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Our First 100 Years
April, 2008, will be a month that will be recorded in glory in the annals of Tablet history. Not only did The Tablet turn 100 years old this month, but it is also the time when our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI will visit the United States, arriving in and departing New York from our own Diocese of Brooklyn.
Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio will host the greeting and farewell ceremonies at Kennedy Airport in what will certainly become cherished memories in the history of the diocese.
While The Tablet staff has been busy planning its own centennial celebrations, it also has been hard at work preparing for the papal visit. Assignments have had to be planned; credentials requested; and logistical meetings convened.
Our Centennial Dinner will be held at the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel near the Brooklyn Bridge. Cardinal John Foley, former head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications at the Vatican is flying in from Rome to address the gathering, which should prove to be another night to remember. Just like the dinner The Tablet hosted five years ago for the 125th anniversary of the establishment of the Brooklyn Diocese, this event is sure to be the diocesan social event of the year.
What a great time to be part of the diocesan communications apostolate!
Achieving 100 years in the business of newspaper publishing is no easy task. It has taken a lot of hard work, creativity, and the support of many church leaders, priests, our readers and advertisers to bring us to this day.
Right from its fragile financial beginnings, The Tablet has received generous backing from its bishop-publishers, enabling it to rise to national prominence in the middle of the 20th century when so much of this country identified itself as at least cultural Catholics.
The trend in the post-Vatican II Church has been to create more of a localized newspaper to better serve the local Church community, especially in helping it to understand and digest the upheaval and changes of the Second Vatican Council. But even to this day, The Tablet maintains a national audience, boasting of circulation in 45 states in the United States. That’s a claim no other diocesan newspaper can match.
In more recent times, we have been fortunate to have the creative support of Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio who has begun to wed The Tablet’s circulation plans to the mailing lists of the Annual Catholic Appeal. The bishop rightfully feels that anyone who financially supports the Diocese should be kept abreast of how that money is being used. What better way of achieving that goal than putting the Catholic newspaper right in the homes of those donors!
We owe a debt of gratitude to the priests of this diocese who have long supported us with their words of encouragement, both privately and from the pulpit. No newspaper can make it in this marketplace without a marketing plan. Part of The Tablet’s image has always been honed by the constant reminders from pastors and priests to read The Tablet. We cannot afford multi-million dollar public relations campaigns, so we rely on the good will of the built-in support system of our parishes.
We also owe deep gratitude to all our readers who have responded to the news and opinions on these pages to create a lively and exciting Readers’ Forum space. While a newspaper strives to tell the news, it also intends to create debate. Over the years, our pages have been peppered with words of passion as parishioners communicate their feelings to the marketplace of ideas.
The Tablet is an important vehicle of communication and thus evangelization for the members of the local Church in Brooklyn and Queens. We bring readers the news, commentary, instruction, inspiration and hopefully some entertainment week in and week out. Our surveys indicate that the formula is working. Tablet readers tend to be the more involved and more generous parishioners. Certainly, they are the best informed.
Our goal is to work with the various diocesan agencies in helping them communicate the good works they are promoting and in this way to serve the people in the pews of our churches.
We have tried to keep up with the advances in technology so that our product will be as exciting as the secular newspapers that call to you from the daily news stands. We are moving in new directions as we build on our website, enabling an expanded news hole and access to instantaneous news breaks.
A word of thanks to all those who have labored over the years in the Catholic Press. Tablet workers are smart, generous and willing to go the extra mile to perform their tasks. Every one of them can command a greater salary in another job but nary is there a complaint because of the sense of satisfaction and achievement which working in the church communications field can bring. In the updated book of Tablet history, which will be handed out at the Centennial Dinner, we list the names of all our employees from these 100 years. We may have missed a couple but we have tried to make it as complete as we could. To each and every person on that list, we offer a heartfelt thank you for your time and energy. You have been vital to helping make us what we are today.
During this exciting time in Church history in our diocese, we are cognizant of the responsibility we bear. To tell the truth in charity is no easy task. Sometimes people don’t want to hear the message of the Church. Sometimes the Church must move against the accepted practices of society. The Tablet is here to help make this as clear as it can be. We are proud that we have been doing that for 100 years and we pledge a renewed sense of commitment to that vocation as we move into our second century of labor for the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
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