American Catholics Turn Left

At the 1950 meeting of the Catholic Press Association, the featured speaker of the program was a man at the peak of his influence—Senator Joseph McCarthy. When he was accorded a standing ovation only two people kept their seats, the representatives of the Commonweal. The consistent critical position that earned for Commonweal a reputation as the leading liberal Catholic journal also earned for it, during the McCarthy period, a place of splendid isolation.

Today, by contrast, there is a committee that is trying to form a conservative Catholic journal because, it alleges, “the Left now speaks to and for the Church, in varying degrees of extravagance and stridency” in magazines such as Commonweal, Jubilee, Ave Maria, Ra...