The ongoing Synod on Synodality has caused no small amount of discussion about the structures and future of the Catholic Church. Prophets and doomsayers alike have focused on the synod as a once-in-a-lifetime event, one with potentially far-reaching implications for Catholics around the globe. But to what extent will we know what the effects of the synod will be during our lifetime? Will anyone truly be able to judge its impact—or its relative success or failure—for years to come?
History has something to say about this—including a journalistic history that has been a bit lost. A look back at the Second Vatican Council through the coverage offered by two American Catholic journals, America and Commonweal, shows that many of what we think of as contemporary challenges for the church were in fact similarly neuralgic issues in 1965. That the church navigated those crises then—even if in a state of occasional panic and anguish—suggests two things. First, we should not expect the journey of the church after the Synod on Synodality to be smooth sailing. Second, the church is very much capable of getting through such turmoil, and emerging stronger from it.
While today’s scholars tend to focus in their study of Vatican II on “what happened at the council” or on how the implementation of the council’s decrees played out, a less developed but still pertinent historical question is how the council was received and interpreted among Catholic circles even while it was taking place from 1962 to 1965. As the late historian John W. O’Malley, S.J., often noted, when we speak of the council as an “event,” we also must remember the sense of the dynamics and drama unfolding within the time period itself. At the time of the council, observers and participants alike were surprised, then shocked and then sometimes disappointed at what was emerging from the council with each passing month.
In the American religious press, the sense that something revolutionary was taking place at Vatican II was also eventually attenuated by a sense that the church was pulling back in obvious ways, unwilling to see the “spirit” of the council through to the more dramatic conclusions expected by some. A study of the content of Commonweal (run, then as now, by lay Catholics and published independently of the hierarchy, and celebrating its 100th anniversary this year) and America (Jesuit-run and therefore connected in a variety of subtle yet still significant ways to the magisterial church) during the latter years of the council gives a sense of this excitement and disappointment.
Such a comparison also reveals valuable insights into the ways Vatican II would be officially and unofficially accepted by Catholics of varying positions and outlooks. In that sense, it might have much to teach us about what we will experience following the Synod on Synodality.
A Church in Turmoil
By the close of the fourth and final session of Vatican II in December 1965, America and Commonweal had diverged significantly from one another in tone and content in their coverage of the council, with Commonweal taking on a more progressive and even confrontational tone and America steering a cautious and sometimes timid course between progressive sentiment and defenses of traditional church structures and mindsets.
These journals illustrate a number of other important dynamics at work in the American church during the time of the council. The emergence of an educated Catholic laity became evident in the work of commentators like John Cogley, Daniel Callahan, Michael Novak and Peter Steinfels, writers and editors who often seemed more prescient and well-informed than some of their counterparts in religious life when it came to their understanding of the church. The idea that one could identify as a practicing Catholic yet raise questions about doctrine also rose in prominence among both lay observers and men and women religious at the time. Third, the era also gave birth to the idea that church leaders had much to learn from its actual body of believers (the laity itself), a heretofore fairly muted notion that was already receiving new prominence even before the council had ended.
The result was a great deal of disillusionment (and more than a few defections from the church) alongside a tidal wave of optimism about what the church could achieve and acknowledge about itself in the future. This phenomenon, too, affected the content and tone of both America and Commonweal at the time, as the editors of both periodicals struggled to find a consistent editorial stance amid so many conflicting trends and expressions of “true” Catholicism.
Commonweal and the Council
The most radical difference (and perhaps the most obvious one) between America’s coverage of the final sessions of Vatican II and Commonweal’s can be found in the way each magazine’s editorial staff (through their selection of contributors, editorials and even choices of art and cover material) envisioned the post-Vatican II landscape. In the June 19, 1964, issue of Commonweal, for example, the former Commonweal executive editor John Cogley (who was appointed “religious news editor” at The New York Times in 1965) wrote a long essay heralding the death “of the clinging spirit of the Counter-Reformation” and declaring that “every attempt of aggiornamento—even discussion of it—brought on suspicion and attack from high places before the Council. If anyone but a Pope had used the word, it would have been outlawed from the proper Catholic vocabulary.”
Announcing that “Romanità has had its day. The civilisation mondiale is here,” Mr. Cogley added that the traditional method of proceeding in the Vatican “will die slowly and many good men will weep for it during the hours of its final agony. I will not be among them.” Respondents to Mr. Cogley’s “triumphalism” about the victory of progressive forces in the church included some predictable interlocutors, like the tradition-minded English writer Evelyn Waugh, and some rather surprising ones, like the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley.
In that same month, Commonweal’s contributors were a veritable all-star roster of scholars identified with progressive elements in the church, including Richard A. McCormick, S.J., Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Gordon C. Zahn, Robert G. Kaiser, Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O., Daniel Callahan, James O’Gara and the Rev. William Shannon. That many of these contributors were lay men (women were still underrepresented) was always a distinctive mark of Commonweal, but this became even more dramatic during and after the council.
Another significant change in Commonweal coverage during and after the council was its new focus on church issues; while the magazine had always self-identified as Catholic, previous years had seen more of a focus on themes such as race relations, nuclear disarmament, church/state relations and other causes familiar to American political progressives. If one were to be glib, one might suggest that with Vatican II, a boring church became more interesting to readers; even the book reviews in Commonweal, for example, began to include a greater focus on Catholic authors.
Hope—With Caveats
Throughout the council, noted Peter Steinfels in an email interview with America, “Commonweal’s view was one of consistent approval, indeed enthusiasm, for what the Council was doing, although never without caveats.” Mr. Steinfels, who was hired at Commonweal in 1964 and later served as its editor, commented that “this approbation was accompanied by constant concerns that the Council might be blocked from completing its agenda and fulfilling its promise and even greater worries about how, or whether, its achievements would be put into practice.”
Amid that enthusiasm and approval, some of Commonweal’s editors and contributors expressed frustration in its pages with the council’s progress. Shortly before the fourth session of Vatican II began in September 1965, the magazine published an essay by the Rev. Hans Küng, “And After the Council?” The subhead declared, “The spirit of Vatican II must not die.” Father Küng’s essay lamented that the inspiring ethos of Pope John XXIII, “although not actually extinct, is no longer the principal moving spirit of the Council” and that “the accomplishments of the Council to date obviously fall short of what was generally expected.”
Editorials later in the month criticized Pope Paul VI’s promulgation of the encyclical “Mysterium Fidei” and questioned whether transubstantiation as currently defined could be considered a dogma of the church, concluding that “Pope Paul has come very close to making a hash of historically nuanced theological distinctions.”
The shift in tone—though not across the board—from even three years before is perhaps the most remarkable element of these and many other articles from 1965 and 1966, as a number of articles and editorials appeared with a more challenging tone on matters about which the institutional church (particularly the Vatican) seemed increasingly out of touch with the realities of American Catholic life. When Commonweal published “The Council Ends,” a summing-up essay by Gregory Baum in January 1966, the editors indicated a new critical distance in their coverage of the church by adding the subhead “Was It a Failure?”
Father Baum didn’t think so, but he recognized the council could not (despite the headline) be judged just yet. “The Vatican Council was such an extraordinary event in the life of the Catholic Church that it is impossible to evaluate it in a few pages. It is certainly possible to find fault with the Council; measured by the contemporary needs of the Church, it failed to supply all the answers,” he wrote. “But this belongs to the pilgrim state of the Church on earth. There is no perfect Council as there is no perfect liturgy, as there is no perfect anything in the Church.… At the same time, the historical reality of the Catholic Church and measured by what the Council started with, the achievements of the Council are nothing short of miraculous.”
America and the Council
For the editors of and contributors to America, the question of tone when addressing the post-council situation was made more complex because of the magazine’s status as a publication of Jesuits of the United States and its own assertion of its status as “The National Catholic Weekly.” Many of the magazine’s leading intellectual lights were involved with the council itself behind the scenes, including Walter M. Abbott, S.J.; Donald R. Campion, S.J., who was later America’s editor in chief; C. J. McNaspy, S.J.; and others serving as experts, commentators, translators and more.
The magazine had also taken on an increasingly progressive tone politically since the tenure of John LaFarge, S.J., as editor in chief from 1944 to 1948, particularly on matters of social justice and economics, and had achieved a reputation among American political liberals for its public confrontations with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy over red-baiting and William F. Buckley Jr. over Pope John XXIII’s encyclical “Mater et Magistra.”
However, the magazine was also quite clearly more cautious and traditional than Commonweal in its ecclesial outlook and its treatment of changes in the church. As the council drew to a close and prognosticators began to speculate about what the future would hold for the church, that instinctive reaction against rapid change became apparent in the magazine’s unsigned editorials, including one from August 1964 that could have easily been read as a direct attack on other Catholic journalists. Titled “Angry Young Men,” it argued:
An age of aggiornamento is necessarily an age of change. Almost everyone in the Church agrees on that. There are some, of course, of whom it could be said they are so conservative that had they been present at the Creation, they would have voted for nothingness. But they are few. The rest of us acknowledge that the Church is and ought to be going through a period of marked change.
The differences among us are ones of emphasis and degree. How far, how soon, should the Church adapt herself in this or that respect? The answer, according to some voices in the Church, is: very far and right away. These voices usually belong to young men, and they are usually angry.
The angry young men include some of the more talented products of Catholic education. Others, if not the most intelligent, are at least the most vocal. They insist on being heard, and naturally they want to be taken seriously. They will be heard, too; the age in which authority could flatly refuse to listen is coming to an end. But these young men would have a better chance of being taken seriously if they would avoid making themselves more obnoxious than they have to be.
Any of the “more talented products of Catholic education” would recognize the harrumphing of an old schoolmaster in such a commentary. But it is also just one example among many of an obvious attempt by the editors and contributors at America to strike a delicate balance between embracing the changes of the council and forsaking too many of the strictures and practices of Catholicism that had so defined the church. In his regular “Letter From the Council,” Donald R. Campion, S.J., acknowledged that the energetic spirit of the second session in 1963 had waned a bit as the council progressed, but wanted to attribute it more to a “new sense of responsibility” and a “sobriety” around the council, a needed reality check about what was possible and what could change.
At the same time, Father Campion was quick to find fault with some of the documents under discussion, including the schema for a document on the laity in church life, which he criticized in the Oct. 17, 1964, issue of the magazine as “dominantly clerical. The result is that even when it strives to recognize the layman’s status and his legitimate autonomy, it still sounds patronizing.”
Steering the Course
America also offered a great deal of space after the third and fourth sessions of the council to bishops who wished to write about their experiences in Rome. While this practice likely had as much to do with ecclesiastical politics as anything else, it also speaks to the more clerical identity of the magazine compared with its lay-run counterpart.
These bishops’ reflections about sessions three and four of the council were generally optimistic. Bishop Mark G. McGrath, C.S.C., used the pages of America to describe a process familiar to many others who attended Vatican II, whereby the bishops began the council process by filling out questionnaires in a “perfunctory fashion” but quickly realized after arriving in Rome how momentous an event was upon them and upon the church. He and his fellow bishops, McGrath noted in the Aug. 21, 1965, issue, had never considered what it would truly mean to bring all the world’s bishops together to reflect on the church’s very identity.
At the same time, he was sharply critical of those who suggested the council was not going far enough, or was addressing issues beyond the competence of the bishops: “One is amused by some of the Pollyanna optimists of the First Session, many of whom are visibly lagging as we go into the fourth lap. It is, in short, too soon for any final judgments.”
Bishop Robert E. Tracy, writing in America in September 1965, acknowledged that many would be disappointed by the activities of the fourth session, particularly those seeking a reversal of the ban on artificial contraception, but also warned against prophets of doom. “Some of [them] utter nervous warnings, others betray extravagant expectations…the end result of the four sessions, they prophecy, will be a set of hollow and irrelevant proclamations to a world gripped in agony and urgently awaiting a solution to its problems.”
Conspicuously absent from America’s pages were the European periti so often featured in Commonweal, including Fathers Schillebeeckx and Küng, and many of the lay writers who were increasingly prominent elsewhere in Catholic publishing in the United States and Canada. To some degree, this obvious lack can be attributed to the simple matter of manpower: America could still rely on a fairly large stable of Jesuit writers, some of whom were experts in the issues being debated before the council.
For example, when the magazine wanted to present an explanation of the decree on religious liberty in January 1965, the editors could turn to a writer few could accuse of not understanding the issue: John Courtney Murray, S.J., who gave the magazine almost 4,000 words on “This Matter of Religious Freedom.” Two years earlier, he had offered the magazine an essay, “On Religious Liberty,” that set the stage for some of the dramatic changes in church teaching on the subject that came later in the council.
By the close of the council, however, it was clear that while Commonweal had become more willing to be critical of the institutional church in the ensuing years, America remained in significant ways more of a defender and apologist, and its choices of authors and topics reflected that position. When it was possible to defend the institutional church while also praising new developments emerging from the council, America’s contributors leaped at the chance; when that chance did not present itself, readers might often find an essay or two on the religiosity of Flannery O’Connor or Dorothy Day.
A Church That Can/Cannot Be Criticized
Of course, the theological and ecclesial landscape that had so dramatically shifted between 1962 and 1965 did not suddenly find solid bedrock after that time, and it is striking to observe the ways in which the tumult of the time following the council affected both magazines. While many scholars focus on the publication of (and widespread dissent from) “Humanae Vitae” in 1968 as the real focal point of post-conciliar intra-ecclesial tensions, a close look at the issues raised in both Commonweal and America in the years between the end of Vatican II and the release of “Humanae Vitae” suggests a more complicated reality.
That encyclical—and the question of Catholic use of artificial birth control—may have provided the most visible evidence of ideological divides and the rejection of the teaching authority of the bishops under certain circumstances, but it hardly emerged out of thin air; rather, issues of episcopal authority and the primacy of conscience (both of which would play such a major role in the troubled reception of the encyclical) had already become prominent themes in the intellectual life of the American church, something reflected in these magazines.
For example, in October 1966, Commonweal published an editorial criticizing the archbishop of Cincinnati for “shackling” the Glenmary Sisters in his diocese, who were attempting to implement reforms inspired by Vatican II’s call for renewal of religious life. The editorial called his actions “severe, even childish” and described him as “responding to controversy in the old pre-Council fashion by curtailing every liberty in sight. This is hardly the answer.”
An issue that in previous decades might have been settled through the quick (and possibly unquestioned) assertion of episcopal authority was instead addressed in a national Catholic publication and framed as a question of liberty and authority. Similarly, when the famed English priest the Rev. Charles Davis shocked many in 1967 with his public announcement that he was leaving not only the priesthood but the church itself, Commonweal’s editors asked whether this was a question of “freedom of conscience,” adding “[t]hat a person must follow his conscience is now obvious in the Church, utterly necessary, in fact.”
In an essay on Father Davis’s departure that resulted in the writer’s ouster as editor of New Blackfriars (and, briefly, the suspension of his priestly faculties) and was reprinted in Commonweal, Herbert McCabe, O.P., actually criticized progressives for what he called their “triumphant radicalism” but described them as being “just as indifferent to persons and to truth as could episcopal authority” (italics mine). In other words, less than two years after the council’s end, a mainstream Catholic publication published an article that criticized the stifling of thought and the obstruction of truth by using the example of bishops who did the same—and needed to offer no further explanation.
That same year, Daniel Callahan (who would also eventually leave the church) wrote “The Renewal Mess” for Commonweal, noting that “[t]he renewal of the Church is not going well,” in part because newfound understandings of personal autonomy had created massive resentment between bishops and priests, as well as between priests and laity. More than a year before the release of “Humanae Vitae,” these twin questions of authority and conscience were already roiling the church, at least in certain intellectual circles.
In the pages of America, a similar but slightly more muted debate was playing out. In an unsigned editorial from 1966, the editors noted and criticized the widespread silence of bishops on important social issues but offered a startling excuse on the bishops’ behalf: The press itself was to blame. “What will happen, a bishop might ask himself, if I take this or that public stand? Will there be those predictably prompt news stories—often spiced with discreet ridicule—that follow on public statements that can so easily be made to sound stuffy, conservative, worried, defensive, authoritarian, triumphalist, preconciliar or simply pious?”
Later that year, advertisements for an “Institute for Freedom in the Church” began to appear in America, providing an avenue for stating far more directly what the editorial pages hinted at. With a board of directors that included Joseph E. Cunneen, Garry Wills, the Rev. Charles Curran and Daniel Callahan, the institute centered its mission on questions of conscience and authority in an invitation published in America in November 1966:
Ideally, the Church is a community which brings its members to the fullest realization of their freedom and autonomy; in fact, it fails to achieve this ideal and, to the extent that it does fail, needs reform from within. The direction in which Vatican II has moved the members of the Church is the direction of freedom, but the institutional structures of the Church are not at present capable of dealing with the results.
In December of that same year, John Courtney Murray, S.J., published a massive article in America, “Freedom, Authority, Community,” in which he located the authority of the bishops in the realm of service to the community and strongly criticized the “corrective or punitive” function of authority. “The demand for due process of law is an exigence of Christian dignity and freedom,” Murray wrote. “It is to be satisfied as exactly in the Church as in civil society (one might indeed say, more exactly).”
Murray also noted that classical notions of obedience were “not good enough to meet the needs of the moment” and that humanity’s growing recognition of each human’s dignity required “a consideration of the classical concept of the ecclesial relationship—a new development, doctrinal and practical, in the relations between authority and freedom in the Church.”
The Council and the Synod
What about today, six decades later? An outside observer might note that Commonweal and America are in many ways still playing the same roles vis-à-vis the church that they did in 1966. With regard to the synod, however, the history of both publications in how they covered Vatican II is instructive. The fact remains that neither journal knew what would come in the years following the council. Would it prove to be a success? Had it failed? Would its reforms be implemented, and how?
Should we expect a different response today to the Synod on Synodality? Or should we, too, be willing to offer hopes and concerns, while adopting a bit of a “wait and see” attitude?
There will be some in the church who—if the synod does not result in significant changes to church structures, disciplines and doctrines—will dismiss the entire process as a waste of time, money and discernment. Others will see any change at all as evidence of the “smoke of Satan” entering into the church through new windows. Still others will assign responsibility or blame to the synod for changes (or the lack of same) that were already sweeping through the church before Pope Francis or the other participants in the process even dreamed of such an event.
What might the historians say? Given that six decades after the close of Vatican II, we are still arguing about the meaning and impact of that monumental gathering, it is safe to imagine them agreeing on this much at least, regarding the Synod on Synodality: We don’t yet know what its final results will be, and we don’t yet know how (and where, and if) they will be implemented in the daily life of the church. Those questions cannot be answered this month, or this year. If one might unironically cite the conclusion of many an America editorial over the years, it bears watching.
But where is the fun in that, to receive no immediate and unequivocal verdict? There is a lesson in it, to be sure: If we think we have landed on a single and definitive answer to questions like “What happened at the Synod?” or “Did the Synod succeed or fail?”, we are certainly not good historians.
