Religious Press: The Printed Word Embattled

When he introduced movable type in the 15th century, German Printer Johann Gutenberg knew what the public wanted: a Bible. In the U.S., Protestant and Roman Catholic publishers alike found it profitable to follow Gutenberg's lead. Bibles and hymnals, missals and prayer books, inspirational and theological works always had a certain dependable bread-and-butter market. Religious periodicals were a bonanza --with a combined circulation, in the mid-'60s, estimated at nearly 60 million. But the crisis in Christian faith during the late 1960s and divisions over doctrinal and social issues within Protestantism and Catholicism have changed the situation. Religious publishing is in serious trouble.

Catholic publications have suffered most in recent months. Sheed and Ward, once among the most flourishing of Catholic book publishers, has retrenched to a skeleton staff and a spare list of new books. Commonweal, the most intellectual of U.S. Catholic weeklies, has appealed to its readers for funds to survive. Herder Correspondence, a scholarly international Roman Catholic monthly, died in June. Ave Maria, a brightly edited but faltering magazine, tried to keep 105 years of publication history alive by changing its name, content and format; but the replacement, A.D. 1970, expired two weeks ago after only 18 issues. And despite an enviable record of reportorial scoops, the aggressively liberal National Catholic Reporter has lost 22% of its circulation over the past 18 months.

The latest symptom of crisis occurs this week when the National Register, a 43-year-old weekly Catholic newspaper supported widely by U.S. bishops, will be taken over by Twin Circle Publishing Co., a right-wing Catholic enterprise supported by Schick Millionaire Patrick J. Frawley.

Council Victim. The $500,000 purchase agreement, reportedly financed by Frawley, solved the immediate fiscal problems facing the Register publishers, Denver's Catholic Press Society. The paper's national edition was down from 190,000 at the beginning of 1969 to 112,000 recently; the number of its diocesan editions dropped from a high of 36 to 25.

Like many other victims in the Catholic publishing world, the Register was also a remote casualty of the Second Vatican Council. During the exciting conciliar years 1962-65, Catholic publishing enjoyed a remarkable boom that inspired what Cross Currents Editor Joseph Cunneen calls "unreal expectations." Moreover, the widespread liturgical experimentation encouraged by Vatican II seriously undermined a profitable "black book" trade in breviaries, missals and hymnals. Many Catholic bookstores, dependent on these items and such increasingly unpopular devotional accessories as rosaries and statues, simply went out of business, thus depriving publishers of one of their major outlets. Rapid developments in theology compounded the problem, often outdating books before they appeared. Eventually, the tide of reform following the Council produced a reaction among traditional Catholics--a shock manifested by their rejection of publications that brought them the discomfiting news.

Just such a backlash surely cost the Register some subscribers as it moved cautiously left of center under the editorship of Father Daniel Flaherty. But the emphasis on local diocesan life resulting from Vatican II was a more critical factor: several large dioceses decided to publish their own papers, leaving an enlarged Register printing plant underutilized. Now, as part of the sale agreement, Twin Circle--the original weekly backed by Frawley--will also be printed at the Denver plant, which stays in the hands of the former Register owners.

Twin Circle itself has grown remarkably, nearly doubling its circulation in the past 18 months to more than 100,000. Much of that increase probably resulted from a blanket, hard-sell promotion (including phone calls to every parish in the country). Some of it is also a response to the unyielding ideology of Jesuit Editor Daniel Lyons, who would have the U.S. blockade Haiphong and send Nationalist Chinese troops to Viet Nam. While an ad hoc committee of bishops was working to resolve the California table-grape strike, Lyons castigated both the bishops and the strikers. On matters of doctrine Twin Circle has supported the Pope vociferously, and has reflected traditionalist misgivings about innovations in the Church. Recently it warned darkly of "theological abuses" that might accompany the new Order of Mass.

For the moment the Register's future posture is a question mark. It will be edited and published not by Father Lyons but by Dale Francis, 53, a layman, former publisher of Twin Circle, whose weekly column in that paper was notably more moderate than the views expressed by Lyons. Francis, who admits that Twin Circle is only "a journal of opinion," promises to make the Register into a "national Catholic newspaper of record." Whether he can do this under the watchful eye of Father Lyons, who will move to Denver from his offices in Frawley's Los Angeles building, is arguable. But Francis insists: "The Register is not going to be Twin Circle. If it is necessary to do any disassociating, I will show it by the content of the paper."

Protestant publishing troubles reflect similar stress within denominations. On social issues and in theology, church leadership and local pastors in liberal Protestant churches have often been more progressive than their congregations, and sometimes positively radical. The Episcopalian, quasi-official magazine of the U.S. Episcopal Church, angered many communicants with its defense of a $40,000 grant to the militant Spanish-American Alianza in New Mexico. A breezy Methodist campus magazine, motive, ran into trouble last year when printers initially refused to set four-letter words in an issue on women's liberation; the next month's issue was pulled from the presses by the United Methodist Church Board of Education for similar language. In all, the predominantly Protestant periodicals belonging to the Associated Church Press have lost almost 2,000,000 in circulation--nearly 10% --in the past two years.

John Knox Press, one of the better Protestant publishing houses, was caught in the left-right crossfire within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. The firm had to cut its publishing schedule in half this year, at least partially because of conservative dissatisfaction with its parent agency, the Church's Board of Christian Education.

The huge Protestant evangelical market, however, is flourishing. Word, Inc., a record-and-book publishing firm in Waco, Texas, has produced a pair of phenomenal bestsellers on spiritual group dynamics by an Episcopalian oilman named Keith Miller (TIME, Sept. 19). Together they have sold some 700,000 hardback copies. Other evangelical bestsellers stress personal experience. David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade, for instance, tells of Wilkerson's life as a street minister amid New York City's gangs, and has sold more than 6,000,000 copies, mostly in paperback, in 24 languages. Some 2,900 nondenominational evangelical bookstores in the U.S. account for an estimated $113 million in gross sales annually.

Packaged Topics. Success has not been the exclusive domain of conservatives, nor disaster the exclusive fate of liberals. The Christian, a lively, 110-year-old evangelical newsweekly in Great Britain, died last year. Triumph, an archconservative U.S. Catholic monthly, faces severe financial problems.

The liberal Catholic publishing house of Herder and Herder, on the other hand, has sold some 350,000 hardback English-language copies of the Dutch Catechism.

The puckish, progressive bimonthly, the Critic, is remarkably healthy --abetted by a brace of profitable newsletters, Protestant and Catholic, a series of packaged sermon topics, and the Thomas More Book Club.

Various schemes for survival are being tried. Though specialized magazines for priests have had their own troubles lately, Father Clifford Stevens of Santa Fe, N. Mex., has recently launched a slick, readable monthly called Schema XIII (after the Vatican II document on the church in the modern world), which tries to overcome the stodgy clerical image of competing periodicals. Methodists and Presbyterians have joined to launch a new "multimedia" mission magazine, New World Outlook, replete with poster-size foldouts and stapled-in phonograph records. The Roman Catholic Maryknoll fathers have announced a new line of "Third World" books about problems in underdeveloped countries, to be edited by Philip Scharper, formerly with Sheed and Ward.

The U.S. Catholic Conference has spent a good deal of money to make the National Catholic News Service a thoroughgoing, even painfully candid, news organization.

Indeed, Publisher Norman Shaifer, a non-Catholic layman who backed the short-lived Priests' Forum magazine of the National Federation of Priests' Councils, suggests that what progressives need to develop is the conservative's willingness to spend not only time but also money on communications. An example of a liberal who does so, Shaifer points out, is Belgium's Leo-Jozef Cardinal Suenens, who is developing an elaborate communications system in Europe. Liberals in the U.S. must do the same, insists Shaifer. "They spend so much time talking among themselves that they don't realize that others still haven't got the message."

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