Tackling tough issues for more than 100 years, ‘official organ’ brought Catholic perspective and chronicled accomplishments of the faithful

SEATTLEBy Terry McGuire

After more than a century of chronicling the lives, deaths and accomplishments of popes, bishops, priests, deacons, women religious and laypeople who shaped the Archdiocese of Seattle, the time has come for The Catholic Northwest Progress to publish its own obituary.

The Progress has reported the highlights and lowlights of the church in the Northwest since 1911 when Bishop Edward O’Dea made The Progress the “official organ” of the Diocese of Seattle.

A return to its rootsThe Progress will be succeeded in September by a monthly magazine called Northwest Catholic. According to the archdiocesan history book “Abundance of Grace,” the paper evolved from a monthly periodical called Catholic Northwest, founded in the 1890s by Catholic laywoman Martina Johnston.

In 1899 the Seattle Council of the Young Men’s Institute started its own monthly, The Catholic Progress. The two publications merged in 1908, with Johnston as the first of four women to hold the title of Progress editor over the next 100 years.

The Catholic Northwest Progress was a weekly publication in 1911 when Bishop O’Dea made it the official newspaper of his then 61-year-old diocese. It was to remain a weekly, published on Fridays for all but a few recent decades, until September 2006 when it became a biweekly.

A search through the archdiocesan archives shows that Bishop O’Dea recognized newspapers as highly influential in molding Catholic opinion. He considered the Catholic paper an accompaniment to the pulpit in “disseminating truth,” particularly in a world where the secular press too often “has been employed with both ignorance and malice against God and His Church.”

“When I consider its power for good and the remedy it affords against evil,” he wrote of The Progress in the July 7, 1911 issue, “I am convinced that it is no longer a matter of choice, but a duty of conscience for every head of the family to have a Catholic paper in his home.”

Subscription: $1.50 per yearNot that The Progress rested on the bishop’s laurels. The paper sponsored contests to persuade the 150,000 Catholics then residing in the Northwest to subscribe, at a cost of $1.50 per year. Its “Great Subscription Contest” in 1911, for instance, featured a top prize of a grand piano valued at $750, followed by $500 in gold. The paper also published testimonials from readers. “Why I’d just as soon think of getting along without my prayer book as the ‘Progress,’” wrote Mrs. M.J. Callahan of Seattle.

The eight-page issues of 1911 offered something for every reader: local and world news, editorials, columns, chats with young Catholic men, hints on fashions, a “Woman’s World” page and a “Children’s Corner,” among other features. The broadsheet’s front page typically carried some 20 stories, most without bylines.

Hot topics of a century ago prove the adage that some things never change. Articles of that era on “Faith and Science,” “The Failure of the Public Schools,” “The Rights of the Workingman,” “The Reform in Church Music,” youth suicide, and the need for a minimum wage remain timely today.

The cover of the Feb. 28, 1913, edition featured an address by Toledo, Ohio, Bishop Joseph Schrembs on “Agencies That Corrupt Morals.” The culprits, he wrote, include a sensational press that exploits crime, makes heroes of criminals and features salacious divorce cases. Other perpetrators, he said, include immoral fiction and plays, and immodest dress. Sound familiar?

In a 1922 edition, the ills of sports were reported when eight Notre Dame football players confessed to playing in a professional game, prompting The Progress to opine that “college athletics must be purged of the taint of commercialism.”

Even the advertisements of 1911 ring familiar today, as in the Gatlin Institute’s promise to eradicate liquor cravings in three days in a non-hospital setting.

Anti-Catholicism then and nowReports of anti-Catholic bigotry have had a recurring presence in the pages of The Progress.

In 1913 the paper took a Kitsap County “patriot” to task for seeking to prohibit Catholics from teaching in the public schools.

In 1960, John Kennedy’s Catholicism became an issue in the presidential campaign, prompting Archbishop Thomas A. Connolly to tell a CCD convention here that bigotry “has become a commercial enterprise.” Said the archbishop: “A disinterested observer might get the idea that the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church itself was running for office.”

Almost half a century later, during the physician-assisted suicide campaign in Washington state in 2008, advocates vilified the Catholic Church for spending money opposing the initiative when it had its own problems with clergy sex abuse.

Most famous among the attacks on the church came in 1924 when the Ku Klux Klan’s Initiative 49 sought to outlaw parochial schools in the state. The measure had succeeded in Oregon two years earlier. Bishop O’Dea launched a campaign to fight it here, naming Progress managing editor William O’Connell to direct the effort while enlisting Catholic and non-Catholic leaders to participate.

“This must not be considered as a fight between Catholics and members of the Ku Klux Klan,” read a Progress editorial. “It is an attack by a hateful minority against the interest and welfare of the great body of peace and justice loving citizens of this state.” Voters went on to decisively reject I-49.

A Catholic voice in wartimeFrom World War I to the current war in Afghanistan, the pages of The Progress have reported the human toll through personalized stories of sacrifice and heroism while supporting the American military and the priests and women religious who served them and civilian populations.

“No one in this wide world knows what war is till they have been through it,” wrote World War I soldier Sgt. T.J. Fox, in a letter to his mother published in the Dec. 20, 1918, issue. A member of St. Mary Parish in Seattle, Fox was writing from his hospital bed.

Wounded during the fighting in the Argonne Forest, he related how the visiting priest had told patients to tie a white cloth atop their beds to indicate they were Catholic.

“Many of the poor fellows here in the hospital with me will be cripples for life,” the sergeant wrote, “so I think I was lucky when I look at them.”

In 1939, on the silver anniversary of the war’s start, The Progress expressed sadness at the scant attention given to the anniversary.

“It may be that the nations are too busily engaged in preparation for another war,” the paper correctly predicted.

Progress issues during World War II were heavily laden with news surrounding the war, including the status of local service people fighting it. But the paper opposed bills in Congress to conscript women into the service, noting: “It would be a disgrace to American manhood if they permit their wives and daughters to be torn from their homes.”

During the Gulf War in the 1990s, photos of local men and women in the military were solicited by The Progress. They were published weekly under the heading “Pray for Us.”

A champion for minoritiesOver the decades Progress stories promoted respect and dignity of minorities.

A story in the March 21, 1913, issue reported on black educator Booker T. Washington’s inspiring speech in Seattle. The article further stated, “Catholicity has not made great progress among the colored race, owing to the circumstances prevailing in the days of slavery; but within the last few years, much has been done by our missionary priests and teaching orders of nuns, in spreading a knowledge of the faith among them.”

In 1920 Bishop O’Dea welcomed the fledgling Maryknoll Mission Society to the diocese to establish a school and serve the local Japanese community. Two decades later, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bishop Gerald Shaughnessy wrote a letter to be read at all Masses warning Catholics not to discriminate against the Japanese here.

“Our Catholic heritage especially inculcates upon us in the momentous hours that we embrace our fellow American citizens of Japanese extraction in a special bond of charity,” he said, “for they who are no less loyal than others, and no less claimants of true American citizenship and of all rights thereunder, need our sympathy and our love in Christ.”

Vatican II Reports Progress readers were informed of the developments of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) through Archbishop Connolly’s weekly dispatches from Rome.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Council has been an outstanding success insofar as the achievement of the aims of Pope John XXIII … are concerned,” he wrote in a Nov. 12, 1965, summary.

But success “will depend to a great extent on you and you and you, on the manner in which you translate into action in your daily lives the decrees and declarations promulgated by the Holy Father.”

The archbishop’s lively reports also covered more worldly matters taking place in the Eternal City, including the price of a haircut (73 cents) and the infestation of the famed Spanish Stairs by a “motley band of scraggly bums.”

Kennedy, King assassinationsIn the aftermath of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President Kennedy, school children gathered in St. James Cathedral to pray the rosary, and some 1,300 people filled every seat that evening for a pontifical requiem Mass celebrated by Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gill.

Father John Lynch sought to comfort the mourners by observing, “God never allows an evil to happen except that he might draw a greater good out of it.” Elsewhere in the same edition, Father Earl LaBerge of St. James Parish in Vancouver penned a memoriam for the slain president, writing in part that his death “leaves us cold and numb, for the bullet in your brain has entered and exploded in our hearts.”

In April 1968 Western Washington Catholics were among the more than 10,000 people who packed Seattle’s Memorial Stadium for a service honoring slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Said The Progress in an editorial: “We mourn that the prophet must die in order to be heard.”

Tackling politicsThe Progress was there when its archbishops grabbed secular headlines in government-related battles.

In 1968, for example, Archbishop Connolly lobbied the Seattle City Council to pass a long-delayed open housing bill. He called on clergy of all faiths to “mobilize the citizens of our community to the fact that thousands of their fellow citizens are the victims of grave injustices.”

The archbishop dispatched the chairman of his Committee on Human Rights to a council session with the instructions: “Light some fires under them. Let them know we want open housing legislation with teeth in it.” The legislation passed.

Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen drew critics and admirers during the early 1980s when he withheld portions of his personal federal income tax in protest of the nuclear arms race. “What I’m doing is consistent with my conscience,” he told The Progress in a 1984 issue.

Archbishop Thomas J. Murphy canvassed the state in 1991 in a successful fight against an assisted suicide measure. Days later, at the national Catholic bishops’ conference, he received a standing ovation.

A plan to limit the size of new churches and schools in rural King County drew opposition from Archbishop Alex J. Brunett and other church leaders.

“There is no evidence that amending the growth management plan to meet our needs would affect the environmental integrity of the comprehensive plan in any way,” the archbishop told Progress readers in a Feb. 8, 2001, column.

Vietnam vs. abortionA Progress editorial in the Jan. 26, 1973, issue minced no words regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision four days earlier to legalize abortion. It came in the same week that President Nixon declared a cease-fire in the war in Vietnam.

“The killing may stop in Vietnam, but it’s going to be accelerated here at home,” the editorial said. “And the tragedy is that those who marched in the streets against the bombing of innocent children in Saigon seem to have no stomach for protest against the merciless stabbing and dismembering of aborted babies who lie in bloody heaps in stainless steel buckets in our local hospitals.”

Abortion was also targeted in the previous issue when The Progress praised two advertisers who had pulled their support from the TV sitcom “Maude” after the lead character opted for an abortion.

“Abortion and anti-life propaganda is beginning to disgust a lot of people,” The Progress editorialized. “It ain’t funny; it’s dead serious.”

Apostolic VisitationCriticism by some of Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen’s ministry — which included his controversial decision to allow the gay and lesbian organization Dignity to use St. James Cathedral for a Mass during its international convention in Seattle — led the Vatican to launch a two-year investigation of the archbishop’s leadership. The Apostolic Visitation, as it was called, ended in 1985 with the Vatican praising certain areas while expressing concern in others.

Archbishop Hunthausen, in a letter to the faithful published in the Nov. 26, 1985, edition of The Progress, thanked the Vatican for the “ways in which they have supported and affirmed my ministry” and saying he acknowledged and accepted in an “honest and open manner those several areas of concern.”

A shining momentOver its 100 years The Progress has welcomed into the diocese 101 new parishes and missions and 75 schools, sharing the stories of the people who kept them viable. The paper has reported on the good works of diocesan ministries, institutions and lay organizations — from the Knights of Columbus and Society of St. Vincent de Paul to the Serra Club and the Association for Catholic Childhood.

And it has educated readers on papal encyclicals and new church dogma, such as the Assumption of Mary.

The shining moment, perhaps, for The Catholic Northwest Progress came on Sept. 8, 1950. Circulation was at 25,000 (compared to less than 8,000 today), and the diocese was celebrating its centennial. The Progress published an impressive 112-page issue covering the entire church locally, which at the time included Central Washington.

In its introductory story, the editors spoke of the thrill of “hunting history” in newspaper headlines because of the links to the past.

“We run the same course our fathers have run,” the story said. “And if temptation to pride in the achievements of today assails one, then there is saving humility in recalling what those who have gone before us accomplished with lesser means and cruder implements.”

Amen to that.

June 27, 2013