The history of Commonweal is a history of hope and confidence: hope in the possibility of change—in the world and in the Church—accompanied by a confidence that Catholicism could learn from modernity while speaking to its deficiencies.
You get a feel for a sensibility inclined toward the bold from Jim O’Gara’s 1973 interview with the New York Times on Commonweal’s fiftieth anniversary. O’Gara, then the magazine’s editor and an outstanding steward of its tradition, was plain about just how much change he hoped for as he ticked off some priorities: “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,” O’Gara said. “What we really want is a total reorganization of society and the church.”
A tall order—“a total reorganization of society and the church.” But that’s what hope can do for you. For all the knocks on the chaos of the 1960s, it was a decade during which Catholics in large numbers, perhaps especially in the United States, dreamed big. They were inspired by Pope John XXIII’s call to discern the “signs of the times” and to reject “distrustful souls” who saw in the modern era “only darkness burdening the face of the earth.” It’s no accident that Commonweal, which both chronicled and cheered the new things afoot, hit its peak of fifty thousand subscribers in 1968.
It was a couple of years before that high point that I first discovered Commonweal as a teenager, thanks to the discerning folks who ran the periodicals room at the public library in my hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts. I won’t pretend that lots of people my age were frequent visitors to the periodicals room, but I do suspect my experience of excitement was typical, particularly of Catholics who lived outside big metro areas and were not clued in to what Catholic intellectuals talked and argued about.
If you got to appreciate magazines of opinion, as I did, you probably knew about National Review, the New Republic, and the Nation. But here was this fascinating publication that examined the world through an explicitly Catholic lens—and unlike National Review, whose conservatism had a distinctly Catholic lilt—a liberal Catholic lens. I was hooked for life.
As Commonweal ponders its history and ongoing mission, what strikes me most is the radically different context in which Catholicism finds itself. I stress the hopefulness and confidence of the Vatican II Era (which coincided, until the escalation of the Vietnam War, with the high tide of American liberalism) because it stands in such sharp contrast to the current moment. The institutional Church in the United States has been ravaged by scandal and—nearly as importantly—by the breakup of a social and neighborhood base nurtured by ethnic identification, the reinforcing holds of parish and school life, and forms of loyalty bolstered by memories of exclusion.
I have largely positive personal memories of that old Catholic world, but I don’t want to romanticize it. If you want to know about Catholic intolerance, just ask Jewish friends about how they were treated as kids by many of their Catholic neighbors after public and parochial schools dismissed classes. Similar, or worse, stories can be told by Black friends. The divisions were so multi-sided that Italian and Irish kids tangled regularly, too. (Where I grew up, I heard similar stories about past confrontations between the Irish and my own French-Canadian forebears.)
But the strength of this Catholic subculture, paradoxically perhaps, enabled the new thinking about “renewing,” “updating,” and “adapting.” There was little fear that a seemingly impregnable structure of meaning and belonging could come tumbling down.
There was also a strong sense in the wake of World War II and the experiences of Nazism and Fascism that making peace with liberalism was a moral necessity. There was a good deal of soul-searching about Catholic complicity with murderous authoritarians. German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, published in 1962 by the prominent Catholic pacifist Gordon Zahn, was a particularly dramatic example of this call to conscience.
But there was also the positive pull of democratic ideas and a dedication to human rights. This was reflected intellectually in the work of Jacques Maritain and politically in the creation of Christian Democratic parties that explicitly endorsed democratic practices, in contrast with the post–Vatican I Church that looked upon democracy with deep suspicion. The left end of those parties had a great deal in common with secular Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists. The European social-insurance state and the “thirty glorious years” of shared prosperity in the wake of World War II were a joint project of Christian and Social Democrats.
For increasingly affluent American Catholics who enjoyed access to higher education to a degree not imagined by their grandparents, modernity itself seemed more a sparkling opportunity than a snare of sin, corruption, and heresy. When Harvey Cox wrote The Secular City in 1965, the liberal Baptist theologian was (pleasantly) surprised by the wide readership and appreciation he won from Catholics. The Secular City Debate, a volume of essays grappling with Cox’s thesis that secularism and modernity’s pragmatic urban style were logical outcomes of biblical teaching, was edited by Daniel Callahan, one of Commonweal’s exceptional voices and an editor at the magazine.
In Bare Ruined Choirs, Garry Wills wrote, archly but with his usual perceptiveness, of the attraction of “the two Johns” (John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII) to precisely the sort of Catholic who was drawn to Cox. For many Catholics, the modern world seemed an increasingly happy place, liberalism and democracy the paths to take, and The Open Church—Michael Novak’s report on the 1964 session of Vatican II—a goal worth striving for. Many volumes have been written as to why this mood of hope gave way to fractiousness, reaction, and even despair. Blame or at least causation is ascribed broadly, depending on the point of view of the person ascribing it. Take your pick (or mix and match) from this incomplete list: the backlash against Pope Paul VI’s ban on artificial birth control; the pedophilia scandals; the shallowness of a “spiritually suburbanized” Catholicism that emerged after the decline of old neighborhood solidarity and doctrinal certainty; the failure of the new liturgy and the inadequacy of Catholic religious education; a modernization project that went too far, or not far enough; the failure to give women an equal role in Church leadership; the rise of abortion as the defining political issue for many American Catholics; and the broader secularization of society that Catholicism could not escape. Let it be said that the critique of post–Vatican II liberalism has taken both radical and conservative forms. (Bare Ruined Choirs was an eloquent entry on the radical side.)
What’s striking about the past few years is the rise of a root-and-branch critique of liberalism and modernity that effectively calls Catholicism back to pre–Vatican II ways of thinking about faith and politics alike. The title of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed succinctly captures the inspiration behind the project that he and other intellectuals on the new Catholic Right, such as Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, are advancing with vigor.
Liberal Catholic communitarians (a label that fairly describes me) can certainly find issues that might draw us into dialogue with Deneen, Vermeule, and their allies. Catholicism is often at its intellectual best in a dialectical relationship with modernity, welcoming its liberating aspects but acknowledging and trying to heal the discontents it can spawn.
But more than ever, I find myself drawn back to a full-on defense of what Vatican II asserted and what Pope John XXIII preached: that believers and religious institutions have gained far more than they have lost by coming to terms with modernity, that liberalism’s virtues strengthen Christian virtues, and that a dour pessimism about our times is inconsistent with the hope—yes, and joy—of the Gospel. Among Pope Francis’s many declarations, my favorite may be his condemnation of “sourpusses.”
This view is shaped in part by the urgency of our confrontation with the growing threat of authoritarianism. If Pope John’s teachings and Vatican II’s declarations on liberty were a logical moral response to the ravages and crimes of the 1930s and ’40s, a renewal of this form of liberal Catholicism is just as vital to battling the dangers of our moment.
The spirit of Vatican II’s documents and of the Commonweal I first discovered in Fall River’s public library is, I think, close to the spirit of the philosopher Michael Walzer’s insistence that we should honor liberalism less as a creed than as a modifier that “determines not who we are, but how we are who we are.” Liberals, he argued in The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective, “aspire to be open-minded, generous and tolerant” (even if Walzer notes that we don’t always pull this off). Liberals can “live with ambiguity,” are “not dogmatic,” are “not fanatics,” can “recognize moral limits,” and “oppose every kind of bigotry and cruelty.” To qualify as liberal, a regime and philosophy must be “not despotic, not repressive, not cruel—constrained by individual rights.” The adjective, he writes, encourages “pluralism, skepticism, and irony.” For those who see skepticism as antithetical to faith, consider that the best theologians and preachers understand that posing questions is a large part of their job, and that intellectual humility is recommended by St. Paul—who noted that here on earth, “we know in part and we prophesy in part.”
Walzer draws a distinction between the assertions of religious traditions in their own realm and the need for pluralism in the political realm, a distinction consistent with Vatican II’s embrace of democratic pluralism. “Absolutism in the form of faith, mystery, dogma, heresy, and orthodoxy is not alien to religion,” Walzer observes, “whereas it should be alien to politics, at least to democratic politics.” At the same time, he takes to task those who “disdain belief and treat religious men and women as fools.” Liberals, he insists, should “respect the lives that believers live and the communities they create, and work to guarantee the safety of both.” Readers of this magazine are entitled to nod here with appreciation.
The task before us is not to recapture or mimic the same liberalism or the same brand of confidence that so many Commonweal Catholics celebrated in the early 1960s. We’d like to think that we have learned something from the failures, tragedies, disappointments, and misunderstandings of the last half-century. But the instinct to lift up the liberal virtues, to encounter the world with hope, and to uphold a philosophical belief in human progress—qualified by an understanding of human imperfection—is as right and relevant now as it was when Jim O’Gara unflinchingly voiced his agenda for change.
It may be a sign of the skepticism in parts of the Church about “the spirit of Vatican II” that there is now debate over whether Pope John actually said that he hoped “to throw open the windows of the Church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.” The magic of search engines produces many variations on that uplifting quotation. But it does not require settling this dispute to insist that when institutions close themselves to “the fresh air of the spirit,” they betray a loss of faith in their mission. Commonweal has kept the faith by keeping the windows open. It has defended the tradition by insisting that each generation can learn not only from the past but also from the present, and thereby move into the future without fear.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
