Our editorial of the week

Dear Claire, I am writing to you on behalf of the editorial staff, that your departure last Saturday plunged you into sadness and mourning. We have known this outcome since you announced to us, at the beginning of February, your entry into the Jeanne-Garnier Medical Center, where you lived your last weeks, surrounded by attentive care and a human presence whose quality you told us about. You leave behind a journalist husband, Vincent, and two grown children, Mateo and Robinson, of whom you were proud and of whom you often spoke to us during these three years of collaboration at Pilgrim.

Three years as editor-in-chief which counted in the life of our weekly. They might seem brief, after twenty-five years spent The Express where you covered religion, then directed the Society department and debates of ideas. But what you have brought here cannot be measured in time: it comes down to a way of working, of demanding, of bringing rigor and simplicity together. It is this heritage that it is now up to us to keep alive.

Striving to “think against yourself”: this was the line you held, with constancy, subject after subject. A rare requirement. A compass to inform as best as possible when the facts themselves are weakened. It spoke of your relationship with the world: a relentless curiosity, a taste for understanding, for transmitting, and the conviction that journalism can, modestly, contribute to making it more readable, more habitable.

This is undoubtedly what brought you to us, at a time in life when the accuracy of places and people counts more than anything. You wrote to us during your long absence: the meeting with this newspaper, its teams and its readers will have shed light on the end of your career. “It was a daily joy to work alongside you to concoct this Pilgrim so precious and so warm. »

These words will remain engraved in our hearts. Like your dazzling smile. Your temperament rubbed against the sun, the language and the rhythms of the Spain that you loved so much. Your humor and your panache even in illness. You have now passed into the peace of another Light.

Thank you for all this, Claire. And for the joy of having worked with you.