EDITORIAL
CORRESPONDENCE U#wllilag Hero Sands Point, N.Y. To the Editors: Congratulations to Father PhiUip Mooney, S.J., for his sensitive "Lindbergh and the Quiet of Christmas" and to Commonweal...
...The fledgling diocesan day college, at that time "For Women" in capital letters, was originally in one and then in two Victorian mansions on once elegant Clinton Ave...
...Great Britain ALA|N WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORYENAAR: Rome JOHN COONEY: Dub/In EDWARD S. SKILLIN: Publisher JOHN BRUBAKER: Advertising Manager Staff: LINDA F. KAYLER, PAMELA J. FITZGERALD, HARRIEITE EALSKY COMMONWEAL A review of Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts...
...Father Karl Rahner's words of 1959 lose nothing of their pertinence in 1977: "If they [the ecclesiastical leadership] do not allow the people to speak their minds, do not, in more dignified language, encourage or even tolerate, with courage and forbearance and even a certain optimism free from anxiety, the growth of public opinion within the Church, they run the risk of directing her from a soundproof ivory tower, instead of straining their ears to catch the voice of God, which can also be audible within the clamor of the times . . . . " This quotation would seem to put the burden of responsibility for a free and open Catholic Press on the bishops and their clerical command, but it does not excuse the editor, clerical or lay, from demanding, indeed fighting for the freedom and openness without which their job cannot be adequately done...
...Second class postage pa/d ~ New York, N.Y...
...Outside limits of bibliographies and assignments, his casual, poignant references to novels of Sigrid Undset, Wladyslaw Reymont and others of the day had us scuttling to libraries for new discovery, for adventure and high romance yes, but beyond, for wonder and pain of human conflict, for knowing the sheer ugliness of human injustice, for the sweep of social history (Continued on page 191) NEWS & VIEWS: 162 CORRESPONDENCE" 162 EDITORIAL: 162 WASHINGTON REPORT: The E n t e r t u i n e r s : Frank Getlein 104 McBRIDE FOR ABEL: Charles Owen Rice 1GG WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Steven Philip Kramer 187 TIMELY SAINTS: Abigail McCarthy 189 ItlORAJJTY AT THE WATER'S EDGE: Stephen A. Garrett 178 TRE CATHOLIC PRESS TODAY: Salvatore J. Adamo 1'/8 ON THE ROAD TO DROGREDA: James Gilhooley 178 THE STAGE: Gerald Weales 180 THE SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...Msgr...
...Putting it another way, it is a long trip back to the John O'Connors and the Donald Quinns, lay editors who thought principle important enough to lay their editorships on the line over it...
...He was a great deal more than that, an astonishingly well-rounded and simple man...
...But these can now be elassitied as historical phenomena...
...The results are safe, inoffensive publications which, however bright and lively, are still unfree and managed...
...The truism of this is demonstrated time and again in the daily general press--as recently, in fact, as the Washington Post's rejection of the oblique Carter White House attempt to quash a story about CIA payments to a Middle East monarch...
...To the Editors: In tributes to George N. Shuster which I have seen, only the New York Times spoke of his teaching at St...
...Single cap/no 7Sc...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 THE CATHOLIC PRESS The article in this issue by Msgr...
...Adamo is being fired for a series of journalistic actions---among them, the breaking of the Pallottine financial-shenanigans story a year before the daily papers were onto the news...
...The laity who moved into the Catholic Press in such impressive numbers after World War II and through Vatican Council II were supposed to bring not only a new professionalism to the medium, but also a new openness...
...WASHLNGTON REPORT THE ENTERTAINERS It's professionally humiliating is what it is...
...telephone: I212I MU 3-2042...
...Foreign $33.$g...
...Class was always good .humored, often delightfully witty and sometimes electric...
...Msgr...
...Of course there are editors, some of them laity, who are fighting the good fight, without great fanfare...
...Later there was a disinclination to suppress word that the Diocese of Camden was peddling property at Atlantic City, the budding casino capital of the East, to legalized gambling interests...
...The fate of Msgr...
...The added tragedy is that it is not only the Catholic Press as entity that suffers as a result of all this, but the Church itself...
...Despite periodic papal pronouncements on the necessity of the Catholic press and the importance of its role in helping bring about an informed public opinion in the Church . . . despite annual Catholic Press Month statements from bishops and chanceries about the urgency of a vital and vibrant Catholic Press in the mission of the Church, the American Catholic Press by and large remains a vehicle hobbled by the fine print of the very papal pronouncements that urge it on and by the witlessness of American ecclesiastical leadership...
...Printed in the USA and published bi.weekly by Cammonweal Pgb/Iskbg Co., 232 Mad/sea Ave., New York, N.Y...
...The freedom challenge applies just as surely in religious journalism, except --unfortunately--the same journalistic sensitivities obviously do not come into play and the issue currently goes by the boards...
...Foreign $19...
...For students of the twenties, classes with Professor Shuster were valued and lasting experience...
...The tragedy of their fate is compounded by the fact that, once removed, their places are filled by bureaucratic types---often clerics with little or no experience . . . . b in journahsm, but possessed of that precious ecclesiastical virtue: understanding of the bishop's mind and an ability to think as the bishop does...
...He expanded our vision in many directions...
...It wasn't always thus...
...There is no cause-effect relationship between this article and that firing...
...It is a clich6 that the freedom of the press is never fully won, and that it must be forever watched over and constantly re-energized...
...It is long past the time when Charles A. Lindbergh should be appreciated as much more than superb airplane pilot, unwilling hero, topflight aeronautical planner, wartime flight engineer and combat pilot...
...10016...
...To the Editors: Congratulations to Father PhiUip Mooney, S.J., for his sensitive "Lindbergh and the Quiet of Christmas" and to Commonweal for publishing it [Dec...
...300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mich, 48106, National Ser/cds Data Progrgm No.: ISSN 0010.3330...
...Indeed, so certain seemed the latter that observers were projecting as a problem of the future the job security of these lay editors committed to journalistic freedom...
...The two in combination effectively reduce most of the Catholic Press, and certainly the majority of Commonweal: 163 official publications, to the near status of house organs...
...181 VERSE: Richard E. McMullen 188...
...It is a curious reversal of roles, and of expectations...
...Salvatore Adamo on the condition of the American Catholic Press appears almost simultaneously with stories in the general and religious press that Msgr...
...The paradox is that it was all supposed to be so different by now...
...A day or two earlier, Henry Kissinger, the big bomber and bugger of the Nixon crowd, caused it to be made known that not only was he one of the big buck men in literature, on the basis 18 March 1977:164...
...Until they have the courage to make demands and to fight, the official Catholic Press token as a whole cannot be other than as described by Msgr...
...This is particularly apparent in the case of diocesan newspapers...
...At the same time, freedom-of-the-press issues have not noticeably caught up the lay editor, the one who was supposed to bring new dimensions of freedom...
...It appears to have been an idle concern...
...E. Howard Hunt, the well-known burglar, got sprung from the pokey the other day and immediately flew to Boston to sign up with a lecture bureau...
...1, 1924, to date available fkrocfik University Microfilms...
...In a word, Adamo loses his job for being what the conscientious editor, religious or otherwise, should be: honest, forthright, uncompromising in journalistic integrity...
...What's worse, Hunt has revealed that while tucked away he has become a painter and proposes now to gain his livelihood in part by the practice of that art...
...Microfilms from VoI...
...Joseph's College in Brooklyn during his years as Managing Editor of Commonweal...
...The purpose of the Adamo removal seems to indicate that this will be Camden's lot...
...goY ALEXANDER Shuster T r i b u t e Saxton's River, Vt...
...18] rightly called him an "encouraging mentor...
...To the extent that anyone has been caught up, it has been, rather, the occasional priest-editor, the very one who was figured to be inhibited in the performance of his journalistic tasks because under a pledge of obedience to a bishop...
...As teacher, he recognized with gracious ease whatever creative spark students showed...
...In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, there were some spectacular exercises of freedom of the press in Catholic journalism...
...Adamo's article, and our eyes, are to be believed, the official Catholic Press has settled comfortably back into its old obsequiousness...
...Now it is the Msgr...
...and the energetic defense of a pries.t-editor in Fall River, Mass., who was first censored, then dismissed by his bishop...
...Copyright 0 1977 Gammeawea/ Publishing Co., Inc.---US and Canada: $17 a year...
...And they get fired...
...Adamo makes a major point of his article almost redundant, for of itself it speaks reams about the controlled state of much of American Catholic journalism...
...Edward S. SkiUin's recollections in Commonweal [Feb...
...Adamo appears on solid ground...
...Special two-year rate $29.S0...
...Adamo...
...To the extent that that judgment can be verified in terms of "witnesses" and "victims," Msgr...
...Robert Wallace 175 ME TARZAN, YOU JANE: Burne Hogarth 182 BOOKS: David O'Connell, Dorothy Dohen, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Raymond A. Schroth, Michael F. McCauley 191 JAMES O'GARA: Editor JOHN DEEDY: Managing Editor RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE M. ROBERTSON, Editorial Asslstemt COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.: Movies JOHN FANDEL: Poetry FRANK GETLEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER...
...Adamo speaks of a "loss of nerve" among editors, and about top talent being "cowed...
...He does not except the lay editor, who, he suggests, has been thoroughly institutionalized and has learned to survive all too well, thank you, in the woods of ecclesia...
...Commonweal is Indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Per/rid/oK/ Index, and Rook Review Digest...
...If Msgr...
...Adamos and the Father Ed Byingtons, the editor who lost out in Fall River, who supply what lead there is...
...Adamo is being terminated by his bishop as editor of the Catholic Star Herald, newsweekly of the Diocese of Camden, N.J., a post Adamo has held with distinction for 15 years...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 6
