Icon of St. Luke the Patron Saint of The Cardinal Read

Dearest Cardinal Readers,

As we enter Ordinary Time, having witnessed and experienced the great joys of Paschaltide, we are happy to announce the inaugural issue of the Newman Centre’s Catholic student’s magazine, The Cardinal Read, in honour of Cardinal John Henry Newman and literary puns. The publication of the magazine was a long process – we thank all those who were involved for their immense patience – but a most gratifying one, as we learned to bring together works of the mind and the heart, in our desire to encompass both the power of the intellect and the creativity of the soul.

The Cardinal Read, while primarily student-focused, is a magazine that wishes to offer a cultural platform inviting students and other young professionals to share their works related to various subjects and themes of Catholic culture. This can take many forms which include but are not limited to reviews, opinion pieces, short stories, poetry, art and photography.

Opening our Easter 2024 issue are two poems by Father Emmanuel Isidore Umanah, a Nigerian Catholic Priest and doctoral research student in the Faculty of Canon Law at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome. Leafless not lifeless is a prose poem about the power of life to bear hope even where hopelessness seems to prevail while A priest’s pledge is a versified poem expressing one’s sacred promise to live and die for Christ.

In The Oblate by Huysmans, an Artist Between Beauty and Decadence, Capucine Tosi, a Master’s student at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, invites us to explore the imaginative and complex mind of a French novelist from the second half of the 19th century, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and how his later works reflect a sensibility for Benedictine spirituality.

Anthony Lombardi, a McGill student graduating in History and Religious Studies who had the opportunity to travel to Portugal for World Youth Day 2023, shares a series of pictures with a personal anecdote and reflection on his trip in his Memories of WYD.

M. S. is a Catholic translator and writer who is currently working on a collection of prose poetry about martyrs. In The Revenant, she draws us under the skin of the plight of martyrdom thanks to intense, abstracted prose, which leaves one with a sense of redemptive suffering.

In Faith as Love’s Catalyst, Thomas Latendresse, a rising senior majoring in political science at Concordia University, presents a commentary on Seamus Heaney’s “St Kevin and the Blackbird, ” a poem highlighting the transition from pain to love as we receive faith from God.

Finally, closing up the issue is God and the Machine, a short story by Adam Pywowarczuk, a catechist and freelance scientific editor. He tells the story of a Benedictine monk’s struggle in a hyper-advanced technological world and which ends with a message of hope for reconciliation of humanity with modernity.

We hope our readers will truly enjoy going over this first issue, and that this yearly publication can become a new tradition in which many will come to partake. This mission, of course, we entrust to Saint Luke, the patron saint of our magazine, and to Our Lady, Mother of the Word. Enjoy!

Lead, Kindly Light,

The Cardinal Read Editorial Team