easily imagine myself not Catholic as I can imagine myself not black. Which is to say that I cannot imagine it at all.

I can't imagine not getting up on Sunday morning, going to my parish church, and sharing with my friends and neighbors there in the celebration of the Eucharist.

I can't imagine not having that mystical sense of connectedness with other Catholics all over the globe through the prayers and rituals and tradition and teaching of the church.

I can't imagine not thinking of life in terms of sin and grace and sacrifice and the cross and the resurrection.

I can't imagine not thinking of the pope as the head of my church, the vicar of Christ, the principal teacher and shepherd of the faithful.

Along with my race, my religion has always been a pillar of my identity in this life, in this society. These two facets of my identity account for the way I think about, feel about, and react to almost everything that I experience and observe.

Being Catholic and being black also account for my choice of journalism as a profession, because that dual identity has shaped the way I respond to injustice and it demands that I be involved in social action to right wrongs and redress inequities. Let me try to explain.

There is a room in my parents' house in Texas that several years ago I humorously took to calling "the colored museum." It is a veritable Wycliff family gallery. Photos cover almost every inch of wall space. The oldest picture, taken not many years after the Civil War, is of a woman ancestor three generations before my parents. The newest picture also is of a female, a member of the third generation after my parents.

It says something important about our family that, right along with the graduation photos and baby pictures and wedding and prom poses, my parents have hung the First Communion class pictures of eight of their nine children, me and my seven younger siblings. The only one missing is my older brother Francois's, and that's because, as best I can determine, it never existed. No picture was taken of him and his small class of First Communicants at Saint Joseph the Worker Church in Dayton, Texas.

The presence of those photos bespeaks the importance to my parents of their Catholic faith, and of our education and upbringing in it. But one particular aspect of those pictures makes that point with special force.

Take my picture, for example. It was shot on a sunny spring day in 1955, on the front steps of Holy Family Church in Ashland, Kentucky. There must have been at least fifty children in the class, girls and boys. But scan the faces and you'll see only one dark face among them: mine. The only other dark face in the photo is that of Francois, who, dressed in the cassock and surplice of an acolyte, stands to one side of the pastor, Monsignor Declan Carroll.

The other pictures show pretty much the same racial pattern, although there is at least a sprinkling of other African Americans in the classes of the youngest siblings. But when we washed up in Ashland, on the banks of the Ohio River east of Cincinnati, in autumn 1954, the Wycliffs were the only black family in the parish and we children were the only black kids in the school.

You'd have had a hard time convincing me of it at first, but we were blessed to be there. Holy Family, I later realized, was for us an ark, a refuge. My father, now eighty-three, related to me a few years ago how we came to be on that ark. In one respect the story was very common to black people of that time; in another respect it was utterly uncommon.

Mother and Daddy both were born and raised in Dayton, a farming community in East Texas, almost exactly halfway between Houston and Beaumont on U.S. Highway 90. Daddy was an only child; Mother was the second oldest of ten. Daddy's mother, my grandmother, was a Baptist; his father, my grandfather, was a Catholic. Daddy was raised "basically Baptist" and converted to Catholicism after he and Mother were married. Mother's parents both were Catholics, with roots in those Creole communities of southern Louisiana.

(It has always baffled me to hear and see black Catholics referred to as unusual, because in my earliest years I was surrounded by black Catholics in Dayton and the other nearby communities. One of mother's aunts was a nun in the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black order in New Orleans. We were always ambivalent when Sister Ambrose came for one of her extended visits. On one hand, it meant that Mother would kill the fatted calf and we would eat exceptionally well. On the other, it meant our already overcrowded house would be even more crowded, as we made room for Sister Ambrose and whichever other nun accompanied her.)

My parents, Wilbert and Emily, were married on June 2, 1942 in Bisbee, Arizona, where Daddy, an Army lieutenant, was stationed at the time. Francois was born ten months later in March 1943. Daddy shipped out for Italy with the all-black 92nd Division not long afterwards.

After the war Daddy came home and, using his GI benefit, went part time to the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University) in Houston while working at various jobs to support his family. He earned his degree in industrial education in 1950. For his trouble he got a series of jobs that gave him inadequate pay and even less dignity. It would never be otherwise in the segregated South, he realized, and so he resolved to leave.

His ticket out was a civil service exam that brought an offer of a job as an instructor of industrial arts at the Federal Correctional Institution--a federal prison--in Ashland, Kentucky. He went there alone in June 1954, to see whether he and the job and the people in charge would all find one another agreeable. They did, and in August 1954 the family packed up and moved north to join him. By then, he and Mother had five children--Francois, Don, Karen, Christopher, Ida--and a sixth, Joy, on the way.

Ashland was not exactly the racial Promised Land. In some respects it was worse than Dayton. We could not, for example, go to the downtown movie theaters at all in Ashland; we at least had been able to sit in the balcony in Dayton.

In one crucial respect, however, Ashland was an improvement: It had an alternative to the segregated black public school in the form of Holy Family School. Or at least it was a theoretical alternative, because to that date, no black child had ever gone to the Catholic school.

Daddy recalled to me how he visited the black public school, Booker T. Washington, saw the decrepit building and equipment, and was heartsick at the thought of sending his children there. Part of the purpose of our moving had been to get away from that sort of Jim Crow education.

It was his immediate supervisor at work, Walter Graybeal--a lapsed Catholic from Lafayette, Indiana; a white man who, Daddy swears, sacrificed his career advancement by routinely going to bat on Daddy's behalf--who first broached the idea of Holy Family as an alternative.

"You're a Catholic, aren't you, Wyc?" Graybeal asked. "Well, why shouldn't your kids go to the Catholic school?"

Why not? Daddy went to the parish and talked with Father Carroll. As he related it to me, the priest told him, "Well, Mr. Wycliff, I don't see why your children can't go to school here. But let me ask the bishop."

A day or so later, Daddy got a call at work. It was Father Carroll. "The bishop said the Catholic schools are for all Catholic children," Father Carroll said. "Your children will be welcome here."

But that wasn't all of it. Father Carroll went the extra mile. On the Sunday before school was to start, he mounted the pulpit at Mass and laid down the law. One of Daddy's coworkers at the prison, Charles Eckenrode, who later became my confirmation sponsor, told him about it later. According to Eckenrode, Father Carroll announced that, starting that fall, there were going to be "colored children in our school. I want them treated properly. And anyone who doesn't will have to answer to me."

In those days, such words carried weight, coming from the Irish Catholic pastor of a largely Irish Catholic parish.

We were treated more than properly. I think it is fair to say that we were embraced as part of the Holy Family Parish family. To be sure, there was some nervousness at first. Mother tells of her anxiety in taking us to school on the first day--this was, after all, just months after the Supreme Court had overturned "separate but equal" public schooling in its now-celebrated Brown decision and the South, of which Kentucky was definitely a part, was full of talk of "massive resistance."

But there was no such resistance at Holy Family. There was, Mother says, a moment's hesitation and then another mother smiled, walked over to her and introduced herself and her daughter, who was the same age and had the same name as my sister Karen. The ice was broken. "You'll never know what a smile can mean to a person," Mother says as she recalls that day.

My subsequent Catholic education set me on a certain path. I did not plan to be a journalist. I was going to be a teacher--a professor of political science. I had graduated in June 1969 from the University of Notre Dame and been admitted to graduate study at the University of Chicago and given a fellowship to finance it.

It took me only a few weeks to realize that I did not want to be there. The University of Chicago was so thoroughly disconnected from the neighborhood, the city, and the social ferment surrounding it, it might as well have been on the moon. And the lively engagement with people and ideas and social movements that I had enjoyed at Notre Dame was absent in the intense, isolated atmosphere of graduate school at Chicago.

Still, while I didn't want to be doing what I was where I was, I had no idea what else I might want or be able to do--until December 4, 1969.

I awoke just before 7 a.m. in my studio apartment at 47th Street and Drexel Boulevard and flipped on the radio next to my bed. The all-news station crackled with word of a "shootout" overnight between units of the Chicago police assigned to the Cook County State's Attorney's office and members of the Black Panther Party on the city's West Side. Two Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Marc Clark, had been killed in the exchange.

I had no relationship to the Black Panthers. I knew of Fred Hampton only what I had seen of him during brief television interviews in the weeks preceding his death. But his words and his manner in those TV appearances suggested to me that this was no mere street thug. Indeed, I saw something of myself in Hampton: We were both young black men full of passion to see our people's lot improved. He was trying to do it one way; I was trying another. His got him killed--unjustly, I was convinced.

In the days and weeks following the "shootout," the Panther story consumed me. I would get up in the morning, buy every newspaper I could find and devour the latest news. I watched every TV show I could. And I listened to the radio constantly for news.

Gradually, the Chicago news media unearthed and exposed the truth. There had been no shootout; it had been a shoot-in by the police. Hampton and Clark had been deliberately targeted and slain.

As I watched the Chicago media do their splendid work, I began to feel myself attracted to that work as a socially relevant and useful way to spend a life. It was in every sense of the word a genuine calling, a discovery of a vocation.

It wasn't until the end of the spring quarter at the University of Chicago that I got up the gumption to strike out in a new direction. I packed up my books and my meager other belongings and headed home to Texas, to Houston. I hoped to get into TV news, but had no luck at the stations there.

I finally made my way to the spanking new offices of the Houston Post and filled out a job application, telling the lady in the personnel office that I wanted to be a reporter. I should have been surprised when they agreed to give me an interview--nobody walks into a big-city newspaper off the street and gets an interview, much less a job. But I suppose the educational pedigree helped. So also did the fact that, at that time, there was all of one black reporter in the Post newsroom and there was unease in the city over a Black Panther-type group that called itself Peoples Party II.

Anyway, I was interviewed and hired. The passion for justice and righteousness cultivated by my parents and teachers had led me to my profession.

I am blessed to have had a career of (so far) thirty years in the news industry. The last sixteen of those have been in the most rarified part of the industry: opinion writing. I wrote editorials for more than five years at the New York Times. I did the same for ten years at the Chicago Tribune, and for nine of those years I served as editorial page editor. For the last year, I have written a column of personal opinion, mainly about issues of media process and ethics, but often about other matters as well.

The stock in trade of opinion writers is ideas--ideas that challenge, provoke, clarify. The Catholic Church, with possibly the oldest and richest intellectual history in the Western world, ought to be a powerful contender for the time and attention of columnists and editorial writers at the nation's newspapers. In my experience, however, it is not. The reasons are complex.

There is an enormous amount of anti-Catholic sentiment in newsrooms, as there is in the society at large. Some of it is plain old lowbrow bigotry--I've heard Catholics referred to on more than one occasion as "mackerel-snappers." Some is more sophisticated, holding the pope responsible for famine and starvation because of the church's official opposition to artificial birth control and abortion. And some is visceral, stemming from the conviction that the church has over the centuries fostered or tolerated anti-Semitism and various other kinds of bigotry and intolerance and therefore is not to be trusted.

But in my opinion anti-Catholicism is a small obstacle compared with the ones that grow out of the Catholic Church itself.

At the most basic level, Catholicism suffers from the same disability in attempting to influence the news media as it suffers from in its pulpits on Sunday mornings: bad preaching. The church simply does not have many spokespersons--any spokesperson?--who can articulate its message in a way that makes it relevant and understandable to modern men and women of a secularist bent. Add to this the fact that the church's message is fundamentally a countercultural one, and thus a demanding one, and the problem of making the message understood is compounded.

Additionally--and this will not be much appreciated by Catholic liberals--the Catholic Church in America has become a Tower of Babel. Non-Catholics--and many Catholics as well--have become confused because there is no Catholic trademark to distinguish one so-called Catholic opinion from another. The brand name "Catholic" has been devalued in the marketplace through confusion. Catholics for a Free Choice is the same as any other Catholic group or opinion--or at least that's what that Catholic historian or theologian on CNN or ABC or in the New York Times said.

Frankly, attempting to bring what little I know of that distinguished Catholic intellectual tradition to bear on deliberations in the newsroom or the editorial boardroom usually gives me fits. Not only am I unable to speak authoritatively about Catholic positions, I am unable to feel authoritative.

So what do I do? I try to go with the basics. I read a lot of Scripture and try to apply what I read to the situations that present themselves in the news. Interestingly, the older I get the more I find myself attracted to the passages about forgiveness and reconciliation.

But always, always, the most powerful passage of all is Matthew 25: 31-46. Especially, verse 40: "I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me."

Don Wycliff, a regular Commonweal contributor, is public editor of the Chicago Tribune. This essay is adapted from a presentation made for a conference on Catholics in the media sponsored by Commonweal's Catholics in the Public Square project and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.