National Catholic Reporter at Fifty: The Story of the Pioneering Paper and Its Editors by Arthur Jones (review)

The important story of the fifty year history of the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) is a challenge to tell. Arthur Jones, with strong journalistic and editorial credentials at The Financial Times and Forbes, served as editor of the NCR from 1975 to 1980 and editor at large for the following two decades. Jones is also author of a notable biography ofM. Scott Peck.

His approach in the face of fifty large volumes of the newspaper is to focus largely on the succession of editors, giving lengthy biographical profiles of each. These are quite interesting, becoming at times a narrative theology of the paths these men followed. A woman editor in chief or publisher didn’t come for four decades.

The tale of founding editor, Robert Hoyt, is both compelling yet somewhat sad. In 1950, fired with a vision and approach similar to the radical simplicity of the founders of Integrity, Hoyt, his wife Bernadette, and a commune-community produced the Sun Herald, a Catholic daily newspaper of eight months duration out of a run-down and empty Kansas City storefront (rent free), while gathering in the Hoyt family’s semi-ruined, three story old stone house (“Withering Hoyts”). The house sat on eight acres and had three goats. After the paper crashed, there are interim stints as teacher and a re-surfacing with the succession of Catholic diocesan newspapers in Kansas City, the last of which was the impressive Catholic Reporter whose staff in 1964 produced both the Catholic Reporter (diocesan) and The National Catholic Reporter (independent) with Bishop Charles Helmsing’s cooperation and support.

The NCR’s timing, concept, independence, and professionalism clicked and circulation grew. Less than three months after launch, subscriptions were at 22,253, a year later at 60,000, and hit a peak in 1968 of 88,578. At $6 a year for a subscription, however, the paper had priced itself too cheaply. NCR was losing money, the fulfillment department, many of them spouses and volunteers, struggled to keep up with the expansion. Everyone was stretched and rather frazzled. Launched with the third session of the Vatican Council in 1964, good stories abounded. On April 19, 1967, NCR, with a timely assist from Irish journalist Gary MacEoin, broke its biggest story, publishing the secret Papal Birth Control Commission’s report that recommended ending the ban on birth control.

By October 1968, provoked by an NCR editorial calling Paul VI’s 3,000 word “Credo of the People of God” to be “flat and unrewarding,” and articles by Rosemary Ruether on the virgin birth and Dan Callahan’s article on infallibility, “How to get the papal monkey off the Catholic back,” Bishop Helmsing had had enough and issued a condemnation of the NCR. Jones says of the condemnation that Hoyt was “thrown by it.” Jones calls Hoyt’s 2,300 word editorial response “discursive, defensive and dissembling before it came into focus” and emphasized the Catholic and independent identity of the paper.

Donald J. Thorman, author of the widely read The Emerging Layman (1962) and former managing editor of the Voice of St. Jude (later U.S. Catholic) and Ave Maria magazine, was brought on as publisher of NCR in 1970. He brought business savvy and a more moderate Catholic style.

In May 1971, the Board of the NCR voted to dismiss its founding editor, Robert J. Hoyt. Circulation had been going down as board member Father Joseph Fichter, S.J. had been noting at board meetings for two years. Also, Hoyt, a workaholic who regularly delivered his editorial at midnight on Fridays, had an affair with volunteer, Mig Boyle, an affair described by Jones as “the worst-kept secret – only Bernadette was unaware of it.” As a result, Hoyt was now separated from his wife and had left the family home. “When he finally told his wife about his affair he did it in...