Christian gentlemen: a chapter of 'Commonweal' history

There has never been a cult of personality at Commonweal, for which, on the whole, the Lord be thanked and the saints be praised. Small magazines don't really have room for superstars soaking up all the attention; let the readers read the whole damn thing and decide for themselves who's good for today.

Yet sometimes, when combined with the compulsory Catholic self-effacement of the 1940s and '50s, the anonymity around here could seem almost eerie, suggesting that the magazine wasn't actually written by anybody at all, but was flown in by angels every week. Years could go by without a single first-person singular breaking into print, as if the Humility Police were intercepting these earthly vanities and pluralizing them all down to ciphers. On a previous anniversary, a senior editor (who shall be nameless) undertook to compare the current editors with previous ones without identifying anyone from either generation. "They're better than ever today," he summed up vaguely, and presumably are better still now--whoever they are.

Fortunately, though, readers have never been bound by this rubric, and I can well remember my own days as a young scofflaw in the '50s, snatching a quick read of Commonweal from the church rack and forming my own little pantheon, from which I would now like to cull just four names, chosen because one, they still go so well together, and two, because among them they typify both the church and the magazine in the crucial years between World War II and the Second Vatican Council; and incidentally also, three, because they were all lifelong friends of mine, in spirit when not in fact, and because the last of them died just last year.

John Cogley, Jim O'Gara, Bill Clancy, and Jim Finn all came, by chance, or perhaps not, from the Midwest, two from Chicago, where Cogley and O'Gara had run a particularly swinging branch of the Catholic Worker, Finn from nearby Gary, Indiana, and Clancy from Detroit, in the heart of Michael Moore country, where the class warfare is, or was, a simple fact of life with company goons literally busting heads and auto workers holding their ground grimly.

The resulting mix of social and religious activism and curiosity and much, much more blended so well in these four men that, to my skimming eye, they became a single great writer, and I could now swear that I even met them all together at one Socratic lunch in 1962. But this surmise is rendered unlikely by one other constant of Commonweal life, namely turnovers. Then, as perhaps now, one could only afford to work at the magazine until one reached two and a half babies, or bumped into a sudden change in the rent-control laws, or just about any other surprise whatever. So at least our blood was always new and our ideas the latest, if not best.

And each editor would have to round out his own bio and self-definition with what he did afterward. Cogley, for instance, who had been from day one our sage, our genius, would naturally enough proceed variously to the ideas desk at the New York Times and to Robert Hutchins's mega-super-think tank at Santa Barbara, while Clancy, as our most spiritual, would become a priest with Bishop John Wright's intellectual apostolate in Pittsburgh, where, no doubt, his deep, whiskey-jar chuckle won hearts and minds right and left. And Jim Finn would also wind up doing what he liked best. In all my own talkative life, I have never met anyone who could argue as long as Jim (ideally about foreign affairs) without raising his voice or his body heat, so he became the editor of a magazine called World View, where they paid him to do just that and where he would retain his cheerful serenity and placid pugnacity right up to the end a couple of years ago. Which brings us to Jim O'Gara, who had by sustained prodigies of simple living managed to break the rule and hang around long enough to steer Commonweal cautiously through the quicksand and the quagmires of the 1960s, and back into the normal path of evolution, where we find it today.

Historians looking for a single defining battle or showdown to mark this next transition might be pleasantly surprised to learn that there actually was one of sorts, and that while it might have seemed somewhat tame by 1960s standards--we didn't lock O'Gara in his room, or burn him in effigy, or even ask him to leave town--it was also uncommonly intense by Commonweal standards. And it went something like this.

On one nondescript Sunday morning, we, the editors, all received phone calls from one Dan Callahan, who had already become the most outspoken of our Young Turks, suggesting that we all assemble at the magazine for an open-ended review of grievances plus suggestions that would put everything out on the table once and for all. And it speaks wonders for our enthusiasm at work, if not at home, that we all seemed to turn up together almost immediately.

"What are you doing here?" O'Gara's puzzled, slightly edgy, first words on my arrival would draw a firm line around my own tiny role in what followed--because I had no honest answer for him. As a drama critic and book editor, who was about to transfer to Esquire anyway, I wasn't quite sure myself what I was doing there. So I mumbled something about "solidarity" when what I should have admitted was simple curiosity, because the one thing that I presumably was qualified to talk about was theater, and this was surely going to provide plenty of that as well. And fortunately it did, because as the large statements of principle inevitably gave way to smaller questions of detail, I found my mind slipping away to greener ballparks or whatever. So have we just agreed to run more stuff on Latin America, or less? And what was that about women deacons? And, more seriously, hadn't I promised to take the kids some place today?