The Rise and Fall of Triumph: The History of a Radical Roman Catholic Magazine, 1966–1976 by Mark D. Popowski (review)

In recent years, historians have been usefully employing the concept of “print culture.” That makes sense. Printed and other literate sources have long been the foundation for studying the past, and it is only a short step from mining these for specific information to wondering what their very form, existence, and extent might tell us. By the middle of the twentieth century, print was everywhere, and the systems for producing it and making it accessible were highly developed. The need to appeal to a range of tastes—high-brow, low-brow, middle-brow—meant that publications proliferated, and the trend was especially noticeable among religions, which had both specific motives for spreading their message and well-defined audiences for consuming it.

Mark Popowski contributes to this interest in the culture of print among American Catholics by looking at Triumph magazine, a very curious publication indeed. It had a short but intense life. Established in 1966, it lasted barely a decade, transformed first into a simple newsletter before going out of business altogether; its peak circulation was only 28,000. It was, however, as Popowski insists, a “radical” publication, although not in the sense that that word was usually applied in the 1960s. It emerged from postwar political conservatism—one of its principals was Brent Bozell, brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr. and cofounder with him of the National Review—but it quickly broke with those forebears by staking out a rigorously sectarian position. The problems of the United States would not be solved by secular libertarianism or unrestrained capitalism. Nothing less than transforming the nation into a Catholic confessional state would do. All citizens had to convert; the Church’s moral law had to become the civil law; and Christ (rather than the people) had to be recognized as politically sovereign, acting through his vicar on earth, the pope. In practical terms, Triumph’s editors and writers may as well have been demanding that the sun come up in the west, but that neither deterred them nor moderated their forceful, punch-in-the-nose style. The list of wrongs to be righted in church and state was familiar, including civil rights legislation, the Second Vatican Council (which had “Protestantized” the Church), and the emerging counter-culture.

Popowski catalogs all this from the pages of the magazine itself, and other researchers will thus find a useful guide in pursuing their own particular interests. (The editors even advised President Richard Nixon not to turn over the Watergate tapes, for instance, although how that related to the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth is a little hard to follow.) It would be difficult to argue that Triumph had any lasting impact, though it did help confirm the opinions of some conservative Catholics in the era. Popowski avowedly sympathizes with much of the magazine’s outlook, and this can lead to trouble. He anachronistically applies the term pro-life to a time well before it entered the public vocabulary, and he refers to efforts to liberalize abortion law as coming from the “anti-life movement” (p. 210). This kind of editorializing, entirely expected from the magazine itself, is inappropriate for a historian. Still, those looking for 1960s radicalism different from the usual kind will find here an example to be incorporated into the larger story of the times.