MANILA (UCAN) – American Jesuit Father James Reuter, who built the Catholic radio broadcasting system in the Philippines and laid the foundations for the bishops’ national media network, has retired.
Monsignor Pedro Quitorio III, from the bishops’ conference, announced Father Reuter’s resignation as executive secretary of the Episcopal Commission on Social Communication and Mass Media on June 16. Father Reuter, 93, sent in his resignation in May on the ground of “failing health.”
The American priest is well known for his actions during the rule of former president Ferdinand Marcos, who clamped down on all media during martial law, which lasted from 1972 to 1981.
Father Reuter developed and supported what was called “the mosquito press” — mimeographed newsletters containing uncensored articles produced in clandestine centers.
He also set up Church broadcasters at a private radio station after soldiers disabled the Church-run Radio Veritas during the 1986 people power uprising that eventually deposed Marcos.
The priest has meanwhile built the Catholic Media Network (CMN), which he began in 1964, into a network of 54 Catholic radio stations and four television stations operating in 11 regions and 35 provinces around the country.
Father Reuter also directed the Philippine bishops’ National Office of Mass Media, a post to which the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines appointed him in 1969.
The American missioner had arrived in the country 31 years earlier as a seminarian. He was interested in broadcasting from the beginning and worked on a radio program while teaching at Jesuit-owned Ateneo de Manila University in 1941.
During the Japanese invasion in 1942, he entertained fellow priests and nuns detained in a prison camp by presenting plays he wrote and composing songs they sang together. He then left the country but returned in 1948. In 1960, the Philippine Jesuit Province appointed him the first head of its Office for Communication.
He set up studios and offices in the Jesuit residence in Santa Ana, Manila, in 1964, the same year he began CMN under its original name, the Federation of Catholic Broadcasters in the Philippines. This network became a primary media provider when cable lines could not reach all villages in the archipelago.
The bishops appointed him national director of mass media in 1967. He trained in broadcasting techniques in Hollywood, in the studio of the late Father Patrick Peyton, founder of the worldwide Family Rosary Crusade movement.
He later started the Philippine broadcast of the movement’s weekly radio-television series, “The Family Theater.”
Father Reuter founded the Asia branch of Unda (wave), the International Catholic Association of Radio and Television, which linked Catholic broadcasters in the region. He continued to be a leading regional figure in Unda and the International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisuals (OCIC), which merged in 2001 to form SIGNIS, a worldwide Catholic association for professionals involved in audiovisuals, broadcasting and new media.
Father Reuter has gathered numerous trophies and plaques of recognition over the years, including a 1981 citation from Pope John Paul II recognizing him for “courageously upholding truth, justice and integrity in Catholic communications.”
Monsignor Quitorio said Father Francis Lucas, who now heads CWM, has been appointed to succeed Father Reuter as acting executive secretary of the episcopal commission.
Father Lucas, 61, has spent much of his 36 years as a priest evangelizing and advocating for environmental, economic and agricultural development through media. He also chairs the Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.