About the Magazine
BASICS: It’s an independent journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics. Twenty-two issues a year; usually 32 pages. Offices in a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with a good view of the Hudson River and beyond.
CONTENT, RANGE: No soccer scores, no recipes, no crosswords. But lots of politics: e.g., the tobacco wars, welfare reform, budget-balancing, Israel & Palestine, China & Tibet, crises in Rwanda, Ecuador, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong.... And plenty of ethics-talk: gay marriage, death penalty, euthanasia, abortion. Plus a miscellany: women’s ordination, science & religion, the high cost of college, Social Security, who exactly was/is Jesus?
STYLE, STANCE: Commonweal publishes editorials, columns, essays, poetry, reviews of books, movies, plays, the media, a selection of apposite and/or funny cartoons, & lots of letters to the editors. Liberal? Conservative? Depends on the issue & the writer. From its founding in 1924(!), the journal has held that America has much to learn from Catholicism, and vice versa-a core belief that has survived severe testing in disputes over the Spanish Civil War, civil rights, Vietnam, Humanae vitae....
CIRCULATION: Around 20,000 on a good day; readership around 60,000. So it’s a "little" magazine, meaning that if you subscribe you may well be the first on your block.
INFLUENCE: Hard to measure, but the magazine is much quoted, reprinted, anthologized, and cussed at. The OCLC Online Union Catalog, a bibliographic database that tracks library holdings across 60 countries, reported that as of 1994 Commonweal ranked 71st among the top 100 periodicals in the OCLC compilation-way behind Time (No. 1) and Reader’s Digest (No. 16), but ahead of Ms., Vogue, and Commentary.
OWNERSHIP, FINANCES: Nonprofit corporation controlled by a nine-member board of directors. Loses money on operations, kept afloat by reader contributions (about 10 percent of revenues).
KUDOS: Historian Rodger Van Allen describes Commonweal as "perhaps the most significant lay enterprise and achievement in the history of American Catholicism." Every year our peers in the Catholic press affirm that verdict by granting the magazine awards for "Best Article," "Best Review Section," "Best Cover," "General Excellence," etc. We do not dispute these judgments.
A Brief History of Commonweal
by Patrick Jordan, Managing Editor
The Commonweal (shortened to Commonweal in 1965) is the oldest independent lay Catholic journal of opinion in the United States. Founded in 1924 by Michael Williams (1877-1950) and the Calvert Associates, it reflected a growing sense of self-confidence among American Catholics as they emerged from a largely immigrant status to become highly successful members of the American mainstream. Modeled on the New Republic and the Nation, the magazine’s goal was to be a weekly review "expressive of the Catholic note" in covering literature, the arts, religion, society, and politics. Never bound by a strict ideology, Commonweal ("the common good") became a forum for thoughtful, urbane discussion, largely from a liberal, reformist point of view, and has had a distinguished roster of editors and writers.
Liberal in temperament - opinionated and engaged, but tolerant in tone - the magazine’s editorial strategy was (and continues to be) to reject sectarianism and to rely on reasoned discussion. It has never shrunk, however, from taking strong and controversial positions. When it declared its neutrality during the Spanish Civil War (1938), circulation plummeted by 20 percent. During World War II, it condemned the firebombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It criticized American racism, the anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin, and the smear tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy; supported resistance to U.S. involvement in Vietnam; and took issue with the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae vitae. Never large in circulation (20,000 over the last decade), Commonweal is nonetheless considered an influential source of reflective Catholic opinion.
The magazine’s high quality and editorial consistency have been aided by long editorships: Michael Williams (1924-38); Edward S. Skillin (1938-67); James O’Gara (1967-84); Peter Steinfels (1984-88); Margaret O’Brien Steinfels (1988-2002); and Paul Baumann (2003- ); and the journal was energized by a variety of remarkable supporting editors, including George N. Shuster, John Cogley, Daniel Callahan, and David Toolan. Edward Skillin’s (d. 2000) association with the journal was perhaps unique. He joined the staff in 1933, became editor and a principal owner in 1938, served as publisher from 1967-99, and transferred ownership to the nonprofit Commonweal Foundation in 1982.
Commonweal was credited with helping prepare American Catholics for Vatican II and its aftermath, and for introducing readers to a new level of literate Catholic discussion. It has published such authors as Nicholas Berdyaev, Emmanuel Mounier, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Hannah Arendt, Luigi Sturzo, G.K Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Graham Greene. It has printed the short fiction of Evelyn Waugh and J.F. Powers, the poetry of W.H. Auden, Josephine Jacobsen, Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Marie Ponsot, and John Updike. Its cultural commentators have included Walter Kerr, Wilfrid Sheed, John Simon, David Denby, and Arlene Croce; there have been illustrations by Jean Charlot, Rita Corbin, Fritz Eichenberg, and Emil Antonucci.
The magazine has an ongoing interest in social-justice issues (John A. Ryan, Dorothy Day, George G. Higgins, A.J. Muste, Michael Harrington), ecumenism (Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Marty, Thomas Hopko, George Lindbeck, Marc Tannenbaum), just-war teaching (J. Bryan Hehir, Thomas Merton, Paul Ramsey), the renewal of the Roman liturgy (Virgil Michel, Robert Hovda, Mark Searle, Rembert Weakland), women’s issues (Mary Daly, Abigail McCarthy, Sidney Callahan, Elizabeth Johnson), the primacy of conscience (John T. Noonan, Bernard Häring, Charles Curran), and the interchange between Catholicism and liberal democracy (Jacques Maritain, Eugene McCarthy, Peter Steinfels). It has taken well-reasoned positions against abortion-on-demand, cloning, and physician-assisted suicide; against the centralization of church power during the papacy of John Paul II; and against the failures of the American church in the clergy sexual-abuse scandal.
Part of the price for its independence has been the magazine’s periodic ostracism from various church and political circles, and its chronic sense of financial precariousness (it was forced to become a biweekly in 1974 because of postal and production costs). The Commonweal Associates, established in the 1960s, have met the magazine’s annual revenue shortfall through generous donor gifts, and an endowment fund was inaugurated in 1994 to assure greater long-term financial viability.
On the occasion of Commonweal’s fiftieth anniversary (1974), historian John Tracy Ellis wrote that, with the exception of the nineteenth-century lay trustee movement and lay congresses, Commonweal "was the American Catholic laity’s most ambitious undertaking, and to date remains the most successful one." In 1990, then editor Margaret Steinfels defined the ongoing mission of the journal as "a bridge for a two-way conversation between faith and life." Commonweal continues to publish in that spirit, as an intelligent, open, committed, but critical arbiter of American life and Catholic thought and practice.