Word: diocesan
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Once scorned among Catholics themselves as "dreary diocesan drivel," the U.S. Catholic press has grown in variety, liveliness and readability. Many Catholic papers draw enough advertising to turn a steady profit; where they do not, the church pays their deficits. The press still suffers widely from what Bishop Dwyer called "a good deal of pious incompetence." But the intellectual weeklies-the liberal lay Commonweal and the Jesuit-edited America, etc.-come up to any secular standard; the layman-edited monthly Jubilee is a tasteful slick picture magazine, and an infusion of trained lay journalists has given many of the diocesan...
...widespread confusion over whether the Catholic press, on such problems as U.S. foreign policy, immigration or "right to work" legislation, speaks with the voice of the church and follows a "Catholic line." What confounds the confusion is the "official" label in the masthead of virtually all the 104 diocesan weeklies. Unlike secular editors who wistfully hope that readers may take their editorial views as gospel, many a thoughtful Catholic editor wishes that readers would...
From the standpoint of the church, nothing in the Catholic press is official except the quoted pronouncements of its hierarchy. "A Catholic paper," editorialized America recently, "is not a little Pravda." Many of the diocesan papers tend to reflect their bishops' views, but even that does not always give such views religious weight. Though editors are supposed to apply a spiritual yardstick in making their worldly judgments, the Catholic press proves in practice to be catholic-not only diverse in its views but sometimes so bitterly at odds in its own fold that Bishop Dwyer cautioned last week: "There...
...Farthest Poles. One experienced observer of the controversy is the Catholic Press Association's outgoing president, Charles McNeill of Dayton, Ohio, general manager of a firm publishing Catholic children's magazines. "Diocesan newspapers have called Commonweal Communist," says he, "and some of the Jesuits have claimed that America has sold out to the Commies. I have been called brutal, blasphemous, unscrupulous and monstrous, for publicly defending the right of laymen to run magazines like Commonweal. Because of my job, they have even called me a perverter of the minds of Catholic children." At the farthest poles are Brooklyn...
Mark's Church in Evanston, Ill., Used his sermon for a preconvention broadside at the diocesan leadership. "What these people want," he cried, "is the exaltation of the clerical order, the subordination of the laity, and the regimentation of the life of the church along imperialist, monarchical or oligarchical lines. In practice . . . [they] want the clergy to run the show, although by no means a majority of the clergy want any such dubious honor...