In honor of Commonweal’s centennial last fall, editor Dominic Preziosi joined WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show as part “100 Years of 100 Things,” an ongoing series in honor of WNYC’s hundred-year anniversary spotlighting organization’s celebrating their own milestones. Host Brigid Bergin had a wide-ranging conversation with Preziosi about the magazine’s mission, history, and role in a Church marred by political and cultural crises.
As Preziosi explained, Commonweal—and American Catholicism more generally— has historically been tied to the immigrant experience. “Commonweal itself, when it was founded in 1924, was the product of the great Irish wave of migration in the 19th and early 20th century, along, of course, with Europeans from other countries like Italians and Poland as well. That trend obviously continues today,” he noted. From this project came a hundred years of content and several key figures in U.S. Catholic history, including contributor Dorothy Day, who one caller mentioned as a key inspiration.
Beyond American Catholic history, Preziosi and Bergin discussed a wide range of issues in contemporary Catholic life, including disarmament —and Commonweal’s recent symposium on nuclear weapons, abortion, women’s ordination, the clerical sex abuse crisis, and more. Commenting on the current political climate, Preziosi explained that “For a lot of readers of Commonweal, ‘disappointment’ is far too soft a word to describe how we feel about some of the decisions of our fellow Catholics to support policies of this administration that do seem to run counter to what we understand to be gospel values, about treating your neighbor as you would yourself, about welcoming the vulnerable, about keeping in mind the poor.”
Nevertheless, Preziosi noted, Commonweal would continue to foster health debate across the political and ecclesial spectrum, rooted in the belief “that Catholicism and American democracy have a lot to say to each other and a lot to offer each other” — hopefully for at least the next century.
The full interview, which aired on April 14, can be found here.
