Rumble and Carty: The radio priests who evangelized the world

Rev. Dr. Leslie Rumble

The Rev. Dr. Leslie Rumble, MSC, a priest in Australia, was a convert from Anglicanism. In 1928, he became a priest of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He began a one-hour ‘Question Box’ program on radio on Sunday evenings that was heard all over Australia and New Zealand. For five years he answered questions on every subject imaginable that had been written to him from all over that part of the globe.

Said Fr. Rumble, “"I was brought up as a Protestant, probably with more inherited prejudices than most non-Catholics of these days.  My parents were Anglican and taught me the Anglican faith. My 'broad-minded' protestant teachers taught me to dislike the Catholic Church intensely. I later tried Protestantism in various other forms, and it is some thirty years since, in God's providence, I became a Catholic. As for the 'open, free, sincere worship' of a Protestant Church, I tasted it, but for me it proved in the end to be not only open, but empty; it was altogether too free from God's prescriptions."

 

Rev. Charles Mortimer Carty:

I broadcast my radio program, the Catholic Radio Hour,  from St. Paul, Minnesota.

I was also carrying on as a Catholic Campaigner for Christ, the Apostolate to the man in the street through the medium of my trailer and loud-speaking system. In the distribution of pamphlets and books on the Catholic Faith, Radio Replies proved the most talked of book carried in my trailer display of Catholic literature. As many of us street preachers have learned, it is not so much what you say over the microphone in answer to questions from open air listeners, but what you get into their hands to read. The questions Fr. Rumble had to answer on the other side of the planet are same the questions I had to answer before friendly and hostile audiences throughout my summer campaign."