The Press: Catholic Editors & the War

Ninety percent of the Catholic priests in the U.S. oppose 1) “a shooting war outside the Western Hemisphere,” 2) aid to “the Communistic Russian Govern ment.” This was the result, announced last week, of a poll taken by the Catholic Laymen’s Committee for Peace, an organization of out-&-out isolationists. Although the results were undoubtedly loaded by the form in which the questions were put, the trend of the results was vouched for by the attitude of the Catholic press.

Its 317 newspapers and magazines, which reach a Hearst-sized audience of over 8,000,000, bespeak the Church’s mind more directly and potently than any other religious press. Since the Spanish Civil War, when it was credited with putting across the Church’s campaign to keep the embargo against arms to the Republic, the Catholic press in general has been strongly isolationist.

Catholics point to a variety of attitudes in their press ranging from the socially radical Catholic Worker, to the liberal Commonweal, to the Brooklyn Tablet, and Father Coughlin’s quasi-fascist Social Justice (the last two called by the Florida Catholic “the Brooklyn-Royal Oak Axis”). They point also to the pro-Roosevelt cast of such leading diocesan papers as the Chicago New World, the San Francisco Monitor, the Pittsburgh Catholic. But the influential Catholic newspaper—the Brooklyn Tablet—and the two most influential magazines—America, the Catholic World —are still isolationist. Commonweal (most widely read by non-Catholics) supported aid-to-Britain until the Nazi invasion of Russia, not long afterwards denounced the Fight for Freedom committee’s appeal for Catholic support.

Rated No. 1 Catholic publication through its influence on teachers and clergymen, the Jesuit weekly America, edited by 52-year-old Francis Xavier Talbot, S.J. opposed the war and everything connected with it, including the draft. The Catholic World, a Paulist monthly edited by 64-year-old America-Firster Father James M. Gillis, is much more isolationist than America, though like almost every other isolationist Catholic publication it makes a distinction between national defense and intervention in World War II.

A major overall influence on the Catholic press is the National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service, founded (1920) and controlled by the Archbishops and Bishops of the U.S. Headed since 1924 by shrewd Editor Frank A. Hall, ex-city editor of the Washington Post, it is the world’s biggest Catholic news bureau, has its own network of foreign correspondents, turns out an average 50,000 words a week. It furnishes the bulk of national and international news, features, pictures in the Catholic press; even sends out prefabricated editorials. Typical of N.C.W.C. News Service is its handling of the President’s hopeful statement made this month about religious freedom in Russia. It sent out three stories: The first denounced the statement; three days later the N.C.W.C. News Service sent out a special communique by N.C.W.C. General Secretary Monsignor Michael J. Ready, commending the President’s move to encourage religious freedom in Russia. Third story, three days later, again attacked the President’s statement.

The editorial policy of the Catholic press generally is suggested in the statement of Catholic position by America’s Editor Talbot: “. . . the American Catholic, enthusiastically affirming that the American Constitutional system of government is the best non-Catholic form yet devised . . . can declare in utter good faith that a government erected on the Leonine [Leo XIII] principles would be a more perfect instrument.” In practice that policy means a complex reconciling of Church policy with U.S. foreign policy, of weighting loyalty to the Government with the anti-British attitude of many Irish and German Catholics and the anti-Communist attitude of the Church.

No poll of isolationist sentiment among practicing Catholics has yet been made. That it would run as high as Catholic clergymen’s response to their poll is unlikely. Lay Catholics include a strong group of Roosevelt supporters; they also read the secular press, which last week was 69% interventionist. Remembered last week was the discrepancy between the Catholic press and Catholics in the Spanish Civil War. After two years of nearly total pro-Franco sentiment in the Catholic press, a Gallup poll showed that one-third of U.S. Catholics were neutral, 43% were pro-Loyalist, less than 25% pro-Franco.

To readers of his Emporia (Kans.) Gazette famed Country Editor William Allen White last week suggested an “interesting game.” He offered a book prize for the best list of ten Emporians most likely to be hanged to Commercial Street lampposts should Nazis capture the town. First entries came from an electrical-appliance dealer and a Santa Fe railway switchman. Like Abou ben Adhem, Editor White headed their lists.