gardens of the mind gardens of the mind - St. Michael's College ...

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religious groups have used the media, both
print and broadcast. The subject is of particular
interest to historians of the College—it
was a native of Hamilton, Ontario, and a St.
Michael’s College graduate, Father Charles
Coughlin, who became famous as the “radio
priest” during the Great Depression, reaching
wide audiences with his political message
and forceful delivery. (Unfortunately,
his message was heavily tainted with anti-
Semitism, unsolicited political diatribes, and
denunciations of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
much to the chagrin of the American bishops
and the Vatican.) Protestant televangelists
may dominate the religious airwaves
now, but they learned their lessons in the
use of broadcast media from such Catholic
virtuosos as Father Coughlin and Bishop
14 Spring 2009 St. Michael’s
Fulton J. Sheen, a star of early television and
winner of an Emmy Award in 1952. “Sheen
was not only a very smart individual and a
great communicator, but he had that sense
of the dramatic,” McGowan says. “He knew
how to use the new medium very effectively,
by using a very simple set and by playing to
the camera.”
Listening to Portebois and McGowan
discuss the fascinating historical details of
their subject—whether those details have to
do with 19 th -century French periodicals or
1950s American network television—an
outsider can well understand why the BMS
program is popular with students. The problem,
aggravated by the current economic climate,
is to sustain this interest with adequate
funds for the program. “It’s been a really
interesting ride, and our problem now is
that we just don’t have the resources to sustain
the growth,” McGowan comments.
“The number of students from other colleges
is phenomenal—so we really are serving
the rest of the university and we’re doing
it on a shoestring budget.”
For the present, McGowan helps to
sustain the program by engaging in what
he calls “old fashioned horse trading” with
sympathetic university departments,
notably French and Italian. Any further
growth in the program, under these circumstances,
will come slowly—but it is
unthinkable that a program of such vitality,
and with such connections to the
College’s intellectual traditions, will wither
from lack of funds.✦