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EDITORIAL
UP FRONT
GERARD MOLONEY CSsR
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TIME TO SAY A SAD FAREWELL
Sadly, the time has come to say goodbye. After almost nine decades of publication, this is the last issue of Reality. The writing had been on the wall for some time. Circulation had been falling; promoters were retiring or dying; finding replacements for them was almost impossible; postage and fulfilment costs continued to increase. The covid-19 crisis made the situation even more precarious. Still, it is with profound sadness that we made the painful decision to close.
In many ways, Reality’s fate reflects the state of the church in Ireland today. The picture is bleak. Church attendance, even outside the towns and cities, has declined precipitously; priests are ageing, vocations have dried up, religious orders are closing houses and pulling back from more and more areas of ministry.
It is a similar story regarding the religious press. When I started as editor 30 years ago, the Religious Press Association had more than 40 member publications, ranging from national newspapers and magazines to inhouse periodicals. Most major religious congregations and dioceses had a magazine or journal. Production standards varied, as did circulation figures and frequency of publication, but the Association appeared robust. The future seemed bright.
Today the Religious Press Association is moribund and its few remaining members face similar challenges to those which confronted Reality; challenges which, of course, also face the secular press.
As we look back over the 86 years of Reality’s existence, we do so with considerable pride. It has been quite a ride.
At the launch of what was then called The Redemptorist Record in November 1936, its editor, Fr Tom Murphy, was clear as to its purpose: to communicate the Good News of Christ the Redeemer in a world that was at that time confronting the twin challenges of communism and fascism; to continue the writing tradition passed on to his followers by St Alphonsus, and to promote the Irish Redemptorists’ missionary work.
Thirty years later, in October 1966, The Redemptorist Record became Reality magazine. One reason for the change of title was so that its readers would not think it was the official mouthpiece of the Irish Redemptorists or reflected the views of all Irish Redemptorists.
But a second, more important reason was in response to the tremendous changes that had taken place in the Catholic Church as a result of the Second Vatican Council. The new reality that existed in the church was now reflected in the pages of the new Reality. It was an exciting time, and its then editor, Fr Michael O’Connor, still happily with us (see his fascinating account of his time at the editor’s desk on page 15), set out to make this magazine a forum that promoted the renewal and reform that were at the heart of the Council.
Indeed, the quality of contributors and contributions to the magazine during those years is striking. Associate Editors like Louis McRedmond, Maeve Binchy, John Horgan, Miriam Hederman, and Michael Viney ensured Reality was topical, intelligent, and lively. The magazine played a significant role in bringing the vision and promise of Vatican II to the Irish faithful, even while the editor had to contend not just with one archdiocesan-appointed censor but with three! John Charles McQuaid may not have been a devoted reader of this magazine, but he certainly kept an eye on it and was no fan.
Decades after John Charles’ departure, Reality’s mission to inform, inspire and challenge its readers continued to ruffle episcopal feathers, as Fr Tony Flannery’s confrontation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith so poignantly highlights. It was clear that some in church authority did not want Reality to address the reality facing the church in the modern world.
As we sign off for the last time, all of us in Redemptorist Communications and in the Irish Redemptorist Province wish to thank our readers and promoters for your steadfast support and loyalty over the years. We also thank our office staff, editors, designers, and writers. You will be forever in our prayers.
Even as we say goodbye, it is clear that we need a robust religious press in Ireland now more than ever. We need an intelligent Catholic media to champion the Catholic perspective and to which Catholics can turn for support, information, and guidance. We hope to use the opportunities provided by the world wide web and social media to continue to do our bit.
PS. In our October 2022 issue, Brother John Long’s name was inadvertently omitted from the list of Redemptorists buried in Esker cemetery. We apologise to his family for this oversight.
Gerard Molonry CSsR Acting Editor
A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
REALITY MAGAZINE HAS PLAYED A HUGELY IMPORTANT ROLE IN IRISH CULTURAL LIFE OVER ALMOST EIGHT DECADES
BY SALVADOR RYAN
Iremember being at a history conference many years ago and listening to a speaker refer to the Sacred Heart Messenger publication, employing a title by which it had become affectionately known to many, namely, “the little red Messenger.” However, in this instance, a double entendre was intended, which provoked a titter from the audience, who realised that the speaker had meant them to hear “the little-read Messenger.” The jibe was not necessarily malicious; it was employed to generate a cheap laugh. But the irony was that the same publication had a decent circulation at the time, being one of the most successful religious magazines in Ireland, and it certainly did not merit the epithet “little-read.” Nonetheless, the joke only worked to the extent that the audience was predisposed to believing that Irish religious magazines, more generally, could no longer boast of large readerships and could, therefore, be easily dismissed.
There is little doubt that the readership of such magazines has, indeed, fallen considerably in recent decades. Still, their impact and visibility, even to this day, should not be underestimated (I’m thinking, for example, of how many times I still spot the Saint Martin magazine at supermarket checkouts). Other publications, such as Bible Alive, or Spirituality, can still be found in some leading newsagents, as can magazines such as the Medjugorje Messenger. Among these publications has also been Reality magazine.
Religious magazines have played a hugely important role in Irish cultural life over much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although they are fewer in number than they once were, they certainly punched above their weight in their heyday. Many of us will remember receiving free samples of religious magazines in primary school, distributed by visiting missionaries, full of tall tales about far-off lands. These always had more than a whiff of the exotic about them. Whether one was interested in faith life or not, it was difficult not to be transfixed by stories of Irish men and women working in remote locations across the globe, living cheek by jowl with large wild animals, and recounting tales of hitherto unknown peoples, with their array of popular beliefs, rituals, and traditions. For many of us, missionary magazines such as Africa and the Far East were our first introduction to anthropology and interreligious
dialogue, even if we didn’t necessarily have this terminology to hand. They also taught us much about Christianity as a global religion, and reminded us that how things were done in our own parish wasn’t quite the last word.
IMPACT
Reality magazine was always notable for the impact it had; indeed, far beyond its own readership. One can get some sense of this by searching the archives of the national and provincial newspapers and discovering how often Reality articles get mentioned (in fact, provincial newspapers often drew attention to the table of contents of the latest issue). These also demonstrate how the editors of Reality made courageous choices in the subjects they chose to cover and the contributors they invited to write for the magazine. These choices often placed Reality at the cutting edge of theological and pastoral reflection in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. It played a significant role in communicating to a lay readership what Vatican II achieved and what it meant for their everyday faith lives. While not many Irish Catholic men and women would ever pick up a copy of the documents of the Council, their essence could be successfully distilled in other ways, and the articles in Reality magazine certainly helped with that.
And now to a flavour of some of the references to the magazine and its contents in the national and provincial papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Westmeath Examiner of 2 March 1968 records how, in the latest
Reality issue, Fr David Bowman SJ, in an article on ecumenism, makes a plea for occasional common eucharist, arguing that “an annual common eucharist seems not only possible theologically, but desirable ecclesially.” In the same issue, Fr Harry Walsh describes a “dialogue between an Archbishop and his people in Detroit,” noting how some of the feedback recommended that priests should own only moderately priced cars; that clergy should meet the people more in their homes; that the laity should have a say in the examination of candidates for ordination, and give their opinions on their fitness for ministry; and that, furthermore, laymen should help with the distribution of Holy Communion on Sunday. Meanwhile, Fr Paul Grassland gave a personal account of his experience as a dishwasher in a seaside hotel as a part of the worker-priest movement in France. This issue alone underlines the outward-looking approach of the magazine, taking its readers far from the experience of their own parishes and their local clergy.
The Nationalist and Leinster Times for 29 August 1969, meanwhile, previewed the September 1969 issue of Reality, which included Fr Brian Power communicating the results of a survey of UCD students on how well Irish clergy did their job. At least one-third of the participants thought Irish clergy were somehow out of touch with at least some section of the people they ministered to. They also criticised clerical conservatism, whether sincerely held by individual priests themselves or as a result of being inhibited by ecclesiastical authority. Meanwhile, Sr Angelice Seibert, an Ursuline nun from Louisville, Kentucky, who lectured for a time in biochemistry at UCG, conducted a survey of the attitude of the laity to the role of nuns. She found that respondents were in unison in urging religious to bring the gospel of Christ to people through ‘closer identification’ with them.
In the same issue, Father Anthony McHugh discusses James Plunkett’s portrayal of the clergy in Strumpet City. He regrets that Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum largely fell on deaf ears and that, therefore, the following situation obtained: “The clergy at times were so anxious to reject the condemned form of socialism that they ended up unwittingly also condemning the forms that were good. The unhappy impression given was that Dublin’s downtrodden might starve, but at least it would be in orthodoxy.”
The Donegal Democrat, on 24 December 1971, in its preview for the January 1972 issue of Reality, mentions an article on ‘Priests and Politics. Religious as Revolutionaries?’ in which Fr Sean O’Riordan considers the situation of the priest who, because of his very deep dedication to Christianity, feels he must be a revolutionary. As a practical example of this, it continues, Fr Anthony McHugh relates the story of Camilo Torres, priest revolutionary, who “made the ultimate sacrifice and died as a guerrilla fighter.”
More prosaically, but no less importantly, the Tipperary Star on 10 October 1970 highlights a recent article in Reality. “Two into one won’t go,” written by Larry Sheedy, editor of the Irish Farmer’s Journal, discusses the problem of two families living together in one house, including the following piece of domestic wisdom: “Sure, you can live with your mother-in-law. But only if you are both angels and guaranteed to remain that way. Otherwise, the odds are bad.”
WOMEN’S LIB
Meanwhile, the Waterford News and Star commented on the May 1971 issue of Reality, particularly its discussion of the Women’s Liberation movement. Mary Salmon, a secondary school teacher, opined in one article, “Women are different, happily for the human race …”. In the same issue, it continues, Rita Canton, a Dublin mother of five, penned an article on “Should mothers go out to work?” It also details how Father Sean O’Loughlin, C.Ss.R. “faces up to the question: ‘Is devotion to Mary out of date?’”, and, making little effort to mask its editorial stance, the Waterford News and Star concludes that he “comes down on the side of the angels – and thinking Christians.”
The Irish Independent of 29 May 1971 reports on a Reality article by Rev. Dr James Good, who reports how, all over the world, the Church-controlled school system is dying, and presciently concludes that “It would be unrealistic of us to think that Ireland was not going to be affected.”
TOPICAL CONTENT
This is but a flavour of some of the stories that got picked up in the wider press in the years immediately following Vatican II. The topical nature of Reality’s contents would remain strong in the decades following, retaining its thoughtfulness and generating conversation and, at times, controversy. One thing it never was, was dull.
On a personal note, I consider myself very fortunate to have been a regular contributor to Reality for many years under the excellent editorships of Fr Gerard Moloney, Fr Brendan McConvery, and, more recently, Triona Doherty. My first contribution comprised some reflections on attending the Solemn Novena in Holycross Abbey for the first time since childhood and an effort to better understand the enduring attraction of novenas. Other subjects I wrote on included: Christmas traditions in biblical and extra-biblical sources; Martin Luther; Pope Paul III and the Council of Trent; the Synod of Thurles and the Devotional Revolution; the “forgotten” Pope Benedict XV; the faith (and doubt) of Thomas McDonagh; Irish folklore; Pope Paul VI; the Legion of Mary’s work in Russia; the mountain shrine of Our Lady of Letnica, Kosovo; and many more. In each case, I ended up learning something new. I hope I also managed to share that excitement of learning new things with others.
Reality will be much missed. May Redemptorist Communications succeed in finding new ways of continuing its valuable mission into the future.
