BRITAIN'S SELECT THREE
Wicker, Brian
CATHOLIC INTELLECTUAL JOURNALS BRITAIN'S SELECT THREE I thought it would be useful, at a time when Commonweal is facing the challenge of drastic inflation in America, to report on the current...
...A characteristic two-page reply begins with twelve lines of relevant Latin quotation, followed by a closely argued reasoning, of which the gist is that "the answer to the first part of the question is in the affirmative" but that "in confession it will certainly be sufficient to avow it as a single sin...
...In more recent years it has swallowed up two other journals: The Dublin Review (founded by Wiseman in 1836) and the English version of Herder Correspondence...
...At least you could disagree with it-as did various Catholic anti-war campaigners of the sixties, when the moral issue of nuclear deterrence was much discussed in The Clergy Review...
...While it still has to keep its nose clean with the bishops, and go carefully on controversial issues, its editorial board has independence and includes at least one layman...
...Its editorials are as pungent as they are unpredictable: you never quite know where the 'theology of the Dominican tradition' is going to go, but you do know it will be worth watching...
...To thumb through these columns is to remember how the Church, in England anyway, used in the old days to tick...
...It was started in 1931 as a vehicle for keeping the secular clergy in England properly 'informed.' It provided a permanent refresher course, so to speak, for parish priests...
...A regular layman's viewpoint is included among articles...
...Politically it is, I would say, pink in an uncommitted and unideological sort of way, but it attains a high standard of in-depth reporting, particularly on international Catholic and Christian affairs...
...They have inspired depths of affection and of hatred which no other order could equal...
...I would say it does a very effective job, in a quiet way, and with great integrity: but its title, while giving it a captive audience, hampers it from expanding its frontiers much, despite the fact that it contains a good deal that is of general Christian interest...
...Yet at its best, New Blackfriars is more energetic, exciting and (to use a cant word) abrasive than its rivals...
...They are The Month, The Clergy Review and New Blackfriars...
...The Month [114 Mount St., London W1Y 6AH, $12.] is the oldest and has the most prestigious connections...
...The former was a close stable-companion anyway, in the sense that it was a journal of a literary/historical/theological kind appealing, as The Month used to, to a reflective, conservative, Oxford-and-Cambridge-style Catholic audience...
...all of them sell a proportion of their circulation in the U.S.A., but there may be many Commonweal readers who would like to know more about them...
...It tries to be ecumenical and to present the clergy in modern dress, but I doubt if many people outside clerical ranks read it, except in mission areas abroad where it has a remarkable currency...
...I leave it to Commonweal readers themselves to judge which of them is the best buy...
...New Blackfriars under its current editor, Herbert McCabe, is a characteristically Dominican product...
...CATHOLIC INTELLECTUAL JOURNALS BRITAIN'S SELECT THREE I thought it would be useful, at a time when Commonweal is facing the challenge of drastic inflation in America, to report on the current state of some Catholic periodicals in England, as they face the same problem...
...It is now frankly contemporary in tone and style, aiming to inform and enlighten the modern Christian primarily on matters of religion and social and political affairs...
...Wayward, unconventional, unpredictable, unamenable to external discipline, they have traced a very different path, in journalistic terms, from either the Jesuits or the secular clergy...
...Not surprisingly, New Blackfriars is the most vulnerable of the three periodicals, not only to financial crises but also to the orchestrated criticism of mainstream Catholicism...
...This sort of stuff reads, in 1975, like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan's Lord High Chancellor's Song: yet it had a kind of charm which much of the current "Moral Theology Forum," which has replaced it, lacks...
...The English Dominicans of the last half-century have been a race of brilliant eccentrics, both in personality and interests...
...We are the journal of the left and we are critical both of the church and of the left because this is where our theology takes us, the theology of the Dominican tradition," says the leaflet inviting new subscribers...
...The Clergy Review today retains its original purpose,but performs its job in a different way...
...Today, there are only three journals that I would put fairly and squarely in that category...
...Together they give a valuable picture of the quality and range of the best in Catholic thought in Britain (though they do not reflect the right-wing element which still persists here, as a kind of irritant, amidst the general vague progressiveness of modern Catholicism...
...The Jesuits' network of connections in many places, high and low, counts for a good deal here...
...It has regular film criticism...
...They all face grave problems in a world of inflation: they are all well worth preserving...
...I have said nothing about the relative circulations of these journals, since I am not able to do so with any accuracy, and in any case circulation is not a test of true merit in this kind of journalism...
...New Blackjriars, the journal of the English Dominicans [Blackfriars, Oxford, England, $12.50], is quite a different proposition from either of the preceding ones...
...A good deal of the credit for the new image of the periodical must go to Charles Davis, who edited it for much of that decade...
...Until recently it has eschewed editorials, but this is changing, I gather...
...In addition to longer articles and editorials, it used to feature 'questions and answers' on matters of morals, etc., by a resident team of canon lawyer, liturgical expert and so on...
...Despite its Jesuit ownership it boasts-yes, I think that might now be the right word-of having turned down Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry in the eighteen-seven-ties...
...The very old and the very young, among the clergy, seem to like it better than the middle-aged...
...The links which it affirms, and tries to make, between theology, politics and literature are far from obvious to the 'Catholic in the street,' while to proclaim that they can only be fully understood within a 'left' perspective makes it harder still...
...If it is little regarded by the 'official church' it is the most regarded of the three by non-Christians, who see it as a beacon of Catholic light amidst the general murk...
...Book reviews are restricted in range but go in for depth...
...The Clergy Review [48 Great Peter St., London SW1P 2HB, Surface Mail $10., Airmail $17.] has a very different sort of past...
...Abstracts from other worldwide religious periodicals are a specialty...
...In this report, I shall concentrate on one small sector only: the Catholic 'intellectual' monthly journals...
...What follows is of course only my own personal impressions, and readers must allow for any bias I may show...
...Not surprisingly too New Blackfriars is the toughest, the most varied and the most daring of the three, and the one which it is hardest for the newcomer to assimilate...
...Ironically, its survival in the nineteen-seventies could depend on the possession by the Society of the Hopkins royalties...
...But to do so is very hard work, against tremendous odds...
...But the absorption of Herder Correspondence was a different matter, and the modern version of The Month resembles, in appearance and partly in content, this later acquisition...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...
...Obviously the political element is mostly absent, but an undercurrent of ecclesiastical politics is often detectable as the journal tries to change and broaden clerical attitudes while not offending anyone...
...A casual glance at the April 1960 issue reveals the following typical question: "Does it follow from Canon 859 that the paschal precept is formally not one but two distinct precepts, so that two sins are involved in culpable failure to communicate in the course of a year...
...To see the tradition of Thomism as inescapably 'left' may seem to many people sheer effrontery: yet from the days of Eric Gill in the thirties to the present moment, such a position has been maintained by the Dominican journal, and I think with a good deal of success...
...The standards of discussion are remarkably high (it is interesting to note that Professor Karl Popper recently commended a Clergy Review article on his own philosophy-a rare event) and the book-reviewing is serious...
Vol. 102 • November 1975 • No. 18
