Crosscurrents at 48

Abstract

Crosscurrents at 48 Charles Henderson (bio) On the occasion of our 70th anniversary, I present these words from our founding editor, Joseph Cunneen, originally presented at our 48th anniversary celebration, as he was retiring. It gives a vivid sense of the excitement surrounding the launch of this journal as well as highlights of the publication during his nearly 50 years as editor. It also traces, in brief, the history of the journal through its merger with the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life and its journal: Religion and Intellectual Life. Looking back at Cross Currents after forty-eight years as editor and co-ed itor requires an effort to disentangle the personal story of a small group of friends from developments in both the church and the world since World War II. The record of what we published gives me considerable satisfaction but a moment's reflection makes it clear that we were not makers of history but excited and surprised participants in a process of rapidly accelerating change. Seed for the earliest idea of the magazine was first sown by John Julian Ryan, while teaching an advanced writing course I took at Holy Cross College in 1942. He complained that there was really no first-class Catholic intellectual journal. One could be created, he maintained, by bringing together the best from existing reviews—and he offered as examples Oratres Fratres (publishing today as Worship) and Theological Studies in the United States, and Dublin Review and Blackfriars in England. The seed fell on poorly prepared ground. Ryan had captured my attention by [End Page 432] reading us an essay by a German refugee priest-liturgist, H. A. Reinhold, "Inroads of the Bourgeois Spirit," from Commonweal, which I had at least heard of, but the other journals were new to me. More than three years later, the surrender of the Germans in 1945 occasioned a special opportunity for me to learn something of European intellectual Catholicism. I had served in a combat engineer battalion with Patton's 3rd Army in the advance from Normandy to Czechoslovakia; on the assumption that many of us would still be needed in the war against Japan, all kinds of programs were started to keep troops usefully occupied. I was sent to Paris for seven weeks for a course in French Language and Civilization, an idyllic period in which, after morning classes, I was free to walk all over the city. There, too, I had a reunion with a close high school friend who had gotten a weekend pass from an air base in northern France and gave me a copy of Esprit, a French monthly I had never seen before. He told me that its editor, Emmanuel Mounier, was a committed Catholic, which surprised me, since the cover of the journal announced, "Marxism est un humanisme." I was nevertheless intrigued with its contents, and, at age 22 still naive enough to walk over to rue Jacob the following Monday and ask to see the editor. The receptionist was a bit startled, but ushered me into Mounier's office while he was eating a spartan lunch at his desk. When he quickly insisted that Esprit was not a Catholic journal, I was taken aback. I wasn't yet prepared to understand how Mounier's personalism had led him to create a journal in which agnostics and people of different faith traditions raised fundamental political and religious questions in an atmosphere of mutual respect. The background of CrossCurrents cannot be explained without a realization that the GI bill made graduate school a real possibility for a whole generation, including thousands of Catholics who previously could not have considered it. Discharged from the army in 1946, I attended Catholic University's flourishing School of Drama, and was sufficiently aware of my ignorance to try to take additional courses in theology. I earned my Master's degree with a thesis on the plays of Paul Claudel, but learned no theology because of graduate school policy at that time: no laity were admitted to theology courses, even as auditors. The taste for Paris, as well as continuing curiosity about theology, next led me- after a brief experience on...