By way of farewell

...In this respect, too, Cardinal Bernardin's proposal holds out great hope...

...As far as the priesthood goes, I agree with those who say the pope and the bishops must take a hard look at the criteria for who should be ordained...

...it is neither...

...As one of my friends pointed out when he saw the letter, at least it was signed only "Sincerely yours," not "Sincerely yours in Christ...

...A S FOR THE WORLD the church is here to serve, plenty of changes have taken place there too...

...I am asked to talk about many things -- books, political life, the world of Washington, ecumenism, the laity in the churches, and, of course, women in the church and society...

...have declined in number from about 180,000 to 120,000...

...Add to the communal Catholic the (literally) millions of divorced Catholics who have married again "outside the church," and it seems a poor time to discourage would-be priests of either sex, married or single...

...I won't deny that this stung, perhaps especially my dear friend John Cogley, then Executive Editor...

...Urged on by Joan, I decided we should come anyway, and here I am in 1984_9 As the joke has it, I knew the job would never last...

...So thank you again and goodbye for now...

...It seems easy for some to forget how much desert there was in the pre-Vatican church, but I cannot help but remember...

...I only say prayers with the highest number of days of indulgence...

...While I am complaining, what about that ever more present phenomenon Andrew Greeley calls the "communal Catholic...

...or, even worse, to further antagonize already antagonized American Catholic women who are told they can't even see a girl serving on the altar...

...And as one whose background lies in Cathofic Action in Chicago, it seems to me there are no current equivalents of things like Chicago Inter-Student Catholic Action (CISCA), the Young Christian Students, the Young Christian Workers, even of the somewhat frenzied Summer Schools of Catholic Action originated by Father Daniel A. Lord, S.J...

...The result: New York and other urban areas around the country must now provide shelter not for dozens every night but literally for thousands...

...And the most welcome change has been in the attitude toward the world...

...With some justice, conservatives have made the point that the church has recently been too concerned with political activity, too neglectful of educational and spiritual leadership...

...The climate was stormier then, in my earlier days here...

...The way things are now, both sides are making proposals for the front pages that they know will be turned down...

...In this period I figure I wrote between 750,000 and 1,000,000 words in editorials, articles, and in the weekly column I did for a few years...

...Need I say I was very proud to be asked to join Commonweal's staff...

...And on the other side, these clerical refuseniks are matched by lay people mired in deep apathy who could not care less about participation...

...On that positive note I will end, with best wishes to all my readers, to the Commonweal Associates, and to all my colleagues, past and present...

...to discourage nuns in their indispensable work...

...one Sunday early in my life here this was distributed after every Mass at my parish where my children attended the parochial school...

...If there have been failings-away, it may well have been because for many the faith of pre-Vatican II was shallow, formalized...

...we can easily blow that any editorial day and probably will...

...That's a plus...

...Since the current administration took over, there has been a lot of abuse directed at this and other social programs, but the central fact remains: there are hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who are not going to bed hungry tonight because of these programs, just as there are hundreds of thousands who are getting badly needed medical care because of Medicare and Medicaid...

...But there were consolations too, and the picture was not unrelievedly dark, even in the worst days of the McCarthy era...

...The term was originally coined by our critics as a denigrating description, to indicate someone whose theology was shaky at best and whose loyalty was dubious, but I never took the term that way...

...The church has problems since Vatican II, but nothing to compare with what problems there would have been if the council had not taken place...

...Going about on the lecture circuit can be equally so for those of us who sit at the typewriter generalizing about many things...

...the situation will, they say, lead to greater lay participation and responsibility...

...Concerning the laity, there are also plenty of critical issues...

...There are lectors and married deacons and extraordinary ministers and various kinds of churchly ministries, but how much respect is there for the layman's real work in his secular milieu...

...The Catholic Worker can house a few dozen people in each house of hospitality, but a young New York lawyer inspired by the movement could also go to court on behalf of the homeless sleeping on the city's grates and in the subways...

...Among the nicer things that have happened to me in recent years, I count an honorary doctorate from my own alma mater, Loyola University of Chicago, where in younger days I taught sociology and Catholic social thought -- by coincidence, my successor Peter Steinfels attended the same university many years later...

...First, a two-sided problem for those who would like to share more responsibility inside the church...

...there in the mail was a substantial check from the archbishop of Brooklyn, Thomas E. Molloy...

...As far as I can see, for every bishop and priest who really welcomes lay participation and responsibility in more than a nominal way, there are at least one other bishop and priest who reject it...

...Then there was the verdict pronounced by the at that time 23 March 1984: 165 right-wing Brooklyn Tablet and which the New York diocesan Catholic News picked up and boxed on the front page: "The editors of Commonweal are not fit to be called Catholic...

...Said the letter, simply, "May Bishop Sheil and the editors of Commonweal burn in hell for all eternity...

...Take as simple a thing as food stamps, for instance...

...With all the flaws of such programs, in a complex society like ours what are they but ways we have devised to carry out the works of mercy...

...Not one of the highlights of my life...

...It could have been simplistic and moralistic...

...The magazine was consistently scornful of Senator Joe McCarthy and his phoney crusade, and I remember a letter we received shortly after Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago gave a talk also denouncing the junior senator from Wisconsin...

...How really sound are the reasons for restricting ordained priesthood to life-time celibate males...

...Don't worry, though...

...We still have a good way to go on this, but a start has been made...

...The commitment of the "Commonweal Catholic" was - - and is - - to a church that was open and pluralistic, not rigid and authoritarian, a church that was the visible manifestation of Jesus's presence in the world...

...That, more than any amount of lobbying, any number of arguments about the moment of conception, will convince fellow Americans...

...And most of all they are going to have to create the kind of Christian community that itself embodies a treasuring of life, that challenges, in its daily existence, the very idea that human beings could be "unwanted...

...Maybe, but at a time when we need more and smaller parishes and increased educational efforts, I am not convinced...

...If we at the typewriters (or wordprocessors...

...Commonweal salaries have never been much to brag about, and in those days they were even less so...

...And that brings me to the bishops' pastoral on the topic, about which I am enthusiastic...

...In comparison with nuclear confrontation, all other issues fade into insignificance...

...John's, the Benedictine university in Collegeville, Minnesota...

...Some observers say one has to see the silver lining in that black cloud...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy FACING THE FACTS THE ECONOMICS OF WOMEN G ETTING OUT and meeting the voters is supposed to be a salutary exercise for office-holders and candidates...

...A lot of things have happened inside the church as a result of Vatican II...

...it is not...

...As for the future, in September my wife and I will go to St...

...The Irish West Side of Chicago where I grew up was not without its virtues, but an intellectual oasis it was not...

...It has been a good if somewhat hectic three decades, but it is time, I think, to step down, while I am still physically up to doing other things and while I have an able colleague, Peter Steinfels, to whom I can turn over the Editor's chair...

...Such individuals may be able to retain their Catholic values with little or no involvement with the institutional church, but I doubt that their children will...

...And in that desert Cornmonweal was often a lonely voice crying out on behalf of human rights, of ecumenism, of interracial harmony, of social justice, of intellectual integrity...

...This should not blind anyone to the fact that some very real problems loom ahead...

...In this it was a model for how such letters should be prepared, and I hope none is written any other way in the future...

...This issue will be the last one, therefore, with my name at the top of the masthead...

...The bishops are going to have to give far more attention not only to telling Catholics themselves that the church opposes abortion but why...

...The bad thing -- the worst thing -- is the most obvious: the arms race and the ever worsening nuclear confrontation between the superpowers...

...For the past ten years I have done some talking each year and I have discovered that what I learn is not so much more about what is true but what people feel about what is true...

...It is unlikely that Catholic children would hear such a thing today...

...Finally, it is ironic that conservatives have balked at the cardinal's proposal - - although, in fairness, a good number have welcomed it...

...B UT I DON'T want to be a Gloomy Gus.There are plenty of bright patches in the cloudy ecclesiastical sky...

...There are some facts they are not willing to accept, others ! evident for years but which they are just beginning to accept, and some startling and disturbing facts which they seem to have accepted without any struggle at all...

...Nowadays, with such goals won at least in theory, we at Commonweal are much more respectable than we used to be...

...From the Editor BY WAY OF FAREWELL A PERSONAL NOTE I N JANUARY I completed thirty-two years at Commonweal, roughly half as Managing Editor and the other half as Editor...

...Sooner or later, the social evolution of Catholics to full economic and educational status would have meant a crisis, the problem of facing the intellectual challenge of the modern world...

...A special word of praise should be added for the way the pastoral was prepared...

...I remember, for instance, an anonymous leaflet produced by some faceless person or group which denounced me as a "red Communist rink...

...Instead it is readable, moral, nuanced, balanced -- all in all, deserving of the compliment of the right-wing attacks it has been receiving...

...It has been a good thirty-two years, blessed as they were in the kind of people I have worked with and in the experiences I have had, including a certain amount of foreign travel and reporting, which I dearly love...

...The way I see it, Vatican I r s basic intuition lies precisely in this: in seeing the essence of the church in its mission of service Commonweal: 166 to the world, of saving the world in its totality, of serving it in history, here and now...

...and which drew young people by the thousands...

...Thus I saw the description intended to be derogatory as a badge of honor, something to be lived up to, and I still feel the same way today...

...Government does have a definite role in social and economic life...

...It was made ready in draft after draft, written and rewritten after long and extensive consultations with experts and lay people from all over the country...

...Here I don't think the U.S...

...Since John F. Kennedy, a qualified Catholic probably would not have any special problem getting himself elected president of the United States if he were brave enough or foolish enough to want that awesome job...

...For a significant number of Catholics, lay, clerical, and religious, the faith is deeper and their practice more vital than ever...

...Shortly before I came, Edward Skillin felt he had to warn me that the magazine was in even shakier financial condition than usual, and this news was nerve-producing...

...As for the women religious, the worst way I can imagine to promote vocations is to harass them, as the Vatican seems intent on doing...

...I agree with the esteemed Monsignor John Tracy Ellis that the church is going through its greatest crisis since the Reformation...

...We were leaving the city where my wife Joan and I both were born and grew up, and where we had relatives and many friends...

...From the days of my youth, when I was involved in organizing a CIO union, I don't think I have suffered any illusions about the Communists or the Soviet Union...

...there I will spend an academic year as a Fellow at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, pursuing a project in Catholic social thought, always a favorite topic of mine...

...Nonetheless, in the Reagan years especially, it seems to me that many of our offers in arms negotiations have been self-serving and selfdefeating...

...I remember a nun I had in grammar school who managed to combine anti-Semitism and bad theology when she said to us, "I am a bit of a Jew when it comes to praying...

...From the time I was old enough to begin to develop some opinions of my own, I have always been what used to be called a "Commonweal Catholic," as I'm sure many of our readers are too...

...is blameless by any means...

...As the concepts of Vatican II spread, people inside the church, lay and cleric alike, have started to turn away from the conception of the church as a static institution which exists primarily to maintain its own existence...

...The church is seen increasingly as a church that exists to serve others...

...Thank God for the Vatican Council...

...There was no place else I would sooner have worked...

...That council brought many things to pass that Commonweal had been arguing for since 1924, from the Mass in English to greater lay participation and an enlarged conception of the church as a church of service rather than a church of privilege...

...JAMES O'GARA (James O'Gara was Managing Editor of Commonweal from January 1952 to May of 1967 and Editor from that date till the present...

...The pastoral could have been leaden and lifeless...

...There have been a lot of other developments in the last thirty years, many of them to the good, at least if you forget about things like Vietnam and El Salvador...

...One problem that stands out is the sharp decline in priestly and religious vocations...

...there are something like one-fourth as many young men in seminaries as there were two decades ago, and women religious in the U.S...

...Marriage encounter groups are all very well, but what do we have for young people searching for a direction in life...

...T HERE IS no doubt that the climate of opinion in the church has changed drastically since the 1962-1965 Vatican Council...

...The one subject which I find still upsets people and the area in which they have the most resistance to the facts is that of women and 23 March 1984:167...

...And there is even a bigger problem, the lack of regard for a genuine lay vocation...

...After that I will be open to whatever interesting retirement projects that may turn up...

...All of us who served here have scars to show for it...

...On the side I wrote a number of religious documentaries for television, served as general editor for a series of religious books, for a period did a great deal of lecturing around the country, wrote a few articles for other magazines, and for four years managed to teach sociology at Fordham University a couple of evenings a week and on Saturday morning...

...could sort these out we would know a lot more about what needs further discussion and what does not...

...I remember, for example, one Monday after a particularly vicious attack on us by the Brooklyn Tablet...

...1 HIS, OF COURSE, was not the way our critics saw things - - not by any means...

...there at last the church stopped seeing itself as a beleaguered fortress and began to confront modernity...

...While I was in Chicago I wrote regularly for the magazine, and Commonweal stood for something in the American church that I was proud to identify with...

...I was a youngish married man with two children when I moved from Chicago to New York to be Managing Editor, and the move was not carded out without trepidation on my part...

...Over the years there have been many similar encouraging happenings...

...If some Catholics, including some bishops, did not like us, we always had many friends including bishops who did...

...It was, we gathered, his way of saying that he did not share the views of his own diocesan paper and its lay managing editor, Patrick Scanlan...

...This is crucial...

...To me the expression meant one who had a definite commitment to the church but who was not sectarian in spirit...