Commonweal. No focus group would choose the name. It’s frequently confused with “commonwealth” (as in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or Kentucky). “Common” is hardly aspirational. “Weal” is obscure. The Oxford English Dictionary provides three definitions. All three are listed under the heading “archaic.”
The magazine was founded in 1924. The models were the Nation and the New Republic, journals of opinion that depended more on the influence of the ideas they promoted than the number of readers they reached. More distantly, some Commonweal contributors and editors knew of Hochland in Germany, A Ordem in Brazil, and other journals—all founded by laypeople around the same time, and all committed to bringing Catholic ideas on politics and culture into their respective public spheres.
The name Commonweal stemmed from a parallel impulse within American Catholicism. The First World War had heightened Catholic patriotism and a sense of shared responsibility for American democracy. At Notre Dame, where I work, the university built an addition to the east side of the campus church in the same year as Commonweal’s founding. Carved into the stone were soldiers and helmets, a small statue of Joan of Arc (canonized in 1920), and an engraved list of Notre Dame veterans. All of it was placed under the heading: “God, Country, Notre Dame.”
The first financial backers for Commonweal—always too few in number—were mostly graduates of Ivy League universities or liberal-arts colleges such as Williams and Amherst, newly minted members of the American establishment. They desired a more intellectually engaged representation of their faith. They named themselves the Calvert Associates after the seventeenth-century founders of the Maryland colony, yet another gesture linking America with Catholicism.
The Calvert Associates barely tolerated the first editor, Michael Williams, an eccentric survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and a one-time participant in an Upton Sinclair–inspired commune, who recommitted himself to his baptismal faith as an adult. An occasional benefactor was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president. A more active supporter was John J. Raskob, a financier and close aide to New York governor and presidential candidate Al Smith. The abuse endured by Smith, Raskob, and other Catholics during the 1928 presidential campaign only reinforced their commitment to projects such as Commonweal.
The first crisis for the magazine occurred in the late 1930s, when democracy around the world seemed at risk. Catholics in Europe and Latin America often favored authoritarian governments. The leader of Portugal’s new dictatorship, António de Oliveira Salazar, was a former Catholic youth leader who frequently invoked key texts of Catholic social thought. Even in the United States, Raskob and Smith had retreated into a sullen opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The country’s most famous Catholic, Fr. Charles Coughlin, talked about social justice (although not democracy) in his popular radio addresses, but often in a crude, antisemitic key.
Commonweal chose better. Its leaders edged aside Williams, who celebrated Spain’s General Franco as a valiant defender of Catholic civilization against Soviet atheism. A new editor, Edward S. Skillin, would guide the magazine until the late 1960s. In the crucible of the late 1930s, Skillin and his colleagues allied themselves with Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher who urged Catholics not to make support for Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War a crusade. In Maritain’s correspondence, one finds references to “our friends at Commonweal.” During World War II, Maritain, more than any other person, urged Catholics to view democracy as the “issue at stake in the struggle.” Along with other European Catholics who had managed to escape to North America ahead of the Wehrmacht, he published a manifesto in 1942 on religion and democracy in Commonweal.
The conviction that Catholicism and liberal democracy strengthened one another deepened over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. The magazine’s circulation peaked in the heady years of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. Paging through issues from those years, it’s not hard to register the intense enthusiasm for the liturgy in the vernacular, the commitment to religious freedom, the openness to dialogue with Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and unbelievers, and the characterization of the Church as a People of God.
These topics certainly captivated a young couple, Loyola University graduates Peter and Peggy Steinfels, just then embarking on heralded careers in American journalism that would include long stints as Commonweal editors. (Peter may have been the first Commonweal employee who grew up reading the magazine in his childhood home.) Opposition to the American involvement in Vietnam and the elaboration of just-war theory became a staple of the magazine. So, too, did coverage of civil rights and Christian ethics. Some of the era’s major political figures, such as Sargent Shriver, could plausibly be described as Commonweal fellow travelers. One political figure, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, was actually a contributor to the magazine, and Eugene’s wife, Abigail, was a longtime columnist.
The second crisis came after the council. Humanae vitae (1968) provided the first jolt. The editors and most contributors lamented the encyclical. They predicted (accurately) that the overwhelming rejection of the encyclical by married couples would mean an ongoing diminishment of clerical authority. A second jolt came with Roe v. Wade (1973). Commonweal had published a range of views on the abortion question, but the increasingly ferocious defense of abortion rights within the Democratic Party, then the home of most Catholics and even more Catholic intellectuals, made the political environment less hospitable.
By the mid-1980s, the slow adjustment to the long papacy of John Paul II was underway. John Paul II was a former philosophy professor and his dense and voluminous writings demanded close attention—which Commonweal provided. The magazine’s stance became one of admiration for John Paul II’s principled resistance to communism and his focus on human rights, combined with disappointment over his unwillingness to reexamine Church teaching on sexual ethics or move on women’s leadership.
I started reading Commonweal about then, devouring back issues in the basement of the Stanford library while a graduate student. I enjoyed the focus on politics and the smart analysis of books and films. I also benefited from a crash course in theology owed entirely to the magazine’s accessible but sophisticated coverage. I didn’t always read the poetry or, truth be told, the articles on spirituality. But that says more about me than about Commonweal.
I eventually submitted an unsolicited book review via the United States Postal Service, complete with a stamped manila envelope for return mail. Editor (and now friend) Paul Baumann wrote back with some shrewd comments. Finally, out of the blue, a one-sentence acceptance letter arrived with, as I recall, a check for $75. Then I waited for the issue to be shelved in the library. (I was, ahem, not yet a paid subscriber.) I remember the excitement I felt when I held with my own hands the issue including my short piece.
I became a subscriber, an occasional contributor, and then a board member. From those vantage points I could witness the unpredictable storms swirling around the magazine. The most unexpected was a newly forbidding financial landscape. Beginning in the 1950s, Commonweal’s financial model was simple: keep a stable base of subscribers and a handful of advertisers, and from that revenue pay the salaries of roughly eight to ten staff members. Commonweal readers renewed their subscriptions at improbably high rates, but subscription income dwindled in relation to expenses. Advertising revenue collapsed. Like every small magazine and almost every nonprofit organization—you receive the appeals, too—Commonweal is now a philanthropic enterprise. Blogs (for a while), websites (now more than ever), and podcasts cost money. Become a Commonweal associate now.
Equally disorienting was the speedy dissolution of the Catholic subculture. All religions have struggled to hand over faith traditions in the twenty-first century, but disaffiliation within Catholicism has been especially notable. Former Catholics are the country’s largest religious demographic after practicing Catholics. The number of Catholic marriages has plummeted. So have Catholic funerals. Two decades of the clerical sexual-abuse crisis fueled and accelerated this disenchantment, even if the abuse crisis alone did not cause it. The greater Boston area, where the public phase of the abuse crisis began in 2002, is now one of the most secular metropolitan regions of the United States. As late as 1990, it would have been one of the world’s most Catholic.
Parallel with religious disaffiliation is a new religious geography. The Catholic population in the United States is still growing in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona, thanks to immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, as well as Americans migrating from the Northeast and industrial Great Lakes in search of a more congenial climate or better employment opportunities. A recent achievement of the magazine has been its commitment to coverage of Catholicism in El Paso, as opposed to Boston, two cities where the number of Catholics who go to church on a given Sunday may now be roughly equal.
Transformations within political and religious liberalism are even more striking. Within the Church, Pope Francis’s emphasis on synodality has resonated with Commonweal writers and readers, as has his openness to discussing issues of gender and sexuality that his predecessors described as settled. Still, Francis comes out of a distinctive Latin American Catholic tradition, more skeptical of corporate capitalism, more committed to environmental issues, and more focused on the poor and marginalized. His is not the Catholicism of, say, John Courtney Murray, SJ, coolly shuttling back and forth in his writing between Robert Bellarmine and James Madison and assuming the strength of the Catholic subculture. One of Francis’s biggest admirers in contemporary American politics is Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
American politics are even more scrambled. Former president Donald Trump’s personal life and his comments about, and policies toward, women and migrants hardly make him an avatar for Catholic values. He is a nationalist who has managed to mobilize many members of a global Church; more than half of white Catholics supported him in the last election. His conquest of the Republican Party now seems complete. George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and other leading Republican figures did not attend this year’s Republican convention in Milwaukee and have conspicuously declined to endorse Trump for president.
The end of Roe v. Wade in 2022 has also ended familiar political patterns on the abortion question. The Democratic Party is more adamantly pro-choice than ever. But the association of the pro-life movement with such a polarizing figure as Trump, and the return of the abortion issue to the states, has driven public opinion in a sharply pro-choice direction. The Republican Party—certainly Trump and those around him—seems to be moving in a pro-choice direction, too, as evidenced by its endorsement of state autonomy on the question. Meanwhile, a handful of “post-liberal” Catholic intellectuals—some associated with vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism—edge toward the protectionist Left on economic issues while remaining firmly on the cultural Right.
A generation ago, Garry Wills wrote that a liberal Catholicism in the United States would have been unimaginable without Commonweal. In an age of crumbling religious and civic institutions, we need that particular imagination more than ever. For a small magazine to thrive for a century is no small thing. The subscription base remains solid and the online reach of the enterprise, especially among young people, is greater than ever. The trick will be to remain anchored in Catholicism—with 1.2 billion baptized members, the Church is one of the world’s few genuinely global institutions—while staying alert to new political and religious formations.
Here’s to the next one hundred years. And to the Church and country that will be much stronger for Commonweal’s presence.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
