Newsroom Cultures

Newsweek is the place where I learned most of what I now know about religion, and where I mediated most of what I learned to others—the millions of readers of the magazine. For that reason alone, I figure, you should know something about my experience of the place.

They told me at Newsweek I was the only writer ever to arrive “over the transom.” What they meant was I didn’t “go down” to New York City from the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News, like the generations of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who “went down” to London to assume their anticipated careers. Nor was I invited off a major daily newspaper—the other normal route to a newsmagazine—because my bylines had caught the editors’ attention. They hadn’t. I simply showed up in late May 1964 with a clutch of stories I had written for the Sun in Omaha, plus a small cache of book reviews and other pieces I had published in magazines like Commonweal, America, and The Nation. I was twenty-eight.

Applying for a job at Newsweek, a magazine I had never read, was something of an afterthought. I first approached Time, the one newsmagazine I did read. I knew a few people there, among them the religion editor, John Elson, who had studied under Frank O’Malley four years ahead of me at Notre Dame. Elson introduced me to Time’s chief of correspondents, Richard Clurman, a tall, urbane man distinguished by an eye patch, who offered me a job as a reporter in its Chicago bureau. But Newsweek, newly purchased by the Washington Post, intrigued me: I was impressed by the fact that they had just hired learned literary critic Richard Gilman away from Commonweal, a Catholic magazine I regularly read, to be chief book reviewer. Moreover, from the buzz I heard in New York, Newsweek was “a writer’s magazine”—that is, a place where the editors, unlike those at Time, were more restrained in rewriting stories and not given to imposing an institutional story line. So I gave it a try. Mel Elfin, who later became the magazine’s legendary Washington bureau chief, looked over my writing samples, especially my work for Catholic publications. “Can you write about religion?” he asked. I had no idea Newsweek was looking for a religion editor to compete with Elson two blocks away at Time.

A month later I moved into the Waldorf-Astoria and began my writer’s tryout at Newsweek. It was soon apparent that none of the magazine’s latest Ivy League recruits knew much about religion or cared to write about it full-time. Newsweek’s most recent cover story in religion, “The New Missionary,” had been a record setter as a newsstand bust, and the fact that I was a Catholic and a graduate of Notre Dame, I began to feel, were to Newsweek’s editors my most important credentials. On the biggest religion story of the Sixties, the still-unfolding drama of Vatican Council II, Time was outspending, out-manning, and therefore often outperforming Newsweek’s two-person bureau in Rome. Curtis Bill Pepper, the Rome bureau chief, had been urging the editors to hire someone with knowledge of Catholicism to write the Religion section. “Do you think you can be fair to the conservative bishops in writing about the Council?” was the only question Newsweek editor Osborn Elliott asked me before confirming my appointment. In truth, with two young children and a third on the way, I hadn’t given the goings-on in Rome that much thought.

It is difficult to imagine now the cultural authority weekly newsmagazines wielded before the advent of the 24/7 news cycle—especially in religion. Local newspapers published Saturday religion sections, which were mostly parochial in content. Religion occasionally made the front page when there was news of wider public interest. But even at the New York Times, religion reporters mainly covered denominational meetings and controversies—even local Sunday sermons—as if “religion” were by definition a subject sequestered in institutions. Jews, Catholics, and Protestants all published opinion magazines that addressed small but intellectually cultivated constituencies. Only the newsmagazines commanded national audiences, and for the interested general reader only Time and Newsweek consistently covered religion as an important dimension of public life.

Much of the cultural authority ascribed to newsmagazines derived from the form itself. By bundling the week’s events into a single package, the newsmagazine presented itself as a distillation of what was most important for the reader to know that week. The editorial voice, especially at Time, was that of a single omniscient narrator: “Time says.” According to the template established by Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce, the typical newsmagazine article should have the internal consistency, trajectory, and resolution of a good short story. Language and style mattered greatly: every story was to entertain as well as inform. Above all, a newsmagazine story was to tell the reader not only what happened but also what—at least for that week—it all meant. In other words, the magazine judged the news as well as reported it. Often, these judgments were a matter of tone, verbal images, the revealing detail, the snappy quote. Concision was essential, even in a long story. All this made for tightly written sentences and carefully compacted paragraphs intended to convey knowledge and authority. For a writer, especially one with persistent dyslexic tics, it was good discipline.

Those of us who were regarded as “specialists” in areas like science and medicine, the law and religion, bore an extra burden. We tried to please two different audiences at the same time: academics and practitioners knowledgeable in the subject at hand and the vast majority of readers who weren’t. It was yet another form of mediation. Insider jargon was to be eschewed. Here the editors positioned themselves as stand-ins for what any intelligent general reader could be presumed to understand, and on religious subjects the bar they set initially was ankle high because the reader’s presumed level of knowledge was so low. I first ran into this barrier early in my Newsweek career when Pope Paul VI announced the members of the commission advising him on the morality of artificial birth control. In my story I identified the moral theologians and other experts he had picked. But before the story could be published, the editors insisted that in each case the adjective moral be excised from the text. Otherwise, they felt, the story implied that the other experts on the commission were immoral.

Every journalistic enterprise generates its own “newsroom culture.” By that I mean an implicit set of assumptions about what its collective outlook should be. At Time, religion was in the air the editors breathed, and the draft emanating from the top was a broadly Calvinist assumption that God’s kingdom was America’s burden to spread. Time’s Henry Luce, the son of Presbyterian missionaries and husband to the outspoken Clare Boothe Luce, a celebrated writer and convert to Catholicism, was fascinated by theologians and treated the best of them as public intellectuals. Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, and Jesuit John Courtney Murray, Luce’s occasional golf partner, all appeared on Time’s cover. It was journalism as if religious thinkers mattered, and what I hoped to do at Newsweek.

But it was up to me to make the case. None of Newsweek’s top editors was noticeably religious. Religion (let alone theology) was not the sort of subject they were likely to discuss over dinner in Manhattan or on weekends in the Hamptons. Fortunately, the editor of Newsweek was hell-bent on beating Time at its own game. Oz, as everyone called Osborn Elliott, had been business editor at Time and was the man who had convinced Washington Post owner Phil Graham to buy Newsweek in 1961. Oz exuded the confidence of a well-bred Protestant patrician: more than any of his successors, he was open to Monday morning second-guessing from the staff. If one of us proposed a story on a subject Oz knew nothing about—and religion, God knows, was high on that list—his reflex attitude was “Go ahead, that’s what I hired you for.”

Newsweek turned out to be a good fit for me. Working there was like having tenure at a university where you were paid to read and never had to teach or grade papers. In time the number of daily newspapers, monthly magazines, and learned journals in my in-box reached more than ninety. Newsweek also reimbursed me for any book I wanted for research. In addition, publishers sent me hundreds of new titles each year, hoping for reviews. On Fifth Avenue, Doubleday operated two retail stores where I could exchange any new book for one of my choosing. Within a few years I had amassed at home and office a variegated personal library of more than four thousand volumes. Greed never felt so virtuous.

But the gold mined by my colleagues in the field was richer than what I panned from periodicals or books. Like all writers at the magazine, I had at my disposal Newsweek’s vast network of correspondents around the world. If I needed reporting from Rome or Rio or Chicago, I had only to send a query to the bureau chief. Conversely, part of the correspondents’ responsibilities was to suggest stories from their area of the world. The Newsweek feeding tube of information worked both ways, giving us New York writers the illusion that we were sitting at the vital center of the known universe.

All of which helps explain why the mastheads of Time and Newsweek were studded over the years with the names of gifted writers who came and eventually went. John Dos Passos, John Hersey, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, not to mention mainstays like James Agee and Whittaker Chambers, all served time in the Luce empire. For shorter terms so did poets like Archibald MacLeish and Robert Fitzgerald, who had taught me how to “versify,” as he called it, at Notre Dame. Hart Crane failed a tryout at Time and Saul Bellow’s lasted just a day.

Among those who were at Newsweek when I arrived, Ward Just left to become a superb novelist. Peter Benchley departed as soon as he published his mega-seller, Jaws. Michael Janeway returned to Boston and eventually became editor of the Globe. Movie reviewer David Slavitt made getaway bucks with a pornographic novel written under a pseudonym, Henry Sutton, and went on to have a distinguished career as a poet, teacher, and translator of Greek and Roman poetry. At different times poets John Ashbery and David Lehman were on staff long after other magazines decided that books of poetry were not worth reviewing. Robert Littell is perhaps the most envied ex-writer for Newsweek: he resettled in southern France and became a celebrated author of sophisticated international thrillers. But by far the strangest exit was that of John Lake, our sports editor in the mid-Sixties, whose office was next to mine. One Monday morning we arrived to find his shoes perched on his office radiator, next to his open window overlooking Madison Avenue twelve floors below. His body was never found and an FBI investigation turned up no trace of him.

Not long after Lake’s disappearance I got a call from a longtime friend, John Leo, who was then writing for the New York Times. Would I be willing to talk to Arthur Gelb, an assistant managing editor, about becoming the newspaper’s religion editor? I met Gelb for lunch at Sardi’s and listened to his pitch. In turn, I gave him a list of five stories in religion just waiting to be written, and five more the Times had already missed. That seemed to impress him. Two days later he called to ask if I would meet with Abe Rosenthal, the Times’ managing editor. I declined. Gelb couldn’t imagine anyone turning down the Times and wanted to know my reasons. “Arthur, I’m a thick-paper person, not a thin-paper person,” I tried to explain. “I like the idea that my stories reach mailboxes in the Middle West and that the magazine is around all week to be picked up from the coffee table.” What I didn’t—couldn’t—tell him was that I could never write inside an open cubicle in a noisy newsroom. I needed a door to shut. Besides, where would I store my books?

But there was another reason, one that became more justified in later years. I objected to the paper’s newsroom culture. The Times, I came to feel, was a newspaper with the soul of a church—an established church at that. It had a hierarchy of editors to match the Vatican’s, and every day the editorial page exercised its magisterium for all to read. It also had its evangelists in the form of columnists, nearly all of them chosen from within the same newsroom culture. And though they differed one from another, as Peter did Paul, their collective outlook was stridently and pervasively secularist. Assignment editors, too, were typically tone deaf to the religious dimensions of public affairs. It took the Times twenty years to recognize the importance of regularly covering Evangelical Christians after their emergence as a political and religious force, and to this day its coverage of education in New York City systematically ignores the city’s extensive Catholic and Protestant parochial school systems. Although Gelb struck me as thoughtful and fair-minded, I sensed that the newspaper’s editorial hierarchs merely tolerated religion as a beat. So I was not at all surprised that when Arthur published an almost hour-by-hour memoir of his life at the Times, City Room, a book of eight hundred pages covering forty-five years, he mentioned religion only once.

In the Sixties, many religion reporters at newspapers were ordained clergymen who regarded their work as a “ministry of words,” as one of them liked to put it. For me it was a job, rather like covering the United Nations without knowing quite enough about each member state. Initially, I tried attending a few denominational church meetings, more to get the feel of how different sorts of Protestants think and act in solemn assembly than to report their endless resolutions on this or that. I was on a steep learning curve, like an apprentice anthropologist’s first turn in the field. For instance, I’d never before met a bishop who had a wife. The wives of Episcopal bishops, I noticed, tended to knit and chat among themselves during denominational meetings, snapping to attention only when their husbands spoke. But at least the Episcopalians held happy hours where you could cadge a drink. So far as I could tell, Southern Baptists came to their convention every year for one of two reasons: to hear themselves preach, or to listen to those who were better at it. The only really Newsweek-worthy Protestant convention I covered occurred in Philadelphia in 1967. There, after years of intense committee meetings, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church voted on a new confession of faith. As a Catholic, it had never occurred to me that a church could hold a plebiscite on what it believed. But for Protestants, I was learning, the Reformation is a never-ending process. I was excited, therefore, when an aging Reinhold Niebuhr agreed to sit down with me and talk. I asked him every question I could think of. Afterward, Niebuhr advised through intermediaries that if I listened more and talked less, I’d get better interviews.

The reason I survived my initiation years at Newsweek, though, was yet another church convention: Vatican Council II. The Council turned out to be the most important ecclesiastical event since the Reformation, and Newsweek’s editors were counting on me to explain what it all meant. It was also a classic example of what I call “mediated religion.”

The Catholic Moment

The early Sixties was for Catholics—and not only Catholics—the era of the two Johns: John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president, and John XXIII, the pope who was universally loved. Both had immense charm, both inspired optimism, both embodied hope for change. And both died in less than five years of taking office, leaving much unfinished business. The pope’s unfinished business was Vatican Council II, and during the four years it lasted (1962–65), all roads really did seem to lead to Rome.

For journalists, the Council was a uniquely Catholic moment. As many as 2,800 bishops participated, making it the largest and most international gathering in the history of the church. By the final session, there were nearly as many journalists in Rome as there were bishops. Initially, reporting the Council was like covering Kafka’s castle. The bishops’ deliberations were held in secret behind the bronze doors of St. Peter’s Basilica and their speeches, called “interventions,” were delivered in Latin. Certain ceremonies were open to the media, but then came the announcement, “Exit omnia,” ordering nonparticipants to get out. Only summaries of the bishops’ interventions could be had at the Salle Stampa, the Vatican press office. But midway through the first session, The New Yorker began publishing a series of articles by the pseudonymous Xavier Rynne called “Letter from the Vatican,” which described in minute and learned detail the drama unfolding on the Council floor. Clearly, there was a mole inside the Council and many English-speaking bishops themselves followed the Council’s weekly proceedings in the pages of The New Yorker.

As mediated by the journalists, the story of the Council was framed as a battle between traditionalists centered in the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy, and a core of progressive bishops, mostly from northern Europe. It was a facile political trope but one that did in fact mirror how important factions within the Council understood themselves. American readers were particularly interested in the issues of religious freedom, ecumenism, and the church’s relationship with Jews and Judaism. On these subjects the lobbying was fierce among the Protestant theologians invited to sit in as official observers and among the delegations of Jewish representatives who kept a lower profile. But as Vatican II progressed, it became evident that the Council fathers were intent on reshaping the way the church would henceforth understand itself and its relationship to the modern world—which is what Pope John had asked them to do.

Theological debates on issues like the relationship between Scripture and church tradition turned out to be grave and timely matters that deserved in-depth reporting and merited front-page display. But few of the media’s mediators had the requisite background. Michael Novak, a former Catholic seminarian freelancing for several American journals, was one of the few reporters who recognized what was going on. For too long, he wrote in The Open Church, a book published after the first session, the Catholic Church had seen itself as standing outside history as the defender of a “non-historical orthodoxy.” The Council, as he saw it, was the Spirit-led summons to reenter the historical flow. And to submit to history was to submit to change.

The prospect of change is what brought reporters back to Rome for four straight years, and what kept resident news bureaus busy during the nine months between fall sessions. But the Council’s fundamental impact on the media was this: it forced even the most secular of editors to recognize that theological ideas and church history mattered. No one could understand what was going on in Rome, a city anchored to monuments of the past, unless they studied up. The best that most working journalists could do was cultivate enlightened sources from among the four-hundred-plus Council periti—the teams of theological advisors and speechwriters who accompanied the bishops. Time’s Rome bureau hosted a regular weekly session with selected periti before filing its reports to New York. Newsweek, too, vetted periti at restaurant rendezvous over lunch and dinner. Both the news and the interpretation of the Council passed through a placenta of theologians before it reached the public. In short, what readers got were twice-mediated stories of what the bishops said and did.

The Council was already half over when I arrived at Newsweek. It wasn’t until the fall of 1965 that Newsweek sent me to Rome to meet bureau chief Bill Pepper and get acquainted with his contacts at the Vatican. Betty and I had been there once before, in 1960, when, newly wed and poor, we stayed in spartan digs at the YMCA. This time, Pepper had booked a balconied room for us in the Hotel d’Inghilterra, just off the Via Condotti, where the most elegantly turned out women in the world, I came to believe, shopped the world’s most elegant boutiques. The Inghilterra would be my home on dozens of future trips to Rome, and every time, Mario, who presided over the hotel’s cramped, dark bar, was there to greet me by name.

Pepper picked us up in an American convertible so wide it imperiled pedestrians as he drove through Rome’s crowded narrow streets. Along the way, friends of Bill piled on, legs dangling over the fenders until we arrived for lunch at Sabatini’s restaurant in Trastevere. There, a dozen of us spent the afternoon outside at a long table drinking Gavi di Gavi and devouring a huge fish that the restaurant called, after Bill, “Pesce a la Pepper.”

Bill and his wife, Beverly, a gifted and hugely successful sculptor, were to me the Gerald and Sara Murphy of Rome’s journalistic colony. Artists, actors, writers, and film directors formed their primary circle, but it was the mix of priests and bishops whom Bill also befriended that gave dinner parties at the Pepper palazzo an extra edge. It was during one such gathering in our honor that I first met a number of Vatican officials and periti, including the elfin Father Francis Xavier Murphy, the man behind the “Xavier Rynne” pieces in The New Yorker. Novelist Gore Vidal teased the guests with wicked tales implying that New York’s prudish Cardinal Spellman favored young males, as Vidal himself certainly did. As the night wore on, Beverly wiggled outrageously in the lap of the monsignor who served as the pope’s English translator. I can still see the perspiration oozing on his forehead. Not long after, he was made a bishop and sent off to a desert post in the Middle East. This was not, I supposed, what the Council fathers meant by dialogue with the modern world, but who could object?

So began my introduction to Rome in the heady days at the close of Vatican Council II. I remember them well because the energy and optimism inspired by the Council were so short-lived.

The Council vindicated the work of a number of European theologians, advocates of the so-called nouvelle théologie such as Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and Henri DeLubac in France; Edward Schillebeeckx in the Netherlands; and Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger in Germany. In their roles as advisors to the bishops, these scholars had provided the guiding vision and rationale for the Council’s major reforms. Some of them, including the American proponent of religious freedom, John Courtney Murray, had been silenced under the previous pope, Pius XII. Now they found themselves hailed as intellectual heroes by Catholics and treated as media celebrities. The youngest and boldest of them, Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen, whose book The Council, Reform and Reunion, had become an international bestseller, quickly made the cover of Time.

In the immediate years after the Council, these theologians, together with the Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish scholars who had worked with them in Rome, formed a kind of theological road show. Listening to them, I realized that there had been an ecumenism of scholarship, especially in biblical studies, that had preceded by years the gathering in Rome. Together, they toured Catholic colleges and Protestant divinity schools across the United States and Canada, as if the Council experience were now a movable feast. Cardinals and bishops courted them; students and professors sat at their feet. And journalists, of course, plied them with questions. Except for the handsome and expansive Küng, who loved the microphone, these Europeans were mostly reclusive scholars, more at home in small seminars than at press conferences. I remember pushing through a web of reporters’ tape recorders at Notre Dame to grab the attention of Karl Rahner, whose writings were notoriously difficult to follow, even for fellow Germans. “Sorry, but I’m on deadline for a story about Jesus,” I explained. “So can you tell me briefly, when in your view did Jesus realize that he was God?” Rahner looked up at me with the weary eyes of a bloodhound: “Read…my…books,” was all he said.

Indeed, for me as a Catholic the greatest impact of the Council was not the passel of reforms set out in its official documents, important as these were, but rather the opportunity it gave me to read the books by Rahner and others who made the reforms possible. I read them as I did any piece of good literature, on the lookout for fresh insights and re-renderings of the Christian humanism I’d encountered earlier as a student. As a discrete event, the Council was a journalistic gift that kept on giving: who knew where it would all end? Personally, however, I really wasn’t moved by the Council’s added definition of the church as “the People of God”—that was already my experience; nor did I need a council of the church to confirm the layman’s role in the church—the Jesuits had already done that. I harbored no ambition to assume any of the liturgical roles that would be eventually opened to the laity.

What interested me more was how the lines between Catholics and other Christians were being redrawn. Instead of separate churches, the theologians spoke of different historical trajectories and theological traditions. I was deeply impressed by the mutual respect, camaraderie even, between the Catholic and Protestant veterans of the Council. Clearly, the Protestants had been deeply affected by their experiences in Rome. There they had not only collaborated with Catholics, but prayed with them, sometimes even worshipping together at Mass. “I came to feel that it was our council,” Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown told me. “I went as an observer, became a participant—even a lobbyist. I concluded that if Catholicism was not going to be the same, then Protestantism is not going to be the same either.” Conservative Protestants observed the Council from a distance. But after watching what the Council fathers wrought, even a few of these hard-core separationists were moved to second thoughts. Evangelical theologian David Wells concluded that the Council’s “change of mind in matters as…fundamental as revelation, the relation of the natural and the supernatural, salvation and doctrines of the Church and papal authority has rendered the vast majority of Protestant analysis of Catholic doctrine obsolete. It has also placed on Protestants an obligation to revise their thinking about Rome.”1

These were changes worth writing about. As late as 1943, Pope Pius XII had taught that the Roman Catholic Church was identical with the Body of Christ, from which it followed that all Protestants were heretics. The fact that Protestant representatives were invited to the Council as observers was a sure sign that the church had already abandoned this negative view. In its Declaration on Ecumenism, the Council recognized that every validly baptized Christian was a member of Christ’s body and to that extent was in communion with the Catholic Church as “separated brethren.” Indeed, the Council adopted many of the reforms that Martin Luther himself had introduced four centuries earlier—liturgies in the vernacular, greater stress on the Bible in preaching and teaching, emphasis on the laity and “the priesthood of all believers,” and above all a firm iteration of salvation as the work of God alone, as Luther had insisted. Without saying so, the Council was acknowledging that on these key points, at least, the Protestants had been there first.

What had yet to be reported, though, was the reaction of ordinary American Catholics to all of this. The American bishops were opposed on principle to church-sponsored surveys of the faithful: on matters of faith and practice, only the voice of hierarchy needed to be heard. Incredibly, no organization had ever polled Catholics to find out what they thought of their church. Newsweek was the first. A year after the Council ended we hired Louis Harris & Associates to create a valid random sample from among 4,000 Catholics in 100 selected communities. In personal interviews averaging 85 minutes, each was asked to respond to 160 questions. This was not the sort of cheap and quick survey that would subsequently be commissioned by the media every time a pope visited the United States.

The results were published in my 1967 cover story, “How U.S. Catholics View Their Church,” and at the time they seemed shocking. Seventy percent of Catholics wanted the church to lift its ban on birth control and 38 percent said they were already using some form of contraception. A majority stood with the church in opposing abortion, though some said they would make an exception for mothers whose pregnancies were life-threatening. And nearly half thought that priests should be allowed to marry. But there was another side as well. Three out of four reported attending Mass every Sunday and half said their religion was the most important thing in their lives. Some old habits still persisted: more than half (55 percent) felt morally bound to follow their pastor’s judgment on what books or movies to avoid, but nearly as many (46 percent) saw no sin in refusing the Eucharist from a Negro priest.

The Newsweek profile of American Catholics certainly dispelled the myth of a monolithic church, and many readers who wrote letters to the editor charged the magazine with being anti-Catholic. Some bishops attacked the survey as unrepresentative. In turn, Father Andrew Greeley, a sociologist who had begged the bishops to sponsor a survey of their flock, asked the bishops in his syndicated column why a secular magazine should have to do their work for them. What struck me most, apart from the headline-making results on sex-related issues, was the sheer confusion revealed in the pollsters’ personal interviews. The sudden change in traditional dos and don’ts, like abstaining from meat on Fridays, left many Catholics feeling boundaryless. Reading their responses, I remembered what sociologist Peter Berger had said of the Roman Curia officials who had warned of chaos if the Council’s liberalizing reformers got their way: “Conservatives have the better sociological noses.”

In the five years following the Council, Newsweek’s Religion section appeared almost every week, averaging more than a hundred stories annually and, more often than not, producing more letters to the editor than the other ten back-of-the-book sections combined. More than a third of these stories were about the rippling effects of the Council’s reforms and initially the tone was relentlessly upbeat.

None was more naively optimistic than our Christmas cover of 1967—“The Nun: A Joyous Revolution” we called it—which described how many religious orders of women were updating their rules at the urging of the Council fathers. At the time, American sisters were 180,000 strong, three times more numerous than the priests. For more than a century they had been the church’s most familiar public faces as nurses, hospital and orphanage administrators, and especially parochial school teachers. With every change these “women religious” made, symbolic boundaries between the church and the world outside were breached.

Newsweek’s reporters focused mainly on those “new nuns” who were experimenting with more flexible lifestyles—moving members out of the cloister and convent and into inner-city apartments, for example, or taking secular jobs in order to be closer to “the people.” Most communities replaced the office of mother superior with elected boards and government by committee. Individual sisters were encouraged to discern for themselves what form of ministry suited their talents. Those who taught in Catholic schools presented bishops with work demands: smaller classes and time off to pursue graduate degrees—a hint of wider gender wars to come. “There are some people,” said the superior of one large religious order, “who see nuns as a convenient labor force.”

The obvious visual symbol for all this updating was the sudden and widespread abandonment of the nun’s traditional religious habit. Newsweek’s split-screen cover image showed Sister Corita Kent, a hugely popular artist in the Sixties, in and out of habit. For Corita, whose brightly colored serigraphs hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, discarding medieval garb was no big deal. Her work, she told me when I visited her in her Los Angeles studio, was sufficient expression of her religious commitment. But to my aunt and many other middle-aged nuns, the religious habit was a precious sign of their vows as virgins consecrated to Christ and (like Muslim women today who take pride in the simple beauty of their hajib) they’d be damned before they’d exchange their veils for frumpy polyester dresses off the rack.

The question of what a nun should wear turned out to be more consequential than a mere change of wardrobe. Fundamentally, it was a matter of personal identity. Neither clergy nor laity, nuns were often and unfairly perceived as asexual women wrapped in swaddling clothes. Upon entering the convent they discarded their family names and took the names of saints. For every Sister Agnes or Sister Mary, there was a Sister Basil, a Sister Joseph, or a Sister Charles Borromeo, which furthered their gender ambiguity.

After the Council, the nuns reclaimed their family names, but among the reformers there was a palpable movement to reclaim their womanhood as well—and with it their sexuality. I woke up to all of this abruptly during a football weekend at Notre Dame. There I was introduced to a stunningly attractive young nun who insisted on controlling her own identity by renewing her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience one year at a time. She was dressed in a blouse, straight skirt, and a tangerine blazer. But it was her lipstick that caught my eye: the color matched her blazer. It was one thing to see Ingrid Bergman as a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s, or Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story. But to meet a real consecrated virgin so captivatingly turned out was downright disorienting. “Get used to it, Ken,” said the priest who was then president of St. Mary’s College across the street. “In five years, nuns will be presenting such a new face to the world that their vocational crisis will be a thing of the past.”

He was a poor prophet. Within a year, Sister Corita was no longer a “sister.” Her religious order, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, splintered into traditional and reformed factions and the latter eventually disappeared. So did a lot of the other communities of nuns. By the end of the Sixties, women’s religious orders were reporting defections of up to six thousand a year plus a precipitous drop in new novices. The vocation crisis, at least in the United States, became a steady state of relentless attrition.

The immediate post-Council years also witnessed an unprecedented exodus from the priesthood. Various polls showed that most Catholic priests felt that celibacy should be optional, and thousands of them opted to marry with or without formal dispensations from holy orders. Vatican officials admitted they were receiving more applications than they could handle from priests seeking permission to resign in order to marry. To force the Vatican’s hand—and to ensure a faster dispensation—many priests married first and then presented the Vatican with a fait accompli.

Newsweek published several stories on priests who had secretly married and fathered children while continuing to serve as pastors. We also reported on “priests who date,” noting how they exploited their attraction to women who were excited by men they saw as forbidden fruit. In 1968, one of the few Catholic bishops I genuinely admired, James Shannon of St. Paul, Minnesota, became the first member of the American hierarchy to resign—the issue was birth control—and he later married.

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I tried to find a pattern in all of this but there was no single explanation. I had read the Catholic fiction of J. F. Powers and figured maybe they had tired of the cramped clerical culture he so shrewdly observed. Obviously, some of the priests who renounced their ordination vows had become priests mainly to satisfy their parents’ wishes—or to defy them. James Carroll, the son of a World War II admiral, and who became a college chaplain active in the antiwar movement, abandoned the priesthood after only five years, claiming later that once the resistance was over being a priest had ceased to be “fun.” Some, like Philip Berrigan, met a nun in the antiwar movement and found a soul mate. Others were Catholic college professors who left, married, and continued to teach theology. A number of pastoral types took off their collars and became psychotherapists. These, at least, had skills they could transfer to a secular occupation. Most parish priests were not so fortunate. My own pastor, a grumpy monsignor, had been secretly seeing a woman who followed him from parish to parish. Eventually he gave up his double life and disappeared with her. We never heard of him again. Some ex-priests claimed that they were the “healthy” ones—that only the emotionally immature and closeted gay men remained to serve the church. This claim, of course, was self-serving: it supposed that no “healthy” male would choose the celibate life. Personally, I felt betrayed by every priest who left. When I married I had sworn vows to my wife and I expected priests to honor those they made at ordination. In any case, life in a rectory or a convent struck me as poor preparation for the give-and-take of marriage. “Good luck, guys,” was the best wish I could muster.

This was not the “open church” that the (then) liberal Michael Novak had so recently celebrated. Words like crisis and especially identity crisis became routine in headlines on stories about American Catholics. And for the first time Catholics began to talk, usually disparagingly, about something they called “the institutional church.” My own attention fastened on the Catholics’ sudden loss of confidence in the church’s educational system, for which, as I’ve already made abundantly clear, I felt enormous gratitude. There were, at that time, 309 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, tenfold more than in the rest of the world combined. Collectively, they represented an enormous achievement by an immigrant and often embattled church. Together with the Catholic grammar and high schools, they educated nearly six million students.

Doubts about the value of this achievement began with the universities. In 1966, the American Council on Education issued a study that failed to uncover a single Catholic university with a “distinguished” or even “strong” graduate department. This prompted Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, the leading American Catholic historian at the time and a tart critic of Catholic intellectual life, to suggest a radical consolidation. “I don’t think we should have more than three Catholic universities,” he told me in an interview for Newsweek: “one on the Atlantic seaboard, one in the Middle West and one on the West Coast.” Ellis knew it would never happen, given the independence of each university. Even so, his magisterial pronouncement prompted a public-relations contest among them in the hope of surviving the final cut. Fordham, for example, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times promising that it would “pay any price—break any mold—in order to pursue her true function as a university.”

The mold that needed breaking, according to lay professors on various Catholic campuses, was the control and often arbitrary administration by religious orders. In the late Sixties, conflicts over academic freedom produced a faculty strike at St. John’s University, then the nation’s largest Catholic campus, in Queens, New York; and another at St. John’s Seminary in Boston. Other protests erupted at the Catholic University of America, in Washington D.C., and at St. Xavier’s College in Chicago, after the local cardinals banned lectures by the same progressive theologians who were so recently celebrated. At Webster College, a tiny Catholic school for women, Sister Jacqueline Grennan, who had won fame (and a profile in Life magazine) as a female New Frontiersman during the Kennedy administration, moved to secularize the college by making theology courses optional. The best-known “new nun” besides Corita, “Sister Jackie” eventually resigned from the religious order that had founded Webster, arguing that a college president should not be subject, as she was, to a religious superior. By 1967, Webster was no longer a Catholic college and Sister Jackie had married, eventually moving on to a tumultuous term as president of Hunter College in New York City. And so it went. The notion that “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms,” as George Bernard Shaw had famously sniped, could now be heard from the mouths of Catholic academics. “The less Catholic it is,” declared the vice president of Chicago’s Mundelein College (which would disappear), “the better the Catholic college will be.” A faculty draft report on academic freedom at the University of Dayton, run by the Marianist Fathers, was more blunt. The purpose of a Catholic university, it claimed, “is to become secularized; for to be secularized means to come of age….”

The assault on Catholic education quickly trickled down to the church’s grammar schools. In the mid-Sixties, the most widely discussed book in Catholic education circles was Mary Perkins Ryan’s Are Parochial Schools the Answer? Her answer, in a word, was “No.” The investment wasn’t worth it, she argued, since half of the nation’s Catholic pupils were in public schools, and there was no way that parochial schools could expand to accommodate them all. But her main argument was that the schools were no longer needed to protect Catholic students from alien religious influences. It was a variation on the theme that American Catholics had “come of age.” Instead, Ryan proposed that the church provide after-school catechetical classes and rely on the Sunday liturgy to form the children’s religious sensibilities and habits.

Hers was a naive proposal, one that only a liturgical expert would suggest. It presumed that Catholics still lived in urban ethnic neighborhoods where the parish was the center of communal life. In fact, more than half the nation’s Catholics had already moved to the suburbs, where, as any amateur sociologist could tell you, the school was now the center around which Catholics formed their connections. Suburban parishes were more like the intentional communities that Protestant congregations had always been, and their vitality depended primarily on the voluntary efforts of that core of parents who sent their children to the parish school. Although Catholics talked a great deal about the importance of “community,” they were not well practiced in forming one based solely on Sunday worship—which is what Ryan was proposing.

Also, her timing was bad: the reformed liturgy, in English with the priest facing the people behind a stand-alone altar table, plus congregational singing (never a strong feature of Catholic worship), had just been introduced. These changes were intended to reinforce the idea of Mass as a communal celebration, but at inception it was better described, as one forgotten wit put it, as “the participation of the laity in the confusion of the clergy.” Compared to the old Latin liturgy, I found the new Mass about as moving as a freight train. Silence was now a liturgical vice, conscripted congregational responses the new regimen of worship. Pamphlet-thin “missalettes” replaced the thick leather-covered missals with the Latin and English on alternate pages. In a pale imitation of the early Christians’ kiss of peace, there was now a scripted pause during which husbands kissed their wives, parents hugged their children, and everyone shook hands with those in neighboring pews. I remember vividly the funeral of the great Catholic apologist Frank Sheed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral: swinging round to shake hands with whoever was behind me, I found only a pair of hands holding a limp missalette at arm’s length. One middle finger was extended. I shook the finger—there was nothing else to grab—and looked into the disdainful eyes of William F. Buckley Jr. “You SOB,” I wanted to say, “I don’t like this Rotary Club routine any more than you do.”

Buckley’s National Review, a magazine produced mostly by Catholics, had responded to the church reforms with a question on its cover: “What, in the name of God, is going on in the Catholic Church?” Good question. Defecting priests and secularizing colleges did not affect me directly, but the new liturgy did. In place of my much-loved Latin hymns and chants, the new liturgists bade us sing old Reformation anthems like Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” I could not bring myself to join in when the chosen hymn was “Amazing Grace”—in fact, I still refuse to do so. It’s a lovely piece, all about getting one’s self individually saved, Evangelical-style, but theologically it has no place in the corporate worship of the Catholic Church.

What the liturgists didn’t borrow from Protestant hymnals, they conjured up by themselves. Mostly, it was folk music sung to plucked guitars with relentlessly upbeat lyrics about how much a nice God loves us and aren’t we fortunate to be his chosen people. There was no awe, no hint of the biblical fear of the Lord in this music, only mildly diuretic self-congratulation. Our children loved it: it matched the treacle they were learning in Sunday school classes, which is why my wife and I pulled them out to teach them the fundamentals ourselves. The church’s failure to pass on the faith, through the liturgy or through the classroom, would eventually snip two generations of young Catholics from their own religious roots. Meanwhile, adult Catholics faced a crisis of their own.

Birth Control and the Collapse of a Subculture

Three years after the Council closed, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, his encyclical reaffirming the church’s opposition to contraception. The pope had hoped thereby to preserve the teaching authority of the church, which had long opposed contraception in any form and had only recently, and reluctantly, tolerated the “rhythm” method as a form of spacing births. But his decision had the opposite effect. The negative reaction to the encyclical was so powerful, by clergy as well as laity, that it produced a far-reaching crisis more damaging to the church than even the child-abuse scandal that erupted twenty years later. To understand why takes some telling.

Birth control was not just another issue in moral theology. It was a subject that touched the intimate lives of every Catholic couple. To use a contraceptive, Catholics were taught, was intrinsically evil, a mortal sin right up there with murder and masturbation. In fact, some Catholic moralists called it “intravaginal masturbation.” Contraception was also a public issue, one that had for a long time defined an important boundary between Catholics and other Americans. When I was growing up, “rubbers” symbolized what other teenagers did on dates, or tried to. I never found any in my parents’ bedside drawers and would have been scandalized if I had. According to church teaching, the purpose of marriage—and therefore of marital sex—was “the procreation and education of children.” The attendant physical pleasure experienced by spouses was grudgingly acknowledged, but only as nature’s way of allaying concupiscence.

To a lot of married Catholics, this argument for chastity in marriage was one that only celibate clergy could find convincing. It took two births less than a year apart and as many later miscarriages for my wife and me to realize not only that the rhythm method didn’t work, but that the reliance on thermometer readings, vaginal tapes, and calendar-keeping to avoid pregnancy was every bit as artificial as latex prophylactics. We were hardly alone. Medical studies found that six out of ten women had irregular ovulation, making rhythm a futile exercise for them.

The early Sixties saw an unprecedented outpouring in the Catholic press of articles and letters from couples describing the baneful effects on their marriages caused by the church’s ban on birth control. John Rock, a Catholic gynecologist at Harvard Medical School who helped develop “the pill,” thought he had the answer. In 1963, he published a book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control, in which he argued that the pill, by helping to regulate ovulation, was morally consonant with church teachings. His appearance on the covers of Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post, and on television, plus a series in the New York Times and a summary of it in Reader’s Digest, brought this “good news” to a wide audience. Within five years, half of married Catholic women in the United States told pollsters they were “on the pill,” often with the approval of their confessors. In 1965, John T. Noonan Jr., a scholar of natural law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, published Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, a magisterial investigation of the church’s long and sometimes contradictory teachings on the subject that remains the definitive history. In the end, Noonan argued that acceptance of contraception was now not only possible but necessary given the changing role of women and the growing recognition that procreation is not the single or even primary end of conjugal sex. On this as on other moral issues, he concluded, the church “has grown in wisdom and grace.” Noonan’s book, too, was widely reviewed in the media.

Noonan’s work took on added significance because the author was a consultant to the international commission that Paul VI had appointed to advise him on the issue of contraception. The very existence of the commission suggested that the church’s position was not written on stone tablets, prompting many Catholic theologians to rethink the issue on their own. The last papal encyclical on birth control, Casti Connubii, had condemned all forms of contraception as contrary “to the law of God and of nature.” That encyclical, published in 1930 by Pius XI, had been the handiwork of a single German Jesuit advisor. This time, Paul VI was relying on a diverse commission that grew to include fifty-nine experts in theology, demography, medicine (mainly gynecology), and psychology, plus three married couples and a committee of cardinals and bishops. For four years, the commission met in secret in Rome, and although I knew four of the American members personally, neither I nor any other journalist could spring a leak about their deliberations. Only later, with the publication of several books, did those deliberations—recorded in more than five hundred pages—become public.

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The witness of the women turned out to be crucial. Two of the five women, both mothers of large families, were especially eloquent in their personal revelations of how the rhythm method had negatively affected their experience of marriage. Patty Crowley, the cofounder of the Christian Family Movement, augmented her personal testimony with three thousand letters from CFM members, couples with an average of 4.9 children each, who added their own litanies of frustration, depression, and spousal alienation as they struggled to conform their conjugal relations to the church’s approved method. It was the first time the committee of cardinals and bishops had heard women speak so openly about their sexual lives—and their first opportunity to consider the issue of birth control from other than a male perspective. From the physicians on the commission the clergy learned that “nature” itself did not support the assumption that every act of intercourse was open to the generation of new life. “Once we learned that,” Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens later remarked, “the breach [in previous church teaching] was made.”

But it was the theologians who provided the zestiest intellectual exchanges. Even those who defended the church’s ban admitted that there was no basis in Scripture for the church’s position. And arguments from natural law proved unconvincing. The only obstacle to change was papal precedent—chiefly Casti Connubii. On this point, American Jesuit John C. Ford, who had invested a lifetime in explicating and defending Catholic sexual morality, was unyielding. For Ford, the credibility of the papal magisterium as the divinely inspired interpreter of morality was at stake. To admit that the church had erred on contraception all these years, he argued, would imply that on this crucial matter the Holy Spirit had decamped to those Protestant churches that had already approved of contraception. A Spanish Jesuit, Father Marcelino Zalba, was troubled by an even weightier question, one worthy of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “What then with the millions we have sent to hell?” he asked. “Fr. Zalba,” Patty Crowley replied, “do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?”2

In its final report to the pope, the commission pointed out that the church had seen changes in the papal magisterium before, notably its condemnations of usury and freedom of conscience, and suggested that its teachings about contraception were reformable as well. Marriage, the report recognized, is indeed oriented to the procreation and education of children, but within it spouses were free to determine the number of children and use whatever form of contraception that was not also an abortifacient. Not to change, on the other hand, would mean continuing the harm this teaching caused to Catholic spouses—and to the teaching authority of the church.

Remarkably, the commission was nearly unanimous: 15 of the 17 theologians voted for change, along with 9 of the 12 cardinals and bishops. But among the dissenters were three men with exceptional clout: Carlo Colombo, the pope’s personal theologian; Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Vatican’s Holy Office, in charge of defending church doctrine; and the resourceful Father Ford. The American Jesuit immediately prepared a dissenting opinion and sent it to the pope. Within days, copies of both documents were leaked to The National Catholic Reporter and to Le Monde in France. From there news stories turned up on the front page of the New York Times and elsewhere around the world, including Newsweek and Time. Once again, the media were the first to inform Catholics of a major event in the history of their church.

Pope Paul was understandably upset by this breach of secrecy. He felt his hand was being forced. Ford, who had previously sought and received at least two private meetings with the pope while the commission was at work, went to him once more. Later, he would boast that it took him only an hour to dissuade the pope from accepting the commission’s recommendations. However it happened, the pope rejected the commission’s findings, as was his privilege, and directed Ottaviani to assemble a group of conservative bishops and theologians to write Humanae Vitae. Two years lapsed between the commission report and the encyclical’s release, years in which, as Newsweek reported, a majority of American Catholics changed their views on contraception.

Humanae Vitae was crafted as a direct rebuttal to the commission’s report. The key words, the ones most widely quoted, were these: “[E]ach and every marital act must be open to the transmission of life.” Why? Because, as footnotes made clear, previous popes had said so, and only the church’s magisterium had the authority to interpret natural law.

The encyclical was also a plea for support: from bishops and confessors to enforce the papal teaching, from scientists to perfect the rhythm method, from governments not to sanction artificial birth control, and from Catholic spouses to live by the pope’s decision, however much distress it caused them. The pope’s fear of noncompliance was evident. But so were his fears that contraception would lead, among other things, to husbands disregarding “the physical and emotional equilibrium” of their wives, thereby reducing them to “being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of [their] own desires.” The contrary testimony of women given to the birth control commission was totally ignored.

The swift and sustained opposition to Humanae Vitae was historic. Overnight a group of theologians from the Catholic University of America (CUA) issued a ten-page dissent, declaring that Catholic spouses had the right and duty to follow their own consciences. Eventually more than seventy Catholic priests and theologians signed the statement, making the reaction a very public and ecclesiastically messy affair. Almost every bishop had in his diocese dissenting priests to deal with. In the months that followed, the bishops of France, Germany, Holland, Austria, and Canada variously affirmed the right to selective conscientious objection to the encyclical. In the United States there were rallies and protests by lay Catholics as the American bishops debated how collectively to respond. In November, four thousand protestors showed up outside the bishops’ meeting in Washington, D.C.—among them Senator Eugene McCarthy, an intellectual Catholic and erstwhile Democratic peace candidate, who read a poem and assured the crowd, “I am not here to start a third party or a second church.” It was the day’s only light touch.

In Newsweek, I wrote several multipage pieces reporting reactions and explaining the issues at stake. In short order they had escalated from academic freedom and the right to theological dissent to the freedom of conscience of Catholic couples and the nature and reach of papal authority. Priests, in particular, were caught between their vows of obedience to their bishops and the needs of penitents in the confessional. An encyclical written to preserve the papal magisterium was now the pretext for challenging it. “Papal authority,” declared Father Charles Curran, the boyish leader of the CUA faculty revolt, “needs to be demythologized and brought under limits.”

Eventually, I was asked to testify as a representative of the media at a hearing on the dissidents called by the trustees of CUA. The university’s chancellor, Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D.C., and his fellow bishops on the board wanted Curran and his dissenting colleagues fired for making public their scholarly dissent. The trustees’ position was that if the theologians had kept their dissent private, journalists like me could not have written what we did, and the reaction to Humanae Vitae would, presumably, have been more positive. I testified that even journalists read scholarly books and journals, that reporting on theological trends is central to what we do, and that even if Humanae Vitae had been met by total silence, we would have investigated the reasons for that silence. “The days when the church informed the press through publicity handouts,” I ventured, “were over long ago.”3 Curran kept his job but in 1986 he was fired after a second investigation by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. By then many of the best theologians at CUA had left, several of them to teach at non-Catholic institutions.

The negative effects of Humanae Vitae proved to be myriad and far-reaching. Birth control ceased to be a staple of Sunday sermons. On the issue of contraception, both sides of the confessional box adopted a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Rather quickly, the acute Catholic sense of sin, for so long tied to sexual morality, faded. Parish priests who habitually spent up to seven hours every Saturday hearing confessions found that the serpentine lines of penitents had disappeared. Within a decade, the dark confessional boxes themselves had vanished from most parish churches, replaced by sunnier “reconciliation rooms.” So did that special form of Catholic hellfire preaching, the annual parish mission, which typically homed in on sexual transgressions. For Father Ford, a major battle won had become a war lost. Jesuit seminary students refused to attend his classes. His position as chief moral theologian for Theological Studies, the Jesuits’ most scholarly journal, was turned over to my former teacher at St. Ignatius, Father Richard McCormick, a trenchant critic of Humanae Vitae. In Rome, Paul VI, a pope I personally admired, seemed to lapse into a terminal funk. His reign lasted ten more years but he never issued another encyclical.4

In 1971, Newsweek again polled American Catholics for a cover story that, with copious charts, went on for seven pages. What we found was a once-cohesive community in disarray; as one liberal monsignor bluntly told us: “the church is one god-damned mess.” Nearly as many American Catholics, for instance, said they now looked for spiritual guidance to evangelist Billy Graham as they still looked to the pope. This was the aforementioned cover story—“Has the Church Lost Its Soul?”—and by “soul” this is what I meant: “an integral Catholic subculture with its own distinctive blend of rituals and rules, mystery and manners,” which, as I saw it then, “has vanished from the American scene.”

Had I that cover story to write all over again, I would have said that the membrane that once separated Catholics from other Americans had been finally rent. The assimilation of Catholics—a quarter of the population—into mainstream American culture and society had been accomplished, though at heavy cost to the institutions of the church. And after Humanae Vitae and its fallout, the internal boundaries by which Catholics had differentiated themselves from their neighbors quickly receded. Still, most Catholics clung to their faith, and said they expected their children to do the same. In closing the story I tried to lay a journalistic finger on the reasons. For that I had to look inside myself, and this is what I wrote: “When the Catholic faith runs deep, it establishes a certain sensuous rhythm in the soul, a sacramental sensibility that suffuses ordinary things—bread, water, wine, the marriage bed—and transforms them into vehicles of grace. In these spiritual depths, doctrine and church laws fade in importance.”

In fact, conflict over doctrine and church law became central to an enduring Catholic saga, especially after the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978. So much so that for the rest of the century Newsweek’s editors never even considered featuring any other Christian denomination on the cover. But however much the reforms of Vatican Council II may have hastened Catholic turmoil, the real causes lay outside the church. In politics as well as in religion, Americans in the early Sixties were inspired by a new if short-lived vision of a robustly secular future.