Youth put faith to work at Salt + Light TV

Young TV journalists want 'to win hearts for Christ'

Gillian Kantor

By KAREN FRANZ
Catholic News Service
Toronto

Some staff members at Canada's Salt and Light TV find working for a Catholic television network is a way of putting their faith to work.

Producer Gillian Kantor began volunteering and later working for World Youth Day 2002 while working at the children's wildlife magazine Wild.

After World Youth Day, she took a job with The Catholic Register newspaper in Toronto. She also kept in touch with the former World Youth Day director, Basilian Father Tom Rosica.

Eventually Kantor was permitted to split her time between the newspaper and the TV station. Slowly, she shifted into a full-time position at Salt and Light.

"I was so attracted by what's happening here, by the growth and the opportunities - not just for us working here but also for Catholic media in Canada.

"Everyone's really young here," she said. "But we're getting older now, and as we grow, the station is maturing."

Kantor said she was reluctant at first to get involved in Catholic media.

"I was hesitant about mixing my faith and journalism," she said.

"But once I got into it and the stories of people - individual Catholics expressing their faith - that's what drove me in my work for the Register and in the projects I choose to work on at Salt and Light. It's the people and their stories - that's what I love to tell."

As associate producer, Matthew Harrison assists in the production of programs and also is responsible for the web log, or blog, on the Salt and Light website.

Harrison studied radio and television at Toronto's Ryerson University, then worked in broadcast news with The Canadian Press. After three years in the seminary, he began working for Salt and Light last October.

"I wanted to be a part of the new evangelization . . . and get the Gospel out and win hearts to Christ," said Harrison, one of the few Salt and Light staffers without any connection to World Youth Day 2002.

Mary Rose Bacani

Producer Mary Rose Bacani made her way to Salt and Light as a result of "one of the moments in my life when I felt a call."

Nearing completion of her undergraduate program at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., Bacani was planning to attend law school. Yet she had always loved writing, and family and friends told her she had a perfect voice for radio and the "presence" for TV.

So when she learned that the friend of a friend was working in the control room of a new Catholic TV network in Toronto, she "just popped in" at the Salt and Light studios - dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt - to have a look around.

Her unusual approach got the attention of Salt and Light management, and she was soon offered a job.

The child of a "ritualistically Catholic" Filipino family, she previously had been a first-degree member of Regnum Christi, a mainly lay movement under the spiritual direction of the Legionaries of Christ.

Bacani said her experience in Regnum Christi "got me on the road to prayer."

"I didn't have a faith life before Regnum Christi," she continued. "To survive at Salt and Light you have to have a strong faith life. As someone told me, you can't give what you don't have."

Bacani said she loves "bringing images and words together creatively to touch people. It's part of my joy to tell Catholics they're not alone."

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