"Reward" for Father Rowan

The Roman Catholic press in the U. S. numbers 139 newspapers, 197 magazines, a total circulation of more than 7,000,000--a big orchestra, with plenty of brass and percussion. Though the tunes change, the rhythm does not. One Catholic journal with a different rhythm has been the liberal, forthright New World, official weekly of the archdiocese of Chicago. Last week the New World got in beat with the rest of the band.

During the 14-year editorship of tall, handsome, grey-haired Father Timothy Rowan, the New World increased its circulation from 37,000 to 55,000. Anonymously Father Rowan conducted a front-page column called the "Big Broadcast," after a radio address which the late, well-beloved George William Cardinal Mundelein made from the Vatican. With the liberal Cardinal's approval, the "Big Broadcast" declined to take sides in the late Spanish war, which most of the Catholic press believed "holy." When nearly every other diocesan paper ran the heavily loaded dispatches, with canned headlines, of the official U. S. Catholic news agency, skeptical Father Rowan tossed many in the wastebasket, rewrote many another.

Last summer Father Rowan reviewed the whole course of the Spanish war, decided that U. S. Catholic commentators had been biased, sometimes dishonest, in their treatment of it. For this "Big Broadcast" Father Rowan got roundly swatted. Even the editorial page of the New World, written by Father Edward V. Dailey, disagreed. Presently Father Rowan abandoned an old dream: to make the New World the first big-city Catholic daily. Said he (under a pen name): ". . . Whereas the inarticulate majority of our readers possibly has no objections to ... a fair presentation of the news, the articulate and even vociferous minority will have none of it."

Last fortnight, the Most Rev. Samuel Alphonsus Stritch, newly installed Archbishop of Chicago, made his first clerical appointment. As a "reward and a promotion for Father Rowan's record of 14 years of service," the Archbishop made him pastor of a moderately good church, St. Lucy's, and explained that this appointment was made at Father Rowan's "expressed and repeated request." Last week the New World came out under a new editor: Father Dailey of the pro-Franco editorials. Gone was the "Big Broadcast."

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