Founded in 1924, Commonweal is the oldest independent lay-edited Catholic journal of opinion in the United States. The magazine has an ongoing interest in social justice, ecumenism, just-war teaching, liturgical renewal, women’s issues, the primacy of conscience, and the interchange between Catholicism and liberal democracy.
The Commonweal’s first issue was published in November 1924, a year after Time was first published and just a few months before The New Yorker was born.
Founding editor Michael Williams was a Canadian-born journalist with a colorful past. After multiple newspaper jobs, a period in a failed Utopian commune and resettlement in California, he experienced a reconversion to Catholicism, which he later described in his The Book of the High Romance. While working for the National Catholic War Council, he conceived the idea of founding his own intellectual weekly: "How can Catholic thought, the Catholic outlook on life and the Catholic philosophy of living, as distinct from what might be called the Catholic inlook and individual religious experience, be conveyed to the mind of the whole American people?"
Williams found backing through the Calvert Associates, a group of (mostly) Catholic establishment business leaders and academics, including architect Ralph Adams Cram; Fr. Lawrason Riggs of the Washington banking family, later Catholic chaplain at Yale; and John J. Raskob, financial executive and builder of the Empire State Building. From the beginning, the magazine struggled with profitability, and required regular, sometimes urgent infusions of support. “It is,” said Thomas Woodlock of The Wall Street Journal, its first president, “an adventure, not a business enterprise.”
Further, the Calvert Associates set as their goal something more than publishing a review. They founded local gatherings of Associates to perpetuate Calvert ideals, especially religious understanding and liberty. They arranged for radio appearances by Commonweal editors and published a series of Calvert books on Catholic apologetics.
Should a Catholic Be President? (on the candidacy of Governor Al Smith) (April 13 1927)
G. K. Chesterton on Sex, from the first issue
Michael Williams covering the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee (August 5 1925)
Because of its lay independence and ecumenical list of contributors, The Commonweal would shortly be known as a “liberal” Catholic weekly, but that would probably not be accurate by later standards. “It was,” wrote historian Rodger van Allen, “rather defensively and triumphalistically Catholic.” In its first weekly issue, it spoke of the Petrine Rock as that force which would resist pagan hedonism, and declared that “upon that Rock The Commonweal stands.”
Controversy over the Spanish Civil War brought a leadership transition and a circulation crisis.
In response to the Great Depression, Commonweal broadly supported the New Deal, drawing parallels between its policies and the vision of the common good in Catholic social teaching: “It is a fundamental axiom of that philosophy that social justice—the welfare of the masses of mankind—is more important than the sort of national “prosperity” which means enormous wealth and socially perilous power for a few privileged cliques and classes, and poverty or destitution, or the permanent danger of poverty and destitution, to the masses of the people.”
Managing editor George Shuster wrote regularly of the rise of Hitler and its urgent implications for every form of freedom, and urged the United States to withdraw from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Thanks largely to Shuster, Commonweal was prescient among U.S. magazines in warning of Naziism’s global threat. Shuster also questioned the Catholic Church’s near-unanimous support for Franco, and against communism, in the escalating Spanish Civil War. Editor Michael Williams, however, then took the magazine in a pro-Franco direction, going so far as to organize a Franco rally in Madison Square Garden in 1937. Shuster resigned, and went on to a distinguished career that included two decades as president of Hunter College in New York. Williams himself was then asked to step down as editor by the Commonweal board, both because of the rally and erratic behavior brought on by alcohol.
Recovery and Reformation on the New Deal (November 17, 1933)
Some Reflections on Spain by George Shuster (April 2, 1937)
Catholics in Germany by George Shuster (June 29, 1934)
The Ryan-Coughlin Controversy criticizing Fr. Charles Coughlin (October 23, 1936)
Houses of Hospitality by Dorothy Day (April 15, 1938)
After this leadership crisis, the magazine’s management and ownership changed. Control passed to Philip Burnham and Edward Skillin, two young editors (ages 27 and 34) who published their first issue in April 1938. Commonweal, they wrote, “will avoid as much as it can the assumption of a propagandistic tone—propaganda understood as being the unfairly one-sided presentation of controversial opinion, overlooking the good points of opposed views and evidence damaging to one's own.” Two months later, Commonweal’s declaration of its neutrality in the Spanish Civil War brought an immediate 20 percent decline in circulation, and added to its reputation for sometimes contradicting mainstream Catholic opinion.
In the 1940s, editors were sharply divided about World War II, but united in their increasing support for labor and activism
Under Edward Skillin, Philip Burnham, and Henry Binsse, Commonweal in the 1940s began to “express a Catholicism no less intellectual, but more of a grass roots variety, and also more activist” than before. They supported labor movements (John Cort was a frequent contributor) and progressive action regarding race—one of the most popular articles from this period was George H. Dunne’s “The Sin of Segregation”—recognizing institutionalized racism in the Church and sharply criticizing the internment camps of World War II.
On the matter of the war itself, the editors were initially divided between interventionism and isolationism until the attack on Pearl Harbor, torn between a desire to maintain neutrality and thus minimize any violent involvement; and, on the other hand, a moral obligation to stand up to fascism and Hitler’s atrocities. The result was a series of “bristling exchanges” in the pages of the magazine and signed editorials reflecting the split in opinions. On the topic of the atomic bomb, however, the magazine was united: such immorality was a source of American shame.
The Sin of Segregation by George H. Dunne (September 21, 1945)
Editors on Hiroshima (August 24, 1945)
Native Daughter: An Indictment of White America by a Colored Woman by Ellen Tarry (April 12, 1940)
Christmas at Dachau by Alfred Werner (December 20, 1940)
The Commonweal of the 1940s was somewhat less focused on theology than earlier or later decades, but in its religious content heavily featured the German priest Fr. H. A. Reinhold, who fled Nazi Germany and, in New York City, preached to laborers in Dorothy Day’s House of Hospitality. Dorothy Day herself wrote for the magazine, and Thomas Merton contributed poetry. All three, along with Jacques Maritain, J. F. Powers, and former editors Michael Williams and George Shuster, contributed to a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the magazine in 1949.
As the 1940s drew to a close, the editorial staff shifted, and new editors replaced Burnham and Binsse: John Cogley and James O’Gara, friends from the Chicago Catholic Worker circle without the upper-crust background of the Commonweal founders. Joined by William Clancy and William Pfaff, they comprised a group described as “an Irish-Catholic intellectual Mafia, unabashed both in their liberalism and their Catholicism.”
