Not my plan for retirement ...

The last thing I thought I’d do in retirement was write about a Catholic parish. Sure, I was Religion Editor for Reuters for 14 years. But when I left  the agency in 2017 I wanted to do different things. Take leisurely trips, improve my cooking, scratch that photography itch that 40 years of text reporting could not kill. But parish history? No thanks. Too boring.

The English-speaking church in Paris had other ideas. The pastor, Fr. Aidan Troy, asked me to write a pamphlet about St. Joseph’s for its 150th anniversary in 2019. To start me off, he gave me an account from the parish diary about the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune from 1870-1871. “There’s plenty more upstairs in the archives,” he said.

That started a fascinating odyssey through the archives and then visits to national libraries and national and archdiocesan archives in six different countries.

There were accounts of glittering Belle Époque weddings, attempts to shut the church down, priests ranging from British traditionalists to Irish rebels, tough times during the two world wars, and a slow postwar climb to the prosperous multicultural parish we see today. Every time I went looking for something, I found something else interesting as well.

The planned pamphlet became the full book Faith, Hope and Paris, with a turbulent Paris setting the tone for the way the parish responded. It’s my second book after Unchained Eagle in 2000 about German reunification and its aftermath (based mostly on my reporting as chief correspondent in Bonn).

Unlike a noisy old Reuters newsroom, the only sound in those archives was of the rustling of dusty papers. But surprises loomed everywhere. And there was plenty of time to chase leads, go down rabbit holes and enjoy the reading even if it didn’t contribute anything to my work. 

Even the most remote link to St. Joseph’s — think of people like Claude Monet, Queen Victoria, Patrick Pearse or Ernest Hemingway, to name but a few -- was included.

In recent months, I’ve discovered even more about the most interesting figure in the book. So much so that I’ve started another book just about this man, who was a soldier, POW, priest and then spy while posted at St. Joseph’s during the 1940-1944 German occupation of France. A return to the archives has already started. 

My book is so full of stories that it’s hard to summarize, as I found when presenting it at St. Joseph’s last week. If you want to read more, Faith, Hope and Paris is available on Amazon websites in print-on-demand or Kindle version.

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