UP FRONT
Giving Shape to A Vision: The Genesis of CHURCH
Margaret O’Brien Steinfels |  Spring 2009

It is a miracle that CHURCH, the magazine, ever saw the light of day. First of all, a start-up was nothing I had ever done on my own. Second, my co-conspirators, Phil Murnion and Harry Fagan, were uncertain that they wanted a magazine; even more, they were unclear what they wanted—just in case they wanted it. Third, our personalities were roughly speaking ying, yang, and yong, not a harmonious line-up. Still, we were all Catholics; perhaps this explains the miracle of CHURCH, the magazine.

The National Pastoral Life Center, founded in 1983, was a growing organization looking for a way to communicate with its members. Phil and Harry thought a magazine or newsletter might be the answer. Well, Phil thought so. Harry wasn’t so sure. He had worked in advertising. He knew what money-losers magazines could be. Would I consult with them on a feasibility study? Why not?

In mid-1984, while talking about what was wanted, I began working on a business plan. Design and editorial content lingered at the margins while the financial considerations played out. Up to that time, I had edited three magazines, New Generation, the Hastings Center Report, and Christianity and Crisis. Of necessity I knew a little—but only a little—about the business of magazines: promotion, printing, paper, and postage. In this case, that turned out to be the easy part. Bids could be had easily enough and, when put into a budget, could forecast the bottom line. The cost estimates showed that the publication should be a magazine rather than a newsletter; that a quarterly would be more economical than a bimonthly; and that sending a copy of the first issue gratis to all parish priests in the country would be a cost-effective promotion. In short, we knew what a magazine would cost before we knew its name and content.

The concept, the whatness (the word quidity was used from time to time) of the magazine resided in Phil’s imagination like a Platonic form. Over many long and arduous discussions, Harry and I worked to elicit that vision and give it concrete shape. Phil wanted what he wanted. But what was that? The audience would be parish priests as well as the increasing, though back then still modest, numbers of religious and lay people joining parish staffs. Phil did not want a theological journal or a “popular” parishioners’ magazine. Still, theology, liturgy, and catechesis had to be taken seriously along with the practical tasks pastors faced—from tending boilers to overseeing hires and fires. He wanted a publication focused directly on parish work in all its rich complexities and its many tasks, high and low, ordinary and extraordinary.

Phil knew this world from many perspectives. He had been and was a parish priest. He had a Ph.D. in sociology and had studied the New York clergy (of which he was a member). He had recently collaborated with a large, national study of parishes at the University of Notre Dame. He was a confidant of priests and bishops and a friend to lay men and women from all walks of life—rich business people and Bowery outcasts (who lived next door to our Elizabeth Street office), tough Irish women (like his mother) and up and coming Latinos. Above all, as I found in my four years at NPLC, he was a priest’s priest; he understood the joys and burdens of their lives; he believed the parish was the heart of the U.S. Catholic church. Most of all, he was smart, well-read, and ever-ready to wrestle an issue into the grave.

Harry Fagan, his buddy and co-director, was an organizer of the kind that Saul Aulinsky and the IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) made famous: verbally aggressive and action-oriented. Head of the diocesan Commission for Community Catholic Action office in Cleveland, he came to New York when Phil decided to start a national organization dedicated to parish life. NPLC’s founding myth had the two of them shaking hands on a boat in the middle of Lake Erie, after which Harry packed up his family and his life and moved to New York.

Phil and Harry, a priest and a layman, were well matched: theological and pastoral, intellectual and practical, analytic and operational. Their “church” experiences gave them complementary outlooks, while their distinctive personalities often sent them to opposite corners. Over the months of planning, Phil came to focus on developing the magazine that he thought would help form smarter and better pastors; Harry leaned to the face-to-face consulting and national conferences that he thought would prove the lifeblood of better pastoral ministry. Phil sat at his desk, contemplating every alternative to a sentence, an article, and a cover illustration. Harry preferred life on the road. And they both tried to do everything.

Putting a magazine together with the two was alternatively exhilarating and exasperating; everything was open for discussion, but nothing ever needed to be decided—at least not right now! The production deadlines and printing schedules that were part of my DNA had never been in their job descriptions: “No one’s going to hold the presses for you guys!” We were all control freaks, each in his or her own reasonable way, of course. Finally this combustible mix produced. Between the rock of Phil’s vacillations and the hard place of Harry’s travels, my pushing and shoving, insisting on this article (or that), and imposing deadlines began to work. To the amazement of all, the Charter Issue appeared at the very beginning of 1985.

That CHURCH, the magazine, ever appeared was no less amazing to Emil Antonucci, who designed and illustrated its pages, and to our compositors and printers, Larry Zwerlin and Mark Solomon. None of them could quite fathom Phil’s clerical chutzpah (“I’m a priest; I know what I like”), or the ups and downs of our Rube Goldberg-like editorial and production process. But the three of them were real professionals and, perhaps for the first time in my career, I understood what that entailed: Not only doing a great job, but working with what you got, namely Phil, Harry and me.

Looking back, I think that first issue, and the ones that followed, were nearly exactly what Phil had imagined a magazine for priests and pastoral ministry should be. Many of our authors were what might be called Master Pastors, men and women skilled equally in the lowly and the exalted tasks of parish life. CHURCH effected what it signified (to use a traditional formula), linking the exalted to the ordinary in mostly everyday language.

Over the next several issues, our roller coaster ride smoothed out and it was time for me to move on. Harry and Phil were lucky to have had me, but in this collaboration, I was even more fortunate. I learned many things: first, how easy (in retrospect) it was to start a magazine with three conflicting personalities, perhaps especially with three conflicting personalities.

Second, though a cradle Catholic, I was an outsider to church life. Phil and Harry were “churchy,” as I frequently remarked, “soooo churchy!” Through them, however, I came to see the church from the inside. “Insider” was not the kind of Catholic I was or wanted to be, but like any culture system it had its virtues and I came to admire many of those who practiced them. Bishops were good people even if some of their diocesan papers weren’t so great. Many priests, I could see, were the linchpins not only of their parishes but often of their neighborhood and whole communities. I didn’t fancy the term lay ministry for the work of being a writer and editor, but I came to appreciate those men and women who lived their vocations in working for the church. And when I went back to the “world,” to edit Commonweal, I saw things differently, or at least with greater nuance.

Third, these were the years when the enthusiasms of Vatican II were coming up for a course correction. Phil’s analyses of these issues, ranging over ecclesiology and liturgy, ministry and clerical and religious life, and Catholic identity, were astute and usually accurate. But more than that, he had a keen political sense of how conflicts might be worked out—if they could be worked out. Our conversations were my inoculation against both the enthusiasms and the counter-revolution then coming over the horizon. Ten years later, when Phil, with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, organized the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, it was of a piece with this effort to sustain the middle ground, to balance the achievements of the council with the enthusiasm of many American Catholics, and to foster dialogue among a variety of Catholic factions.

Finally, for all of the Sturm und Drang of starting the magazine, we three managed to sustain a friendship that dwindled with Harry’s death in 1992 and ended with Phil’s in 2003. They left many good works behind and I am happy to have been part of one of them.

Margaret O’Brien Steinfels is co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, former editor of Commonweal, and founding editor of CHURCH.