Time's Covenant

...candidate at Notre Dame, Clancy struck at several attempts by Catholics ( including Cardinal Spellman) to condemn, censor, or suppress several movies and a college magazine...

...That case can be made only with great injustice to the significant issues of the day and the consequent battles in which Commonweal played a most honorable role...

...Cogley's responses were almost always original and unpredictable, not to be readily anticipated by someone else...

...The essentials of the faith" are not as clear as they seemed then...

...that Joe McCarthy and the movement to which he gave his name flourished...

...tion...

...But to all who, with any intellectual honesty, continue to call themselves Catholic, there were, are, and always will be, essentials...

...He loved his friends...

...According to Moran, these efforts brought down on Clancy the veiled wrath of Spellman, the president of Notre Dame being selected as the agent of his dismissal from the school...

...In staking out this position Clancy was not adopting the familiar stance of aging liberals who, no longer comfortable with change which alters the world as they knew it in their youth, become "conservative" in the pejorative sense...

...Certainly, for most, they are not as many...

...The church then makes itself merely another agency for political or social change...

...It was at least partly this characteristic of Clancy, I believe, that once led James O'Gara to describe Clancy as the Commonweal editor par excellence...

...He preached not of the needs of the third world, nor of the compassion we should feel for those afflicted with AIDS, nor of the ghastly dangers of nuclear war, nor of the appalling conditions of the homeless — all situations which deeply concerned him and the topics of innumerable sermons by others — but of Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected...

...Clancy carried these qualities with him in his subsequent years as a working journalist and, still later, as a priest and provost of the Oratory community in Pittsburgh...

...Both men frequently disconcerted and sometimes disappointed those who knew what they wanted to hear from these two men — and heard something quite different...

...that a movie could be condemned and kick up a mini-storm because it contained the word "virgin...

...How dated this may now sound, a quarter of a century later...

...This book is part of the testimony of that love...

...But the quotation is from "The Troubling Spirit," an article by William Clancy that appeared in Commonweal almost twenty years ago...

...James Finn " The real crisis (of the Catholic church) is one of authority and freedom, and the agony it brings with it is shared by those who think they must now defend one of these values against the other, and those many more who are tragically torn between the two...

...At its frequent best it represented and articulated a generosity of spirit, keen moral and intellectual discrimination, and a notable civility of manner and discourse...

...In a sermon he preached not long before he died he commented on this situa334...

...Mutatis mutandis, these words apply to William Clancy as well...

...and in his sermons...

...A Ph.D...

...If the church abandons the preaching of the mystery of the cross and the resurrection in pursuit of any temporal good, no matter how necessary or how laudable that temporal good may be, the church not only forsakes its mission but the church becomes irrelevant to the ultimate human condition...

...In his fine introduction to this volume, Michael Moran tells how Clancy's early attempt to dispel some of this oppressive climate led, indirectly, to his term at the magazine...

...Time's Covenant is also testimony to this characteristic of Clancy's mind and spirit...

...It was this message, presented in a myriad of ways, that drew people of all ages to hear him preach...

...He joined Commonweal soon after and, with John Cogley and other editors, fleshed out the body of opinion, attitudes, analyses, and judgment that came to be associated with the term "Commonweal Catholic...

...In our present cultural mythology, the fifties are frequently regarded as the time of Eisenhower and somnolence, a trough between the political highs of the forties and sixties...

...In this volume, these qualities are evident in his response to writers as diverse as Santayana, Mauriac, Lippmann, Silone, Toynbee, Waugh, and Newman — always Newman...

...His conservatism was based on holding to sound religious principles which he saw being lightly abandoned in favor of intense but sectarian political engagement, "the eternal enemy of any genuine Catholicism...

...In his eulogy of John Cardinal Wright, who died in 1979, Clancy recalled some of his own past words about the essentials of the faith...

...To appreciate the intensity of those struggles one must recall that during those years the gap between laity and hierarchy was impressive and that, on most public questions, ready lay submission rather than cooperation was expected...

...In "The Catholic as Philistine," Clancy described these efforts as "semi-ecclesiastic McCarthyism...

...To affirm this proposition, to fight for it when many seem to think that the history of dogma, liturgy, and the church itself began around 1966, is not to have become "conservative...

...It is to have survived, as a liberal Catholic, into an age when that center which is liberal Catholicism is threatened by attacks from right and left...

...Like any reader of Time's Covenant must be, I was struck with how often Clancy's judgments encompass and transcend the particular limited subjects that provoke them...

...Clancy himself had the opportunity to reflect on the world after Vatican II and the changes it had wrought on the church — and on his own views...

...Tant mieux some may respond...

...But to Clancy this was a near-tragedy...

...And one last reflection...

...Useless questions...

...The classic liberal Catholicism that had shaped his own worldview and that he had consciously represented, the tradition that he defined as that of "Lacordaire, Dupanloup, Blondel, and Maritain, Newman and Acton, Orestes Brownson, Archbishop Ireland, and Commonweal itself — that tradition, he perceived quite correctly, has been challenged in many of its aspects, in places eroded and even superseded...

...He loved ideas and conversation, good food and good wine...

...He looked out on a world in which almost every important issue has been politicized, in which sectarian positions have been clothed in religious symbols and invested with an ultimacy they do not deserve and cannot satisfy...

...Above all else, as he confessed, he loved the church — one, holy, Catholic, apostolic, and, of course, Roman...

...Again, not to be anticipated...

...If you read that opinion slowly enough you probably had time to think of several people, several issues to which it might apply today...

...Time's Covenant is not, however, simply an interesting slice of American Catholic history as seen through the eyes of an acute observer and participant...

...John Cardinal Wright did not leave the classic liberal Catholic tradition...

...it left him, or at least it disappeared as he had known it in the years and the angers that followed Vatican II...

...The church was the sign of those things which are eternal, set down among the good things, and the bad things, that pass...

...Clancy joined the Commonweal staff in the early fifties...

...And Clancy's responses flowed from a continually developing application of clear principles to new situations...

...But both men taught a lesson that can be learned — though not without cost...

...William Clancy is one of two Commonweal editors — the other being John Cogley — about whom I find myself asking since each of them died: What would he think of this question...

...His conservatism, if such it should be called, found an eager audience in the faculty and student community to which he ministered as a priest...

...in his discussions of freedom, democracy, Protestantism, and the nature of belief...

...In speaking thus of Wright, Clancy was acutely aware that he was expressing his own views...

...One last quotation, again concerning his friend and bishop, John Wright: "John Wright loved the world...

...Do your own thinking, make your own decisions, even if they run counter to what friends and colleagues expect from you...

...How would he respond to this situation...