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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 is no point in carrying intramural controversy beyond the limits of fairness and courtesy."
The 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's Tablet and Manhattan's radical-pacifist Catholic Worker. When she was asked where the two papers might come together, the Worker's Publisher Dorothy Day replied: "Only at the Lord's table." Items:
¶ When Osservatore della Domenica* a Catholic weekly published in Vatican City, ran an article attacking U.S. Protestants, sloppy reporting made it appear in many U.S. papers as a Vatican-inspired view. But Milwaukee's Catholic Herald Citizen (circ. 126,097)—which is just as official as the unofficial Osservatore—rapped the Italian article as "stupid, untruthful, uncharitable."
¶ Father Raymond T. Bosler, editor of the Indiana Catholic and Record (circ. 35,122), has backed the American Civil Liberties Union in a local fight against the American Legion, once attacked Spain's hard-bitten Cardinal Segura for his crackdown on Protestants. The paper's editorial was headed: THE CARDINAL CALLED THE COPS 400 YEARS TOO LATE. The only comment Editor Bosler got from Archbishop Paul C. Schulte: "I thought your headline was a little flippant."
¶ On the issue of desegregation, Catholic newspapers in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina and Virginia have come out strongly in favor of the Supreme Court decision opening white schools to Negroes. But though papal teachings clearly point to this anti-discrimination position, the Catholic press in most of the deeper South has kept mum.
¶ An editorial in the right-wing Our Sunday Visitor, published in Huntington, Indiana (national circ. 749,995), attacked world federalism. The liberal Davenport, Iowa Catholic Messenger, whose relatively small circulation (19,800) reaches 43 states, reprinted the editorial, and alongside, almost paragraph for paragraph, it ran excerpts from Pope Pius XII's statements in direct rebuttal.