The last word hasn't been said. Yet
O'Gara, James
THE LAST WORD ACTUALLY, THE LAST WORD HASN'T BEEN SAID. YET James O'Gara I can't say exactly when I started to read Commonweal, but I was probably in my early...
...The magazine was one of several Catholic publications we received at the Catholic Worker in Chicago at the time, in the days before I left to serve in the army in World War II...
...Even in those days before Vatican II, I would have thought that the fairly regular appearance in our pages of members of the hierarchy like Bishop (later Cardinal) John Wright and others would have indicated our orthodoxy...
...I also wonder if current-day readers realize that Commonweal was not always a nonprofit corporation...
...YET James O'Gara I can't say exactly when I started to read Commonweal, but I was probably in my early twenties...
...Years later, thanks to the efforts of a friend of a friend who served as our pro bono lawyer in the matter, the magazine was able to become officially a nonprofit corporation, eliminating private stockholders who could bring pressure on the editors...
...I conveyed these feelings to the stockholders and they seemed to have decided to ease up the pressure on us...
...I finally persuaded Ed Skillin to buy out the other stockholders so that he had a majority of stock for voting purposes...
...Looking back on that now, bear in mind the considerable tension of that period on the McCarthy issue, and the near hysteria on the subject in some quarters...
...Our circulation was even lower than it is now, unfortunately...
...THE LAST WORD ACTUALLY, THE LAST WORD HASN'T BEEN SAID...
...The story went that one day a seminarian going to confession told his confessor that he had read the Commonweal...
...What I am saying is that the magazine was originally set up as a normal corporation, not as a legally nonprofit operation able to receive tax-free gifts, as it is now...
...In addition, the magazine regularly printed distinguished if sometimes controversial theologians...
...To which the young man replied, "But Father, I took pleasure in it...
...After I was on the staff, I learned a joke which we told on ourselves...
...Since our circulation was low and our financial resources were even slimmer than they are now, it seems to me very possible that that event might even have been the magazine's "last word...
...I wonder if most present-day readers are aware that in those days before Vatican II, being a "Commonweal Catholic" had a very different feel than it has since the council brought some of the ideas commonly discussed in Commonweal's pages into the mainstream of Catholic thinking...
...This is not to say that we ever made a profit...
...The confessor said, "It isn't necessarily a sin to read the Commonweal...
...May it have years and years to continue in that work...
...This meant that we were protected from stockholder pressure on our editorial positions, pressure being brought by Burnham primarily...
...But we were later halfway forced to run a regular column by Burnham, which was increasingly both right-wing and dull...
...James O'Gara served as Commonweal's managing editor (1952-67) and editor (1967-84...
...This stock division and possible pressure on the editors was not a happy situation...
...That made efforts to build circulation and stay afloat even more difficult...
...This fragment of memory is scheduled, I know, for the department called "The Last Word...
...The editors always published material if they thought it worthwhile, even if it tended to be a bit dull or heavy reading...
...It is hard to guess what would have happened to the magazine if we had resigned in a body and it had become something of a scandal in national Catholic journalistic circles...
...Thinking back over those times, I am inclined to think that had Philip Burnham been able to force us into mass resignation, with all the publicity that would have followed, the magazine might not have survived...
...In those bad old days, the magazine was forbidden reading in some of the major seminaries of the country...
...Being on what was in those days considered the frontier brought us denunciations in diocesan papers and from pulpits—even in some cases from the pulpits of our own parish churches...
...Commonweal 63 November 19,1999...
...As it turned out, Commonweal weathered that storm, as it has all others, and it went on to publish many, many more words since then...
...When the hints became somewhat more than hints, we younger editors talked it over...
...The stock in the corporation at that time was divided among three owners: Edward Skillin, Philip Burnham, and Mrs...
...George Craig, Jr...
...We increasingly received hints that we should ease up in our criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...I was delegated to go to the stockholders' meeting and inform them that if there was any more pressure to change the editorial position on Joe McCarthy, we would all resign in a body and then call in representatives of the New York Times and other publications to tell them why we were resigning...
...This became quite an issue for us editors during the McCarthy era...
...During the 1950s, Burnham became more and more conservative, and at one point this created quite a problem for the editors...
...Happy anniversary, Commonweal...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 20
