UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
November 8, 2017
By Peter Jesserer Smith
When Soviet tanks rumbled into Lithuania in 1991, a pair of young journalists crossed the border — for the second time — to chronicle the death throes of the Soviet Union for the National Catholic Register.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once reputedly scoffed, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” when told Pope Pius XI wanted to see signs of encouragement for religion and Catholics in Russia. More than 50 years later, Joop Koopman and Jonathan Luxmoore were on assignment for the Register, crisscrossing in a secondhand Polonez, a Polish car with a cast-iron bumper that Luxmoore bought from a Belgian ambassador, sending back their firsthand accounts of watching the empire Stalin built crumble before St. John Paul II’s religious revolution.
“We were at the cutting-edge of political reform and change,” recalled Koopman, who went on to serve as the newspaper’s editor during the 1990s.
These and other stories of the past 90 years rest in the Register’s archives. But the fading pages of print also tell the story of a long line of men and women who served as custodians of a great mission to form, inform and challenge generations of Catholic readers to engage the world through the global lens of the Catholic faith.
From its very beginnings Nov. 8, 1927, up to its present day as a news service of the EWTN Global Catholic Network, the Register has left its mark on both its readers and the journalists who aspired to bring the best professional writing to its pages.
Denver Origins
The National Catholic Register was born out of the Denver Catholic Register, which began as an effort in 1905 to set the record straight for Colorado’s Catholics and had been overseen by Msgr. Matthew Smith since 1913. Msgr. Smith took over leadership of the Denver newspaper as a lay journalist, bringing to the paper professional journalistic standards. He had been a priest only four years when he launched the national edition of the Register in 1927.
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