Anniversaries are for celebrating, and major ones the more so. Twenty years go, on Commonweal’s fiftieth anniversary Fortress pubilshed Rodger Van Allen’s durable history of the magazine’s first half-century, The Commonweal and American Catholicism. Now Van Allen is at it again, celebrating Commonweal’s seventieth birthday with Being Catholic: Commonweal from the Seventies to the Nineties (Loyola University Press, 1993).
The new volume received extensive treatment earlier this year in the Spring issue of Horizons magazine. Three appreciative but critical reviews were followed by a response from Van Allen. Together, the four constitute a significant discussion of Commonweal’s status, aims, and achievements (or lack of them). One of the reviewers, William L. Portier, raises an important question about Van Allen’s claim—made in the 1974 volume—that the journal founded by Michael Williams in 1924 “developed into perhaps the most significant lay enterprise and achievement in the history of American Catholicism.” While Portier doesn’t dispute the claim head-on, he admits there is part of his “evangelical self’ that wants to ask, but “what about the Catholic Worker?”
In his response, Van Allen briefly describes some striking links between Commonweal and the Catholic Worker, but resists a full answer to Portier’s question: to provide one would require perhaps another volume. Still, on the occasion of Commonweal’s seventieth anniversary, it is not out of place to offer some observations on the links, similarities, and contrasts between the two enterprises and on their contributions to the church and society.
Before there was a Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day (1897-1980), a freelance journalist who had converted to Catholicism in 1927, wrote with some frequency for Catholic journals, including Commonweal, America, and the Sign. Commonweal published her reports from Mexico and New York’s Lower East Side, as well as a short story. Some years later, George N. Shuster, Commonweal’s managing editor from 1928-37, would write that Day “was a very gifted writer, perhaps the most talented Catholic woman writer since Kate Chopin. She could have been one of the most brilliant and influential of Commonweal’s editors.” But, he continued, Day had seen the dedication of the Communists, and she “wanted words and deeds expressing a deeper Christian concern than was theirs” to be her life’ s work (America, November I l, 1972). In a recent biography of Shuster (George N. Shuster: On the Side of Truth, University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), Thomas E. Blantz distinguishes between Day’s emphasis on the life of active involvement in the social movements of the time and Commonweal’s more intellectual and journalistic bent. Day frequently recalled that it was Shuster who told Peter Maurin (1877-1949), the theorist and cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, to look her up. That meeting took place in December 1932 and led to the first issue of the Catholic Worker in May 1933. But Blantz gives another insight into what prompted Shuster to suggest Maurin get in touch with Day. “When the creative, unkempt, and slightly uncouth emigre French anarchist and poet, Peter Maurin, appeared at the Commonweal offices, Shuster realized that Maurin would be out of place and introduced him instead to Dorothy Day…thus inaugurating a long and fruitful collaboration.”
In his America reflection, Shuster noted similarities and differences between the two undertakings. “The founders of Commonweal announced that the publication would be loyal to the church but that it would be edited and published by laymen independently of ecclesiastical control. This was a more revolutionary decision than it seemed to be at the time….The founders of the Catholic Worker did likewise. They would be Catholics, indeed committed ones, but they would be of and for the poor, who were to participate in the Worker’s doctrine and effort.”
From the beginning, the Catholic Worker’s emphasis on the active life, shared with the poor, gave it a tone and a purpose distinct from Commonwears efforts. Whereas Commonweal was founded, among other things, to implement the U.S. Catholic bishops’ 1919 declaration, “On Social Reconstruction,” the magazine sought to shape public opinion as a journal of opinion rather than as a social movement or its literary organ.
While the editors of Commonweal wanted to “express the Catholic note” in influencing culture and politics, the Catholic Worker wished to challenge them. Thus historian Mel Piehl has written that the Catholic Worker movement was “the first major expression of radical social criticism in American Catholicism.”
It seems clear that similar criticisms were also found more frequently in the pages of Commonweal after the founding of the Catholic Worker. Edward S. Skillin, Commonwears longtime editor and publisher (see, page 26), has written elsewhere that “Dorothy Day always served as an inspiration, reminding me of our duties as Christians toward our needy brothers and sisters….Because of her I developed a different point of view of what should be the social message of Catholicism.” That view was clearly evident in Skillin’s own writings on land reform, cooperative movements, and the link between the liturgy and social reconstruction. And whereas Commonweal and the Catholic Worker have diverged over critical issues, particularly on matters of war and peace and the wisdom of engaging the political process as it presently exists, both have clearly worked to bring Christian principles to bear on both.
Thus, in the 1930s, no other magazine in the country wrote as much about what was happening in Germany as Commonweal. The Catholic Worker also took a strong anti-Nazi position. In 1935, Catholic Workers in New York picketed the arrival of the German liner Bremen to protest Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws. The following year, Commonweal led an unsuccessful attempt to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics. New York Auxiliary Bishop James Francis Mclntyre, a confidant of Olympic organizer Avery Brundage, denounced Commonwea’s stand. The same year, H.A. Reinhold, a German priest who had been forced to flee the Nazis, arrived in New York. Mclntyre refused to grant him priestly faculties because of Reinhold’s anti-Franco stance. But the Catholic Worker allowed Reinhold to address its meetings and Shuster helped him secure an assignment in the diocese of Brooklyn. Over the years, Reinhold was to write frequently for both Commonweal and the Catholic Worker.
In 1937, Shuster left Commonweal because of founding editor Michael Williams’s support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. When Williams was forced to resign soon thereafter by the magazine’s editorial council, Skillin and Philip Burnham, the new editors, shifted the magazine’s stance toward neutrality. While the Catholic Worker had opposed the war from the beginning of the conflict, Commonweal’s principled shift cost it 20 percent of its subscribers. In 1938, Commonweal’s editors wrote that the journal was “personalist,” in the sense that it believed in “the priority of human beings over property and institutions.” It supported workers’ movements, cooperatives, and the right of farm laborers to organize—all stands shared with the Catholic Worker.
In May 1939, John C. Cort, who would eventually have a long association with Commonweal as both writer and editor, reported in the magazine about the founding meeting of a new group, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. The meeting took place around a kitchen table at the New York Catholic Worker. Years later, Cort described in Commonweal (June 20, 1980) his first meeting with Dorothy Day in Boston in 1936.
The young Harvard graduate was working as a reporter and went to hear Day speak. “Suddenly, bang, without ever to that moment having given it any serious thought at all, I decided to give up my $15-a-week job and join the Catholic Worker. What was it about her that so moved me?…I remember sitting in that dingy hall and saying to myself, ‘This woman is getting a lot of fun out of life and I would like to get some of that for myself….’”
During the 1930s and ’40s, not only Day and Cort wrote for Commonweal, but other Catholic Workers such as Ade Bethune, Bill Callahan, and Arthur Sheehan. Commonweal ran occasional ads for the Catholic Worker newspaper (“The Catholic Worker is openly and unashamedly the champion of the have-nots”), and for houses of hospitality chronically in need of support (a publishing practice that persists to this day). In the late ’30s, Commonweal took a generally isolationist stand on European affairs, one that at times came very close to the nonviolent approach of the Catholic Worker. Writing in 1939 on the Germans, Commonweal editorialized that to overcome nazism, the people of Germany must “undergo a personal revolution and then reorganize their society on a more humane basis.” The following year, Claire Huchet Bishop, a native of France and a frequent Commonweal contributor, took a pacifist stand when she opposed Jacques Maritain’s call in Commonweal for French resistance to the Nazis. Bishop wrote that in the end nonviolent resistance was the only Christian way for the French to win.
With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, Commonweal quickly changed its stand and, unlike the Catholic Worker, joined in support of the Allied effort. Still, throughout World War II it supported conscientious objectors, deplored the saturation bombing of cities, and at the end of the war decried the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its editorial, “Horror and Shame” (August 24, 1945), and Dorothy Day’s own famous condemnation in the Catholic Worker, “We Go on Record” (September 1945), were two powerful and immediate indictments of nuclear warfare.
Another connection between the two at this time was the 1941 arrival from France of the Russian emigre, Helene Iswolski, a friend of Nicholas Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier. Forced to flee the Nazis, Iswolski was welcomed to this country by C.G. Paulding, a Commonweal editor. She became one of Dorothy Day’s closest friends and confidants, later living for a period at a Catholic Worker farm.
After the war, Commonweal welcomed to its small staff two new editors who had previously been associated with the Chicago Catholic Worker’s newspaper and house of hospitality: John Cogley and James O’Gara. Both were to have distinguished careers with Commonweal. While neither was a pacifist nor subscribed to the Catholic Worker’ s distributist economic or anarchic political views, both wrote with an awareness of the downtrodden that was based on their personal experiences in the Catholic Worker movement. O’Gara later noted that for him, the effect of Dorothy Day’s emphasis on voluntary poverty and care for the poor was revolutionary.
Cogley analyzed the contrast between Commonweal and the Catholic Worker this way: On the Worker’s twenty-fifth anniversary, he wrote in Commonweal that “the movement which never sought power has had more influence on more influential Catholics than any other single force in the American church.” Of Dorothy Day, he supposed that future historians would judge American Catholics “by measuring our attitude toward her.”
As for Commonweal, Cogley wrote later (in his book, Catholic America, 1973) that it was widely accused of being subversive and downright un-American: “It was blacklisted by many seminary rectors, kept under the counter by Catholic librarians, denounced bitterly from pulpits, and excoriated mercilessly in some of the diocesan papers.” But despite that, Cogley continued, the magazine managed to exert an influence in the American church “all out of proportion to its small circulation,” its positions often later being adopted by the wider Catholic community.
One lesson James O’Gara learned during his days at the Chicago Catholic Worker and brought to bear during his tenure at Commonweal was to face controversial issues head on. Since the Chicago Catholic Worker newspaper had not broken publicly with Day’s absolute pacifist stand at the beginning of World War II, O’Gara wrote later that “this diffidence on the part of the nonpacifists was probably a mistake.” Under Cogley and O’Gara, such diffidence was not apparent at Commonweal, whether the issues concerned church and state, theology, or the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
During the mid-1950s, when Catholic Workers mounted protests against civil defense drills meant to acclimate citizens to the possibility of nuclear war, Commonweal was the only Catholic publication to defend the protesters. Editor Edward S. Skillin wrote an open letter to the New York Times with John C. Bennett of Christianity and Crisis to defend the fight to make such protests.
In the same years, Commonweal’s format and typography changed. For the first time it began regularly running line drawings on its cover and in the body of the magazine. Many of these were contributed by Rita Ham Corbin, an artist long associated with the Catholic Worker. There has always been an overlap of writers appearing in both journals, and it continued in the 1950s and ’60s: Iswolski, Thomas Merton, Gordon Zahn, Michael Harrington, and Daniel and Philip Berrigan.
In 1960, during a debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., at a Paterson, New Jersey, church, Commonweal editor William Clancy had to defend Day and the Catholic Worker against Buckley’s characterization that Day was “off to the left almost out of sight” and that the Worker” s positions were “grotesqueries. Clancy responded that while he himself did not subscribe to the Catholic Worker’s political anarchism, “Dorothy Day’s vocation has been a heroic one,” “a light to us all.” He considered it a scandal that in 1960 “any Catholic can stand here and draw laughter from a Catholic audience at the expense of this heroic woman.”
In 1954, in a long article in the Catholic Worker on Theophane Venard, a nineteenth-century French missionary to Vietnam, Day presciently warned against American intervention in that country. In 1947, Commonweal had supported French military action against Ho Chi Minh; in 1961 it editorialized that Vietnam was “the one auspicious place for the free world to make a stand” against the spread of communism. Commonweal changed its stand on U.S. involvement in Indochina only gradually. In 1963 it supported the American war effort, but it questioned whether “the goal can be achieved in a way which is just, humane, and sensitive to human rights.” By 1967, Commonweal joined its voice to those who protested the war, judging the war’s conduct to be unjust. Managing Editor Jack Deedy became one of the founding sponsors of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, initiated by Jim Forest and Tom Cornell of the Catholic Worker. In 1968, Commonweal’s then associate editor, Peter Steinfels, was arrested and jailed for protesting the war.
Today, the Catholic Worker’s Christian pacifist opposition to all war and war preparations remains at odds with Commonweal’s just-war position, a fact that, for this particular writer, has presented frequent occasions for soul-searching. Commonweal continues to be a forum, however, where pacifists such as Eileen Egan, James Douglass, Michael True, Michael O. Garvey, and John Dear have published their views. For its part, over the years the Catholic Worker has reprinted pieces from Commonweal on pacifism and on the life of faith, and has invited Commonweal editors to speak at its meetings.
When Dorothy Day died in 1980, historian David O’Brien wrote in Commonweal that Day was “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” Since that time, the Catholic Worker movement has continued to expand in size and diversity, as a recent review in Commonweal by Robert Gilliam indicated (June 3, 1994). But that diversity and the loss of its remarkable founders have had an inevitably unsettling effect on the movement. In a 1988 Commonweal article, Gordon Zahn broached serious questions about the future of the C.W. Zahn reported that some Catholic Worker houses were taking liberties with the celebration of the Eucharist, and pointed out that on matters of faith and discipline, Dorothy Day would never promote her private judgment in such matters if they were at variance with the church’s magisterium. Zahn concluded that the present-day Catholic Worker movement could do no better than to follow Day’s lead, and that not to do so would threaten its unique character and distinct contribution. Such questions continue to surface in the movement, as they do throughout the church in general.
To return to Professor Portier’s original question and Rodger Van Allen’s response, it is apparent that both Commonweal and the Catholic Worker paper and movement have played significant roles in the life of twentieth-century American Catholicism. The latter has done so as a movement aimed at rejuvenating society in the light of gospel principles and a shared life with the poor; the former as a journal of opinion meant to challenge society and the church. Without either—let alone both—society and the church would have been decidedly diminished.
No one who has ever been associated with the Catholic Worker movement, been acquainted with its remarkable personages, or read the pages of its various papers has remained unchallenged, untouched, or uninspired. It is clear that Commonweal itself has been so moved. Conversely, Commonweal has practiced protest and offered a different but essential type of hospitality by welcoming distinct and sometimes quite divergent views in its pages.
In the future, both Commonweal and the Catholic Worker face significant challenges. The Catholic Worker movement has yet to successfully portage into the post-founders’ era. It should come as no surprise that an anarchist-leaning, decentralized movement would find it difficult to replicate the focus, energy, discipline, and inspiration provided in her lifetime by Dorothy Day. Regional meetings of Catholic Worker houses, and a wide variety of Catholic Worker newspapers and newsletters—from such various cities as Houston, Saint Louis, Worcester, and Los Angeles as well as New York—seem to be the means the movement is developing to clarify its aims and provide intellectual and spiritual grounding. Both the “catholic” and the “worker” of its title are areas that need definition. On the one hand, how does the Worker’s Depression-era critique of industrialized society and the nature of work apply in a post-Communist, post-industrial, computerized mass society? More essentially, how does the movement remain Catholic? Some Catholic Workers, troubled by their fellow Workers’ lack of clear identification with the church, have sought to enshrine theological restorationism, misrepresenting Dorothy Day’s love for the church as a form of blind obedience. At the other extreme, some Catholic Workers have taken the course of theological libertarianism, attempting to use Day’s repeated stands against the status quo as a means of justifying their own divergence from church teachings.
In a very real sense, there is today a struggle going on for the soul of the Catholic Worker movement. Outsiders can only hope that those who carry on the daily life of the movement will continue to anchor themselves in the Gospels and the sacraments, the lives of the saints, nonviolence, the justice preached in the Scriptures, and charity toward one another. The hallmark of Dorothy Day was not simply the strength of her character, intellect, or views, but her clarity of soul and her delight in what she was doing. She genuinely appreciated those with whom she lived and worked, made great efforts to forgive and be reconciled with those she had offended, and found a ready joy in all things beautiful. All of this—in the midst of unceasing hardship—was based on prayer and faith. Day’s example, as John Cort once remarked in these pages (September 24, 1982), is a standard to be reckoned with: “I most firmly believe that all social reformers, without exception, should ponder well Day’s words: ‘We live in a time of gigantic evil. It is hopeless to think of combating it by any other means than that of sanctity. To think of overcoming such evil by material means, by alleviations, by changes in the social order only—all this is utterly hopeless.’”
The challenges Commonweal faces are different but finally not unrelated: How to develop a language with which to communicate the Catholic vision with clarity and resonance? How to bring those insights into play in an in-your-face era where group antagonisms are promoted and self-interest reigns? How to restore a sense of common bonds and renewed commitment to the common good in such an age? And how to keep the magazine afloat on limited resources when fewer people seem interested in substantive reading?
Over thirty-five years ago, Edward S. Skillin wrote that “our country has need of media that attempt to relate our present characteristics, and tendencies for the future, to the noblest traditions of our people.” The need for such independent and critical journals of opinion as Commonweal is as strong today as in 1924. But if it is to celebrate significant anniversaries in the future, Commonweal will need many new readers and generous supporters. The same is true, of course, of the Catholic Worker movement. Here’s hoping we and future generations of American Catholics are up to the challenge, and that historians like Rodger Van Allen will be there to tell the story.
