Veteran CBC journalist extols ‘profound impact’ on poverty

CBC journalist Brian Stewart (left), with Canadian Church Press president David Harris. Photo: Canadian Catholic News

THE SUCCESS of churches and faith-based organizations in providing disaster relief and fighting world poverty is one of “the greatest overlooked stories of our time,” said veteran CBC television journalist Brian Stewart.

Speaking to the Canadian Church Press (CCP) and Association of Roman Catholic Communicators of Canada (ARCCC) conference in Toronto May 3, Stewart praised the “courageous” work of churches and faith-based NGOs, calling them “uniquely efficient engines of human development.”

These organizations have had a “profound impact” on human rights, peace, health care, clean water and education around the globe said Stewart, who has covered more than nine wars in his 43-year career. Intractable world poverty is the “greatest problem of our time with the exception of global warming,” he said, yet the successes churches and NGOs have had are “almost always overlooked by the mainstream media.”

This success story began during the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. One million people died in “the worst hell on earth,” Stewart said. However, in Ethiopia and elsewhere, aid and development organizations stayed behind long after the cameras and the reporters left. In Africa alone, churches and NGOs have left a legacy that includes 40 million more children in school, and tens of thousands who “made it from famine camps to college.”

Concentration on Africa’s failures breeds defeatism and ignores the marked improvement in the lives of millions through the efforts of small-scale, often faith-based projects, he said.

The story of those successes parallels Stewart’s personal transformation – which led to his becoming a faithful Presbyterian. The role of faith in those successes is not taken seriously enough, even provoking “titters” among mainstream journalists, he said.

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In the 1960s, Stewart’s generation declared organized religion was on its death bed. They underestimated the strength of spiritual hunger and the “human drive to serve and to help others.”

Since then, he has witnessed the “galvanic force of faith in action,” a faith he described as “hard, institutionalized, organized and clear-sighted.”

Since the Cold War, the provision of international aid has shifted from “big aid battalions” and “five year plans” he said, to smaller, independent NGOs which “partner” with local people and have “refused to give up their sense of mission,” he said.

He said he regretted the fact that the term “muscular Christianity” has passed out of fashion, because that is what he has observed on the front lines of famine, war and catastrophe, where he and his crew were almost always greeted by Christian workers who had arrived first.

“A lot of good things start up quietly in humble church halls,” he said, pointing to the 1787 meeting of 12 evangelicals in a church basement that launched the movement to abolish slavery.

He noted the rise of the Solidarity trade union in Poland. With the support of the Catholic Church, Solidarity helped bring down the Iron Curtain.

Stewart recalled meeting Solidarity leader Lech Walesa in a stairwell as he was on his way to mass. It was shortly after he had been released from prison in the early 1980s and many feared Walesa would be assassinated. Walesa was asked whether he was afraid.

“No, I am afraid of no-one or nothing. Only God,” Walesa said.

“It was a transcendent moment,” Stewart said, revealing that no force or empire could ever extinguish the power of faith. – Canadian Catholic News

June 2007