The present year, 2010, is a special one for The Times since it is celebrating its 75th anniversary of offering its professional coverage of both national and international current affairs. Furthermore, on June 12 of this year, the first lay journalist, the Spaniard Manuel Lozano Garrido, better known as "Lolo", was beatified in his hometown Linares. Who was this extraordinary journalist?

Lolo was born in Linares, Spain, on August 9, 1920. Incidentally he died in the same city 51 years later, precisely on November 3, 1971. As an active adolescent member of the Catholic Action, Lolo used to bring Holy Communion to the prisoners during the Spanish Civil War, which action cost him imprisonment. In his journalistic career, Lolo contributed regularly to the daily Ya, and the magazines Telva and Vida Nueva, and the Associated Press. At the tender age of 22, he started suffering from spondylitis, which bound him to a wheelchair for nearly three decades. In 1962, this outstanding man of the press became blind. Notwithstanding all these hardships, Lolo kept using his journalistic talents at the service of what is good and true till the very end. He wrote numerous articles and authored nine books which he dictated to his sister Lucía and his friends.

At one point, when he discovered that he could nonetheless employ some of his fingers, a typewriter was given to him. The first immortal words which this courageous herald of the truth typed were the following: "My Lord, thank You. The first word, Your Name, may it always be the strength and soul of this machine...May Your light and clearness be the mind and heart of all that I type on it, so that everything written may be noble, fair and promising".

According to the Benedictine monk, Juan Javier Flores Arcas, rector of Rome's St. Anselm Pontifical Athenaeum, Lolo's intellectual output in the 1960s and early 1970s was imbued with that "sense of evangelisation, of openness, of the media [which was awakening in] the Church. And he, with his situation, realised that this was his mission in the Church." Father Rafael Higueras, the postulator of his cause, observed how Lolo realised that his mission was to evangelise through the media. Blessed Lolo once put it: "If each one of us had a microphone to speak about Christ, wouldn't it be a wonderful field for the New Evangelisation?"

His exceptional dedication earned him acclaimed professional acknowledgements, such as the distinguished Bravo journalism award. Lolo is the founder of Sinai, the name both for his magazine for the sick as well as for the association. In actual fact, the Sinai association clusters tiny groups of a dozen sick persons, connected with a monastery, who offer their prayer and suffering for the media people.

In his reflection after the Angelus, on the following day of Lolo's beatification, Pope Benedict XVI exhorted journalists to imitate the heroic example of this committed apostle of the pen. "Journalists can find in him an eloquent testimony of the good that can be done when one's pen reflects the greatness of the soul and is put at the service of truth and noble causes." Whereas, in his address to the Journalists on their Jubilee, on June 4, 2010, Pope John Paul II said: "Your passing through the Holy Door as pilgrims expresses a choice of life and says that you would like 'to open doors to Christ' in your profession as well. He is the 'Gospel', the 'Good News'. He is the model for everyone who, like you, is striving to make the light of truth penetrate every area of human life". Certainly, Blessed Manuel Lozano Garrido's holy life has been a faithful witness to this lofty journalistic invitation.