Al Antczak, former editor of the Tidings, the official newspaper of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, died Thursday at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He was 84.
A resident of San Gabriel, Antczak had been in poor health since developing pneumonia several months ago while visiting family in San Diego, his son John Antczak said.
Antczak's first writing job after he graduated from Loyola University (now Loyola Marymount) in 1947 was at the Tidings, and he worked for the weekly newspaper for 42 years. He was editor from 1973 until he retired in 1989.
He covered the administrations of Archbishop John J. Cantwell, Cardinals James Francis McIntyre and Timothy Manning and the first four years of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.
"Al was involved at a time of the greatest period of change in the Catholic Church, at the time of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, which set the tone for the way we worship and the way we relate to the world," Tod Tamberg, who was editor of the Tidings from 1992 to 2000, told The Times over the weekend.
"Some of it was quite dramatic, and so you had nuns discussing whether they were going to wear habits anymore, and you had people looking into the eyes of their priest who was saying Mass in English. Al was right in the middle of a very historic period."
As the chief communication vehicle of the Roman Catholic Church in Southern California, the Tidings presents the official viewpoint of the archdiocese while covering local, national and international issues of interest to its readers.
In a 1987 editorial, Antczak wrote that Catholic newspapers "report the news of the world from an objective moral, religious experience."
"Life is not a holy card," he wrote. "The people of the church must ... address public policy issues on a day-to-day basis: refugees, immigrants, homeless, elderly, education, marriage, single parents, AIDS, alcoholism, sex clinics, surrogate parenting, test-tube babies, abortion, disarmament, nuclear weapons.... Catholic newspapers, including the Tidings, address these issues week after week in terms of reporting responsible church expressions and action on these subjects."
Antczak managed a staff of reporters, photographers and graphic artists and oversaw production of the newspaper's pages before they were shipped off for printing.
