This is the one hundredth anniversary of the independent lay American Catholic journal of opinion, Commonweal. Its very title means “the common good,” and reflects the keystone concept underlying all Catholic social teaching. As Anthony Annett writes in his award-winning volume Cathonomics (2022), and underlines in his April 2024 Commonweal article “What Comes Next” (referenced by Bill Griffin in the July-August 2024 issue of The Catholic Worker), the Common Good is, quoting Pope Francis, a “central and unifying principle of social ethics,” one that, contrary to our prevailing market ideology, means that “nobody can be excluded from the common good.”
“One hundred years of solicitude” might be a better description of Commonweal’s motivating philosophy, not to mention its achievements and sheer longevity over the decades. These include its seminal role in the founding of the Catholic Worker movement. For it was George N. Shuster, managing editor of The Commonweal (as it was known until it dropped the “The” in 1965), who introduced Peter Maurin to Dorothy Day in 1932. Luckily, Shuster’s acumen and intuition led to the birth of arguably the most radical and challenging lay movement in American Catholic history. No wonder Day (who began writing for Commonweal in 1929 and continued doing so until 1973), remarked on the occasion of Commonweal’s fifteenth anniversary:
“In the name of the staff of The Catholic Worker, I write to assure you of our prayers…. We are grateful for all the pioneering work you have done in the past, and for all the help the editors personally and in their columns have given us.
“You remember that Peter Maurin always says that it is the duty of the journalist to make history as well as record it. May The Commonweal continue to have the influence on its times that it has had in the past.”
To have remained an independent journal of opinion for one hundred years is to have “made history,” and—in Commonweal’s case—impressively so. For the journal has consistently brought Catholic social teaching, advocacy for the common good, and the search for truth and beauty to each published issue, whether the topic dissected and discussed was theology, politics, literature, or society. As the syndicated columnist Mark Shields once remarked: “Thank you Commonweal for the courage to confront both our comfort and our conformity.”
The historian Charles R. Morris (at a later point a Commonweal columnist), wrote in his fine 1997 study of twentieth-century American Catholicism, American Catholic, that the “glue” behind the success of the Catholic Worker movement was its publication, The Catholic Worker. Morris described the CW as “a professional, imaginatively laid out production from the very start.” Typical issues, he noted, contained not only Peter Maurin’s succinct, analytical (and still prophetic) “Easy Essays,” but “field reports on important labor actions” and “farm-mortgage foreclosures,” as well as on poverty, pacifism, ethics, spirituality, the relationship between Catholic liturgy and the common good, and “always a column by Day herself.” Day, Morris opined, “wrote like an angel, in spare, limpid prose, with a pointillist’s eye for detail.” As Commonweal’s Shuster observed, Day was perhaps “the most talented Catholic woman writer since Kate Chopin,” who could have been “one of the most brilliant and influential of Commonweal’s editors.” But, Shuster noted, Day chose to be more directly involved in the social issues of her times, whereas Commonweal maintained a “more intellectual and journalistic bent.”
From its beginning, The Catholic Worker’s emphasis was on the works of mercy, protest, and active involvement in resistance to war. Its lived experience with the poor gave it a tone and purpose quite distinct from Commonweal’s. While Commonweal’s editors wanted, in their words, to “express the Catholic note” in influencing culture and politics, the CW wished to challenge them. Thus, as Mel Piehl noted in Breaking Bread, his essential history of the Catholic Worker movement (1982), the CW was “The first major expression of radical social criticism in American Catholicism.” And it was precisely that fact that led David J. O’Brien to write, in his trenchant Commonweal encomium of the recently deceased Dorothy Day (December 19, 1980), that “Day was the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.”
That influence was felt (and clearly manifest) in several of Shuster’s own editorial successors—he had left Commonweal in 1938 over then-editor Michael Williams’s support for Franco—particularly Edward S. Skillin, but also, to varying degrees, John Cort, John Cogley, James O’Gara, Patrick Jordan, and Daria Donnelly—all of whom had experience in Catholic Worker houses of hospitality before joining Commonweal.
The bond between The Catholic Worker and Commonweal (the latter became a bi-weekly in 1975, and a monthly in 2019) became apparent almost immediately, based on their common interest in the Church’s teaching on the Mystical Body of Christ as manifest in the liturgy and its concomitant social implications. Both publications were influenced by Virgil Michel, OSB. But there were other writers the two shared from their earliest days: G.K. Chesterton, Jacques Maritain, Nicholas Berdyaev, H.A. Reinhold, to name only a few. There was also a strong French personalist connection that included Peter Maurin, Skillin, and C.J. Paulding (an editor at Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit before joining Commonweal in 1940). There were both publications’ early condemnations of fascism and Nazism, and both stood (Commonweal only following the departure of Williams) against Catholic support for Franco—which both paid for in terms of lost circulation. Both condemned antisemitism early on and the vitriol of the radio priest Charles Coughlin.
Edward Skillin later wrote that for him, “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.” As a result, Commonweal’s pages became more welcoming to such issues as land reform and cooperative movements. A Benedictine oblate, Skillen also sponsored Catholic Worker participants at staff retreats, a fact Dorothy Day deeply appreciated. So appreciative was she, Skillin later related, that she had kissed him in gratitude: “I was kissed by a saint,” he said. (James O’Gara, who succeeded Skillin as editor, told a similar story. In Rome in 1965, at Vatican II, O’Gara addressed a gathering of bishops on the toxic effect of Church triumphalism. Afterwards, Dorothy approached him and thanked him with a kiss.)
Over the decades, the stable of shared authors between the two publications has been relatively constant and stellar. One of the earliest substantive articles to appear in the Catholic press on Peter Maurin was Joseph A. Breig’s “Apostle on the Bum” (Commonweal, April 29, 1938). Similarly, it was at Maurin’s urging that the first Catholic Worker Friday night meeting for the clarification of thought featured the historian and Commonweal board member, Carlton J.H. Hayes. Even to this day, Commonweal staff and authors address Catholic Worker gatherings, including Peter Steinfels, Rita Ferrone (columnist and liturgist who spoke last year on Virgil Michel and the liturgical movement), and this last fall, special projects editor Miles Doyle on the shared history and distinctive approaches of the two periodicals/movements. Other Commonweal speakers at the CW have included Anne Fremantle, Sidney Callahan, artist Emil Antonucci, and poet Marie Ponsot. Similarly, many CW writers have graced the pages of Commonweal: Day herself, but also Michael Harrington, John McKeon, Marge Hughes, Tom Cornell, Jim Forest, the Berrigans, Robert Gilliam, Eileen Egan, Gordon Zahn, Ade Bethune, and Helene Iswolsky.
Whereas the CW has remained staunchly pacifist throughout its ninety-plus years, Commonweal has endeavored to apply just-war teaching to the countless wars that have plagued the American century. While Commonweal eventually supported U.S. entry into World War II (following the attack on Pearl Harbor), like the CW it consistently condemned the saturation bombing of cities. Its editorial following the U.S. destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (“Horror and Shame,” August 24, 1945) stands alongside Dorothy Day’s searing condemnation (“We Go on Record” in the September 1945 CW) as prophetic, lone voices in American Catholicism at the time. Later, two of Commonweal’s most accomplished editors, John Cogley and James O’Gara—former Chicago Catholic Workers who each served in World War II—lauded The Catholic Worker’s ongoing consistency and uninterrupted witness to gospel nonviolence. In 1957, for example, Cogley wrote to defend the Catholic Workers’ “lonely protest” against taking shelter in nuclear air-raid drills. “By the simple act of resisting the national periodic preparations for doomsday exercises,” Cogley wrote, the protestors “hope to point up the importance of life over death.” He then addressed Day and her fellow protestors’ willingness to serve jail time. “Miss Day acts in the spirit of the prophets,” Cogley observed. “She is indifferent to legalities” and acted out of religious duty: “imprisonment was something to be accepted not as a legal injustice but as an act of ‘penance’ for the sins of the world.”
Several years later, in 1960, Commonweal editor William Clancy debated National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., on the merits of their conservative vs. liberal religious and political worldviews. At one point, Buckley described what he called “the grotesqueries that go into making up the Catholic Worker movement,” and he then personalized his criticism of Day as “off to the left almost out of sight.” Her point of view, he summarized, was “slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic and anti-Catholic.” To which Clancy responded: “Dorothy Day’s vocation has been a historic one. It has been to witness in the world to the corporal works of mercy. Here she has been a light to us all.” And while not subscribing himself to what he called the Catholic Worker’s political anarchism, Clancy took note of St. Paul’s instruction to the Ephesians: the Christian’s vocation in every age—including our own—is to discover oneself “living in evil times” but nonetheless not turn one’s back on them. Rather, one must attempt to redeem them.
Such was the attempt of Jerry Ryan (1937-2020), a Commonweal and Catholic Worker reader/writer. Ryan was a Josephite seminarian in 1958 when he was introduced to the life of Charles d’ Foucauld through the writings of Dorothy Day. It was there he also learned of the Little Brothers of Jesus and their Foucauld-inspired founder, René Voillaume. Ryan decided to travel to New York to speak with Day about Foucauld. Unannounced, he discovered her sweeping a walkway in front of the Worker house. Their conversation “came easy,” he later wrote. As a result, Ryan was eventually introduced to Voillaume in person, who invited him to join the community—the first American to do so.
As a Little Brother, Ryan eventually ended up in Chile, witnessing to the Gospel as a foundry worker and labor organizer. There he was associated with the legendary Chilean union leader, Clotario Blest (1899-1990), whom Ryan later described for The Catholic Worker (January 2006): “Clothario reminded me of Dorothy Day. They had the same hunger and thirst for social justice, a similar evangelical poverty, an uncompromising integrity, and in both there was a complete absence of self-interest.” (The same could be said of Ryan himself.) With the 1973 Pinochet coup, Ryan was forced to flee for his life, returning to the United States to testify on events in Chile, and reporting anonymously for both Commonweal and The Catholic Worker before returning to South America.
Early on (1932) in Commonweal’s development, John Tracy Ellis wrote that no other magazine “had done more to give intelligent and moral interpretation to the problems of current affairs than The Commonweal.” On its one-hundredth anniversary, it is safe to say that Commonweal continues to publish in that vein, doing so with uncommon consistency, insight, forbearance, and tenacity. It argues for (and exemplifies) freedom of thought and the press, in both Church and state. It welcomes opposing views and responds to them in depth. It has consistently expressed what Anne Fremantle described over seventy years ago as Commonweal’s “personalist priority”: the defense of human beings over property and institutions.
May that witness continue to be Commonweal’s “uncommon” gift to the common good—for generations to come.
(This article was originally published in The Catholic Worker. It is reprinted here with permission.)
