Simon Caldwell meets the young priest who runs a Catholic radio station from a priory in north London.
Fr Toby Lees, a young Dominican priest of great energy and charisma, levels his gaze as he summarises the value of Radio Maria England, the youngest daughter of an international network of Catholic radio stations which each day together reach an audience of more than 500 million people.
“On a most basic level, if as a radio station we only have 5,000 listeners in a day that still makes us the biggest daily parish in the country,” he says.
“There is no priest in his parish who speaks to 5,000 in a day, or even a thousand. Evening Mass is quite well attended if you speak to 50. We are already a big force from that perspective.”
The daily tally of listeners to the new station, he’d explained moments earlier, was a conservative estimate because although it is possible to monitor the numbers of people accessing programmes via the internet or through the Radio Maria App, there is no way of knowing just how many tune in via digital radio without expensive external commercial research.
As the priest director of the station, he is convinced that the numbers are rising. “I definitely get a sense, particularly in the last four or five months, that more people are listening,” he tells me when we meet in St Dominic’s Priory, north London, where the studios are based.
“A big part of the Radio Maria model is to invite live callers and the numbers of people calling have increased,” he explains, adding that others, who were in the habit of calling in to request prayers of intercession during live recitations of the Rosary, were also reporting that the surge in the volume of calls meant they were sometimes struggling to get through.
“I would like in a year’s time to be closer to 15,000 [listeners] and I think that’s plausible,” he continues.
“The aim is to be part of the re-evangelisation of the country and I am firmly a believer that the type of media matters,” he says.
His vision has been informed by the writings of media theorists like New York’s Neil Postman, and Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher who observed presciently that “the medium is the message”.
“I think radio is a good medium, I think print is a good medium and I think there are bad media. Our presence on social media is to my mind not to encourage people to spend more time on social media but to lead them out of the swamp. I would like to see more young people start to listen to radio.”
His observations are pertinent because they come amid some discussion in magazines like the Spectator, of the work of Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who studies generational changes and who revealed in a new book, Generations, that almost 30 per cent of American girls have clinical depression, a phenomenon replicated across the Anglosphere, and that the US suicide rate for 10 to 14-year-olds has tripled since 2012.
Significantly, she found that the more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely it was that he or she will end up depressed.
The service offered to the young by Radio Maria, however, is not just an escape hatch. It is one of many ministries because the station is there to serve the whole Church while striving to create links between generations.
Since it was launched little more than three years ago, one of the “privileges” of working in radio, says Fr Lees, is having his “eyes opened” to “so much fabulous stuff going on in the Church in this country”.
“Even in a time of demographic decline there are really brilliant things going on and there are really brilliant people and we are able to give a voice to them,” he says.
“They are not media personalities and they don’t have contacts and they wouldn’t otherwise be heard, but they should because they are inspiring, and it’s lovely to provide that mouthpiece.”
Among the listeners he cites are a group of largely West African young mothers from Beckenham, Kent, who have attended several Rad-io Maria events and even visited the studios in Gospel Oak, London, with their children.
They include such people as prisoners and residents of care homes who have benefited from gifts of radio sets each worth £40.
These radios are made in the shape of a Madonna and Child and come in a box showing the Blessed Virgin Mary listening to Sky Sports, triggering a little light speculation between us about which teams Our Lady might support.
“West Ham United,” ventured one of Fr Toby’s entourage, and I accept it with an open mind. I very much doubt it is Wigan Athletic, my own struggling team, in spite of their historic FA Cup triumph over Manchester City a decade ago.
Discussion of sport comes quite naturally because it is one of the subjects occasionally covered by Radio Maria in its programmes.
Although a third of output is classed as “prayer and liturgy”, and another third explicitly serves the cause of faith formation and catechesis, the final third focuses on subjects of general human interest, albeit from a Catholic perspective.
An important aspect of this are the regular “Just Life” podcasts which cover the faith in such areas as sport, arts, literature, history, lifestyle and culture, travel and pilgrimage – subjects as diverse as hunting and foraging to what it is like to work as an actor.
Weightier matters, such as theology and faith, are also packaged into podcasts under such titles as “The Friarside”, “Credo” and “The Word for Today”. Music also features prominently, with concerts broadcast along with hymns and church music generally, and there are regular news bulletins reporting events from the Vatican, the UK and from around the world.
A glance at a schedule for any given day will see the recitation of prayers and readings following the pattern of the divine office but including the Angelus, the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet. Mass is broadcast daily and there are also reflections on the lives of the saints.
There are opportunities for listeners to call the station to discuss matters of faith, to join in with prayers on air and to request prayers of petition, with Marian devotion and piety being a key focus.
Radio Maria England owes its very existence, after all, to Marian piety because it was the inspiration of Dr Charles Wilson, a retired Cambridge oncologist with a strong devotion to Our Lady, who felt compelled to establish a UK station in the pattern of Radio Maria stations that have grown up in many other countries of the world since the 1990s.
What followed was the first of the unexpected financial donations on which Radio Maria, which carries no advertising, depends to survive.
A charity was formed, a licence obtained from Ofcom, the regulator, and then Dr Wilson and a small team went in search of premises. The first broadcast was made from a mobile studio in Cambridge in November 2019, four months before the first lockdown of the Covid-19 global pandemic the following year.
“We were up and running by that stage,” Dr Wilson says. “I realised that Our Lady wanted us, by March 2020, to be providing a service of sorts. We had Masses being transmitted and we had programmes. It was an extraordinary coincidence.” So: what next? Dr Wilson is ambitious. “It’s Our Lady’s station,” he says. “It’s protected by Our Lady. It’s faithful to the Magisterium and its role is to evangelise. I want to evangelise China. It’s not just for our parish here – the world is our oyster.”
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