Fifty years ago, on Nov. 12, 1924, the first issue of Commonweal was published. Why another magazine? Wrote the editors: "The difference between the Commonweal and other weekly literary reviews designed for general circulation is that the Commonweal will be definitely Christian in its presentation of orthodox religious principles and their application to the subjects that fall within its purview . . . . As a sure background the Commonweal will have the continuous, unbroken tradition and teachings of the historic Mother Church. But it will be in no sense—nor could it possibly assert itself to be—an authoritative or authorized mouthpiece of the Catholic Church. It will be the independent, personal product of its editors and contributors, who, for the most part, will be laymen." 

With that statement of purpose as its charter, Commonweal began publication. Over the years since then, there have been many attempts at self-evaluation and self-explanation; the surprising thing about these is not their differences but their similarities. Emphasis has naturally shifted from time to time during 50 years, as new problems arose and new situations developed. Nonetheless, certain characteristics have remained rather constant. One effort at self-analysis summed up: "The purpose of the men who founded the Commonweal in 1924 was to provide a new expression of Catholicism in American life" (a new expression, it should be noted, in which, then as now, good writing and good thinking were welcome whether from Catholic or non-Catholic sources). Not all readers nor even all editors, however, have agreed on what "a new expression of Catholicism in American life" should mean in practice. Earlier editors spoke of the "changeless truths of Catholicism," which they called the "foundation and ultimate test of everything the magazine believes." Many readers over the last 50 years would have cheered the magazine if it had in fact restricted itself to restating these "changeless principles" in new language. It was when the magazine tried to apply the principles to such issues as the race question, anti-Semitism, nationalism, peace or war, that the cancellations came in. Many who objected to controversial editorial positions insisted that later editors had abandoned the lofty plateau on which they claimed the magazine was founded. Yet it was founding editor Michael Williams who described the magazine's beginnings in terms of "some sort of publication that would serve as a medium for the expression of Catholicism in its varied and frequently highly debatable possibilities of application to contemporary social problems." Similarly, early and longtime managing editor George N. Shuster said one of the main ideas of the early days was to establish a lay organ which would implement the then-radical and far-reaching social message of the Bishops' Statement of 1919, written by the pioneering Msgr. John A. Ryan. 

Over the years, then, there have been many who objected to the magazine's comments on specific secular issues, from Franco and Father Coughlin through Senator Joe McCarthy to Watergate and Vietnam. In more recent times, however, the trend has shifted in the other direction. The magazine's concern with the great political and social questions of the day is more or less accepted, if frequently not really welcomed; what is resented more particularly is the concern of the editors with internal Church problems. It is accepted that Commonweal speaks to the world in the accents of the Church; what is rejected is that it speaks to the Church in the accents of the world—when the magazine insisted before Vatican II, for example, that the Church had much to learn from democratic society, that concepts like due process of law would improve ecclesiastical life, that democratic society came closer to the Gospel ideal than any authoritarian regime. In earlier years there had been a strong tendency in the Catholic community to leave ecclesiastical and theological questions to clerics and religious; Commonweal itself long stressed the fact that the temporal was the specific sphere of the layman. In recent years, however, and especially since Vatican II, there has been a growing conviction that such questions concern the entire Christian community and indeed that they are too important to be left solely to "official" spokesmen. This is a conviction we share. 

When the present editors go back 50 years to read the statements of purpose by the magazine's founding fathers, we are struck by one significant change: the great shift that has taken place in ecclesiology in that time. Fifty years ago the prevailing concept of the Church—and this certainly was not limited to the editors of Commonweal—tended to be highly static. The Church was seen as the Rock, as the timeless custodian of unchanging truths, the clearing-house for immutable principles which implicitly contained the answers to all problems. The task of the Christian citizen or journalist, then, was clear—all he had to do was to go to the right file-drawer and apply the proper principle to the specific current problem. This static concept of the Church is now dead; it was dying before Vatican II, and the Council Fathers laid it to rest once and for all. Today the predominant concept, indeed the popular cliche, is of the pilgrim Church, the Church on the move, seeking the right path, not supplying easy answers but perhaps asking the right questions—a Church perpetually in need of self-examination and self-renewal. Yet there are clearly many Catholics who still yearn for the old certainties; they do not accept the new ecclesiology and they resent any suggestion that the Church does not necessarily have the answer to every conceivable question. A case can be made that our predecessors in 1924 were influenced in matters secular and religious by the euphoria surrounding the then newly elected Calvin Coolidge. No such euphoria, secular or religious, exists today. In this connection it is interesting to look at another bishops' statement, this one the recent review of trends issued by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Significantly, the bishops start right out by saying: "The word 'malaise' is often used to describe the current state of U.S. society in general and, in particular, the condition of religion in the United States." In recent years, the bishops note, it has been customary to discuss the tensions within the Catholic Church in the U.S. in terms of conflict between conservatives and liberals. Now, they say: "It may be, however, that the time has come to cast such discussions in different terms. The emerging question for the Catholic community in the United States may well be whether it will in the future, as in the past, derive its fundamental beliefs and attitudes from the traditional value system of Catholic Christianity, or whether its beliefs and attitudes will be drawn more and more from the secularistic, humanistic value system of the society around it." 

Commonweal, of course, has long been known as a liberal magazine, and perhaps because our bruises are too recent, we cannot totally agree with the bishops that the day of liberal-conservative battle is completely gone. But we do agree, and have long held, that this difference, although very important, is not the central issue. The Church had something to learn from Paul Blanshard and other nativist critics, despite their distortions; only the vindication of John Courtney Murray at Vatican II gave final answer to their charges about official Catholic lack of commitment to the democratic state. But if it was true that certain ecclesiastics were slow in seeming to accept some of the theories behind democratic society, there was nonetheless something ironic about the nativist attack: the truth has always been that the American Catholic community at large—including the American bishops—was not less American than it should have been but was entirely too uncritically American, not simply welcoming the obvious values of the American system but abandoning Christian judgment on a multitude of crucial issues, from the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few to the race question, from the Spanish-American war to Vietnam. The bishops are certainly right: to an increasing extent the question in the future will be how far Christian principles will have any influence on "secular" issues or even on the thinking of individual American Catholic citizens on such questions. Is the parable of the Good Samaritan to become a question of purely personal charity and irrelevant to public policy as millions face starvation in India, Asia and Africa? In a world of proliferating nuclear weapons, is the traditional Christian moral heritage on war and violence to be completely forgotten? Indeed, going beyond specific questions of public policy like these, will Catholics and all Christians face up to what is clearly a crucial issue in our time, the general crisis of faith described by the contributors to this special issue? 

We live in a world and in a Church that are changing at a mad pace—indeed, in the next decade both the United States and American Catholicism may face the greatest challenges either has ever seen. In such an era, it is the conviction of the editors that a magazine like Commonweal still has much to say—a conviction illustrated by our publishing this special Commonweal Paper on Faith to mark the completion of 50 years of publication. Over this past five decades the magazine has survived only because of the loyal support of its subscribers and contributors and the generous assistance provided by friends such as the Commonweal Associates. Convinced as the editors are of the value of the magazine and its unique role for the years ahead, in the ultimate analysis the future of Commonweal depends on the continuation of that loyalty and support from its friends and subscribers.