The publisher of Our Sunday Visitor spreads the Good News in black and white.

"When I graduated and put the bell bottoms away, I was more ready than I realized to grow up and to revert back to the Faith." -Bob Lockwood, president of Our Sunday Visitor's publishing division

In 1971, fresh out of college, Robert Lockwood lucked out. He wanted to teach history, but needed money for grad school, so he took a job as assistant editor at Our Sunday Visitor.

"I was going to be a tennis pro during the day and a bartender at night," admits the affable Lockwood. "That’s what I had lined up. Then I was offered the OSV job."

He’s been there ever since, moving up the ranks to become publisher of the national Catholic weekly newspaper and president of OSV’s publishing division, overseeing numerous periodicals.

Fortunately, he landed at one of the few solid Catholic papers published during that era, a time, says Lockwood, of "flux, uncertainty and disillusionment" for many Catholics.

"It was hip to be unorthodox, hip to question authority, hip to advocate the loosest morality possible," he says. "All these things had their impact on the Church and the way people thought and acted . . . You had the impression everyone had just lost their way."

Even Lockwood, with his solid Catholic upbringing, quit practicing the Faith during his four years at Fairfield University.

"It wasn’t a conscious rejection of all things Catholic," he explains. "I just preferred to sleep in on Sunday . . . When I graduated and put the bell bottoms away, I was more ready than I realized to grow up and to revert back to the Faith."

At OSV, Lockwood became "immersed in Catholicism." And he had Father Al Nevins to straighten him up.

"Father Nevins’ line about me was, ‘I’m looking for somebody with half a brain, and you’ll do,’" Lockwood says with a chuckle. "He was instrumental in engaging me in debate and getting me back into practicing the Faith."

Lockwood’s knowledge of history also helped in his reversion to the Faith and has helped him avoid despair.

"If you think times are tough now," he says, "look at Catholics in late eighteenth century France . . . And the fourteenth century was a mess. There is no perfect period in the life of the Church. History teaches this. If we’re Christian, history tells us not to despair and reinforces the fact that the Holy Spirit lives in the Church, because if it survived all the mess humanity has tried to make of it, it cannot be a man-made institution."

Lockwood, who’s been married for 25 years, has seen his college-age twins grow up in a Catholicism reinvigorated by Pope John Paul II.

"I mean no disrespect to Pope Paul VI," Lockwood says. "It’s just that he had difficulty dealing with the forces unleashed in the culture and their impact on the Church. He was raised in a different environment, and in his last years had difficulty coping with what happened in the culture. Pope John Paul II established the image and means of a solid post-Vatican II papacy and what the Church needed to be in the modern world. At the same time, this papacy gives younger Catholics, post-Vatican II Catholics and Baby Boomers, a more solid picture of what the Church is and what it means. It gives them a firm grasp of their Faith and how to live it in the world."

At 49, Lockwood belongs to that "been there, done that" Baby Boom generation that sought fulfillment through drugs in the 60s, sex in the 70s and money in the 80s.

"Those that got through this are very, very solid in the Faith and know what the answer is for the culture," Lockwood says. "Their deepest need, and the deepest need of Catholics in general, is to learn, or relearn, how to think Catholic, to see their world through the perspective of faith and not to see their world as defined by the propaganda of the secular culture."

The books, magazines, newspapers and other materials produced by OSV help counter that propaganda.

"Nothing forces you to think more than reading the printed word," Lockwood says. "Books and magazines increase one’s knowledge and understanding of the Faith — two different things — and they create in an individual depth and conviction. Now, of course, faith is a gift from God, clearly. But Catholic books, magazines and newspapers provide the means to deepen that faith through study."

OSV is also involved in the Internet, CD-ROMS and other electronic media.

"We’re not Luddites," Lockwood says. "But print is the most durable form of communication. Nobody curls up with a computer."

As for his own favorite books? The Bible, it goes without saying, and A Manual of Prayers of the North American College.

"I most assuredly read it everyday," he says. The book, of course, is published by Our Sunday Visitor.

Our Sunday Visitor can be reached at 1-800-348-2440.

e