Current

Current is a little review of Catholicism and contemporary culture put out by the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Club. The appeal of its March issue is neither sectarian nor entirely universal, and indeed the most puzzling question its table of contents raises is that of self-definition. It seems to me that the editors of Current have not thought out what they are trying to represent or what public they are trying to reach; the result of their confusion is an eclectic scattering of pieces with little relation to one another and not much interest for the Harvard community.

This scatter-shot anthology includes some hastily-written and unincisive editorials, a copy of an address on America by Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, and two finely-wrought and dull poems reprinted from the Sewanee Review. Gabriel Marcel, whom I admire very much, has a reprinted and astoundingly short discourse on the technical and the sacred in modern civilization, a selection whose mixture of brevity and pretentiousness reminded me of the one-page Great Thinker articles Vanity Fair used to run--Gide on Art and Mass Myths in twelve one-sentence paragraphs. There is a reminiscence of Bernard Berenson as a sort of a Catholic by John Walker, Director of the National Art Gallery, and two articles by graduate students--one an inadequate discussion of the Syllabus of Errors by Valda Vanek, and the other an armchair commentary on the Kennedy Administration by John Ratte, a teaching fellow in General Education, full of italicized words like public and rational.

Part of Current's trouble is a general problem faced by all American Catholics. At Harvard (and in America) there is not the same sense of an intellectual community for Catholics as for Jews. Mosaic reflects a sureness and even a kind of clubby smugness in possessing a public that Current nervously lacks. Current is not aimed at Catholic intellectual opinion, for the very good reason that there is no such thing. Catholicism in America--with the exception of a man like John Courtney Murray, or lone magazines like Commonweal and Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker-- is not a significant intellectual force. Its compromises with the same American Way that Carey McWilliams speaks of have cut the American Church loose from the main European intellectual currents of Catholic thought. Content with being "one of the three major American creeds," Catholicism here is an activist, extrovert religion, still very mindful of its immigrant and lower class background, and still embarrassed at having to find places for intellectuals.

Whether he comes from Portsmouth Priory or Milton High, the Catholic student at a place like Harvard faces a special set of intellectual difficulties that his American Church cannot solve for him. He must either make a personal synthesis of liberal thought and his faith, ignore his faith and ride prevailing winds of liberal thought, or adopt a European strand of Catholicism not especially relevant to him.

The editors of Current probably want it to be something more than just another little review and if it is to justify its separate existence, it will have to have something to say. Simply talking about "American Catholicism ... making a contribution to the cultural life of America," is useless, since American Catholicism has yet to develop any distinctive thought, and has as yet very little to offer American intellectuals.

There is no reason why a Harvard student should spend his quarter for Current, since it is no different from any number of small magazines. And there is even less reason why he should purchase it here at Harvard, since so many of its articles are not written by students. Current, if its March issue is any indication, badly needs to decide why it exists. Conceivably, it could develop and present a new and intellectually respectable strain of Catholicism to a community completely estranged from all Catholic thought. Right now it does nothing of the kind.