Roman Catholics: The Reporter Stands Firm

ROMAN CATHOLICS

The Reporter Stands Firm

Kansas City’s Bishop Charles H. Helmsing last month accused the lay-edited National Catholic Reporter of turning itself into “a platform for the airing of heretical views” (TIME, Oct. 18). In an editorial for the current issue written by Founding Editor Robert Hoyt, the N.C.R. refuses to backtrack. Hoyt agreed that the bishop had the right to criticize the paper, but the editor charged that the condemnation statement “attempts to make the paper an outlaw publication, but without anything faintly resembling due process of law. It is a prime example of the attitude toward the use of authority in the church which the paper opposes.”

Helmsing had urged the paper to drop the word Catholic from its title; the editorial pointed out that the N.C.R. had been conceived as a journal that was within the church but not an official part of it. “We intend to go on being a Catholic paper,” wrote Hoyt, “concerned with Catholic activities, values and ideas. We do not consider ourselves to have been severed from the community.”

Nor do many others. Since Helmsing’s blast, 66 journalists from other U.S. Catholic publications have signed a statement of intellectual support for the N.C.R. Though 1,090 subscriptions have been canceled, the paper has gained 3,849 new subscribers.