Anniversary Wishes from Charlotte Allen

There are so many obvious errors and wild generalizations in Charlotte Allen’s comment on Luke Johnson’s piece in our anniversary issue ("The Commonweal Catholic") that I confess to the sneaking suspicion that she may not have read Commonweal as closely over the past eight years as her critique of the magazine pretends. In fact, I’m not sure she’s ever read the magazine carefully (perhaps she only reads the table of contents). She pines for the pre-Vatican II Commonweal of her youth, lamenting the disappearance of its “spritely” graphics in today’s allegedly duller, more secular pages. Now Charlotte, Commonweal has never had spritely graphics! That is one tradition we cannot be accused of abandoning. And what might Allen, who longs for the days when Commonweal didn’t recycle “whatever the [liberal] secular media try to push,” have made of the magazine’s endorsement of Adlai Stevenson, or of John Cogley’s and James O’Gara’s praise for John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism? And when it came to church reform, the magazine was keenly interested in the Nouvelle Theologie and the Liturgical Movement. A less tendentious examination of the magazine’s history will reveal that the Commonweal editors of yore had a few dangerously liberal proclivities of their own.  

Allen begins her comment by announcing that she is hated by everyone at Commonweal. I don’t know what led her to this belief, but I can assure her that no one here has any reason to hate Charlotte Allen (one of our editors even worked for her once, and remembers her with some affection). But I admit that her scattershot and inexact criticism of Commonweal can be exasperating. Neither do we, as Allen claims, “detest” First Things or think of that journal as our “arch-rival or ideological bugaboo.” In fact, I just appeared on a panel with First Things editor R.R. Reno, and as best I can tell neither of us evinced any animus toward the other. It was all very distressingly kumbaya.

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