July 2021

The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 marked the beginning of a controversy that still shapes the nation’s politics and the Church’s own priorities.

Commonweal’s editors quickly criticized the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of January 1973, noting that before the decision, state laws represented “some consensus that life in process is life and must be protected. Now…that consensus is gone.” The editors also immediately foresaw, however, that “the anti-abortion cause will become the political tool of the right wing,” and criticized the American bishops’ response to Roe, noting that their rigid opposition to birth control gave them little credibility on other matters of morality.

In 1974, after fifty years as a weekly, Commonweal began to publish twice a month, but its ambitions remained impressive. In a New York Times interview about the magazine’s milestone anniversary, editor James O’Gara described Commonweal’s mission: “We want to see Vatican II implemented…. We’re concerned with the redistribution of wealth, a better way to choose the Pope, the limits of papal power and lay participation in all levels, including the highest. What we really want is a total reorganization of society and the church.”

The 1970s also saw the debuts of two long-time columnists whose broad scope and graceful writing helped define the Commonweal sensibility. John Garvey began to appear in the magazine in 1973, and for more than forty years wrote with spiritual insight and common sense about a wide range of moral, political, and religious questions. Abigail McCarthy, the former wife of 1972 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and a distinguished author in her own right, wrote with special attention to women’s issues both inside and outside the Church, as well as on literature, politics, and many other topics.

At the end of the decade, the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978 almost immediately raised concerns in Commonweal about his style of leadership, especially his authoritarian approach to internal Church discipline and the work of theologians: “[I]nsofar as it encourages a teaching church that is not equally a learning one,” wrote the editors, “the huge promise of his papacy may go unfulfilled.”

In the 1960s, the issues of principal concern for The Commonweal were the first Catholic president, the Second Vatican Council, the rise of communism, and the war in Vietnam.

The autumn of 1960 saw the election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States. While the editors did not officially endorse Kennedy, his election—not merely by Catholics, but, significantly, by a significant share of the Protestant population—was “greatly encouraging” to institutions and publications like The Commonweal “that had been working for years to promote a greater engagement with American society by Catholics.” 

The Commonweal was also eager to see American Catholics engage more with the institutional Church, and the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) provided the perfect opportunity for this, as the Church invited input from the laity before the council began. The council’s conclusions invited “real grounds for hope,” calling for “openness, dialogue, and discernment of the Spirit by and from all.” It was the most reported-upon religious event of the century; in the pages of the magazine, notable authors who discussed it included German theologian Hans Küng. Less encouraging was the 1968 papal encyclical, Humanae vitae, which took a hardline position against birth control despite the opinions of much of the laity and, indeed, the study commissioned by the pope himself on the matter. As the decade continued, some of the enthusiasm generated by the council began to wane.

Throughout the decade, The Commonweal remained anticommunist, but it resisted the radical right’s reactionary impulse to recast the liberal as communist, as well as the tendency to consider the entire world as divided into two warring camps. Indeed, the magazine recognized that “even with avowedly communist countries a certain diversity or pluriformity was emerging.” While the editors in the 1950s and early 1960s supported the war in Vietnam, by late 1964, they believed a negotiated settlement as the only way out, and by 1965 praised anti-war demonstrators. As the war dragged on, the position of the magazine against escalation and the use of the nation’s resources solidified; in 1967 they advocated civil disobedience in the style of Thoreau as “the only course left” to stop the war.

Opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy set The Commonweal apart from almost every Catholic publication and church leader.

As early as 1950 when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began his relentless campaign to identify Communist infiltration in American institutions, The Commonweal pointed out in an editorial that he seemed to be “shooting away at political records and personal reputations like a drunken sailor.” Anti-communism was both a religious and a political issue for American Catholics, however, and the Catholic hierarchy and press of the era was virtually unanimous in its support for McCarthy, and untroubled by the abusiveness of his tactics.

By 1953, McCarthy had included The Commonweal among his targets, questioning the possible Communist sympathies of an occasional writer for the magazine in the 1930s. In a letter from McCarthy ignoring Commonweal’s denials, he wrote, “I feel that you have done and are doing a tremendous disservice to the Catholic church and a great service to the Communist Party.” At the height of McCarthy’s influence, Commonweal editors James O’Gara and John Cogley were both publicly denounced in their home parishes as Communist sympathizers.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”