American Catholicism: The Catholic Mind ’62 – ’64

Theologian David Tracy distinguishes three publics to whom the theologian addresses him or herself: the Church, the academy, and the general populace.  Spending time paging through issues of The Catholic Mind published between 1962 and ’64, I found myself struck, especially in comparison to its relative infrequency today, by the frequency with which the third of Tracy’s audiences is addressed.  For it is indeed the educated Catholic public that serves as the audience for The Catholic Mind.  The journal is a publication of the Society of Jesus via America magazine, and it gives evidence at being aimed to facilitating the outbreak of this educated Catholic layperson from the ghetto of insular Catholic culture in any form.  That is, in order for the articles selected by the editors for inclusion in this journal to be effective, there must be an attentive, well-versed Catholic audience to receive them.  In other words, there is no need to address with such zeal the integration of the secular and sacred words if these two words were not so strictly separated for the reader in the first place.