Growing up Commonweal: what it meant; what it means

We were two and four years old in 1952 when our family moved east from Chicago so that our father could take up his new post as managing editor of Commonweal. We can still remember the long overnight ride on the train taking us to our new home. For thirty-two of Commonweal's eighty years, our father, James O'Gara, served on the staff of the magazine--first as managing editor and later as editor.

Growing up Catholic is common enough, but growing up Commonweal Catholic less so. For three decades--throughout the McCarthy era, the election of John Kennedy, the civil-rights years, the Vietnam War, and especially the Second Vatican Council--there was a way in which we were "daughters of the Commonweal," our growing-up years tremendously influenced by our father's role as Commonweal's editor.

Of course, we were also just little girls growing up in the Long Island suburbs--we jumped rope, we swam in the ocean, we caught lightning bugs. But we were the children of our parents, James and Joan O'Gara. From our earliest years, in ways that became clearer as we matured, their ideas and values--many formed at the Chicago Catholic Worker and Chicago Inter-Student Catholic Action (CISCA)--shaped our home.

Our parents taught us a strong commitment to the church, and they taught us about the great responsibility and privilege of the laity. Our father saw his writing and editing as his lay responsibility as a "committed citizen of the church" to help it more clearly reflect its social teachings to the world. Our parents loved the Catholic Church--it formed the underpinning of their lives. Even in the days before the reforms of the liturgy, our home life was centered around the feasts and customs of the liturgical year--an advent wreath before they became common practice, our "walking" the Three Kings statues along the mantel to get them to the creche by the Feast of the Epiphany, attendance at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, bedtime blessings from our father every night.

As we grew, we came to understand that our parents' commitment was to a broader vision of Catholicism than the one presented by our Catholic school and parish. The liturgical movement, papal social teachings, and the role of the laity--none of these got much play in the East Coast Catholicism of our childhood. Our parents strove to maintain a healthy lay criticism of the official church, while at the same time encouraging us to respect our teachers and pastors. "What did you learn in religion today?" our father would often ask us at dinner. If we described some overemphasis on a minor point of the Baltimore Catechism or a teacher's dramatic retelling of Marian visions at Fatima, our father was careful to discuss these with us and give us a broader gospel-based picture of the church's teaching.

Our parents wanted us to be educated in a parish school, but at the same time experienced anxiety that our father's public role as editor might cause us discomfort or discrimination. This was particularly true during the McCarthy era of the 1950s when anti-Communist hysteria--"better dead than red"--reached great heights, especially in Catholic circles. Since Commonweal and the Catholic Worker were the only two Catholic publications denouncing Senator Joseph McCarthy, our father and the other editors received direct and sometimes intimidating treatment. This was particularly true in our diocese of Brooklyn, where the diocesan newspaper published editorials and letters supporting McCarthy and deploring his critics. For a period, someone leafleted outside our church as we went into Mass, denouncing our father and the other editors as "card-carrying Communists," pointing out that two of them (our father and John Cogley) even had children in the local parish schools. It was not until years afterward that we understood why our father questioned us so carefully every night about "what Sister had said" in school that day. But it was a joy of our parents' later years that the reforms of Vatican II brought them involvement in that same parish as catechists and sponsors for adults entering the church.

Well-reasoned and well-expressed thought was of great importance in our home. We saw in our lifetime how ideas written in the pages of Commonweal and other publications--about liturgical renewal, the role of the laity, ecumenical dialogue--could cause real change in the church at Vatican II. So our house was a house of conversations. "What do you think about English in the liturgy?" we were asked. "How do you think civil-rights issues can be worked on in our town?" These were the kind of questions often discussed at the dinner table.

Many people came to join the conversations at our house. We remember wearing our best dresses and patent-leather shoes, serving appetizers to the crowd of visiting grownups in our living room. Who would have been there when we were children, talking about the reform of the papacy, church-state relations, or interracial justice? We recall seeing many connected with Commonweal: Edward Skillin and John Cogley, William Pfaff and Philip Scharper, Wilfrid Sheed and Richard Horchler, John Deedy and Michael Harrington, Raymond Schroth, SJ, and Paul Farrell. Our father also maintained cordial relations with others who shared common goals--editors of America, Christianity and Crisis, the Christian Century, and Commentary, and staff from the National Council of Churches and the American Jewish Committee. Always the talk was good, and always the same kind of questions: What should the church do? What should the United States do?