January 27, 2026
Veteran Catholic journalist Phil Lawlor recently retired as editor of Catholic World News at CatholicCulture.org. Phil was the first lay editor of The Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, but his negative experiences trying to do real journalism while being economically dependent on the church hierarchy led him to a career in independent Catholic journalism, serving as editor of Crisis and Catholic World Report, and eventually founding Catholic World News, the first English-language Catholic news service to operate on the Internet, in 1995. In the early 2000s, CWN merged with Catholic culture.
Phil joins us on the podcast to reflect on his career as a journalist, the problems of church-run news agencies, the value of financially independent Catholic journalism, the state of Catholic media, and his reporting over the years before the clergy abuse crisis became a household name in 2002.
link
Phil Lawler’s Substack https://pflawler.substack.com/
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Source: The Catholic Culture Podcast – catholicculturepodcast.libsyn.com
