Leave the window open | Commonwealth Magazine

The story of community is a story of hope and confidence: hope in the possibility of change – in the world and in the Church – accompanied by the confidence that Catholicism can learn from modernity while addressing its shortcomings.

You get a sense of the sensibility that tends toward the bold from Jim O’Gara’s 1973 interview with the magazine New York Times To community‘S fiftieth anniversary. O’Gara, then the magazine’s editor and an outstanding steward of its tradition, made it clear how much change he hoped to see as he ticked off some priorities: “We’re about redistribution of wealth, about a better way to choose that.” “Pope, the limits of papal power and lay participation at all levels, including the highest level,” O’Gara said. “What we really want is a complete reorganization of society and the church.”

A major task – “a complete reorganization of society and the church”. But that’s exactly what hope can do for you. For all its impact on the chaos of the 1960s, it was a decade in which many Catholics, perhaps especially in the United States, dreamed big. They followed the call of Pope John XXIII. inspire to recognize the “signs of the times” and reject “distrustful souls” who in modern times saw “only darkness on the face of the earth.” This is no coincidence communitywhich both recorded and celebrated new developments, peaked in 1968 with fifty thousand subscribers.

It was a few years before this peak that I first discovered community as a teenager, thanks to the discerning people who ran the periodicals room at the public library in my hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m not saying that many people my age frequented the magazine room, but I suspect I experienced a certain amount of excitement Was typical, especially for Catholics who lived outside large metropolitan areas and had no idea what Catholic intellectuals were talking and arguing about.

If, like me, you appreciated opinion magazines, you probably knew National ReviewThe New Republicand the nation. But here was this fascinating publication that looked at the world from an explicitly Catholic perspective – and different National Reviewwhose conservatism had a distinctly Catholic influence – a liberal Catholic lens. I was addicted for life.

As community When I reflect on its history and its ongoing mission, what strikes me most is the completely different context in which Catholicism finds itself. I emphasize the hope and confidence of the Second Vatican Council era (which coincided with the height of American liberalism until the escalation of the Vietnam War) because it contrasts so sharply with the current moment. The institutional church in the United States has been plagued by scandal and, almost as important, by the disintegration of a social and neighborhood base reinforced by ethnic identification, the empowering influences of community and school life, and forms of loyalty reinforced by memories of exclusion were, was nourished.

I have mostly positive personal memories of this old Catholic world, but I don’t want to romanticize it. If you want to know more about Catholic intolerance, just ask Jewish friends how they were treated as children by many of their Catholic neighbors after public and parochial schools stopped teaching. Similar or worse stories can be told by black friends. The divisions were so diverse that Italian and Irish children also regularly came into conflict. (Growing up, I heard similar stories about earlier confrontations between the Irish and my own French-Canadian ancestors.)

But the strength of this Catholic subculture perhaps paradoxically enabled new thinking about “renewal,” “updating,” and “adaptation.” There was little fear that a seemingly insurmountable structure of meaning and belonging could collapse.

After the Second World War and the experiences of National Socialism and Fascism, there was also a strong feeling that it was a moral necessity to make peace with liberalism. Much thought has been given to Catholics’ complicity with murderous authorities. German Catholics and Hitler’s WarsThe work published in 1962 by the prominent Catholic pacifist Gordon Zahn was a particularly dramatic example of this call to conscience.

But there was also the positive appeal of democratic ideas and commitment to human rights. This was reflected intellectually in the work of Jacques Maritain and politically in the creation of Christian Democratic parties that explicitly advocated democratic practices, in contrast to the post-First Vatican Council church, which was deeply suspicious of democracy. The left wing of these parties had much in common with the secular Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists. The European social security state and the “thirty glorious years” of shared prosperity after the Second World War were a joint project of Christians and social democrats.