Editor’s note: On Sept. 3, Matt Malone, S.J., coauthored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with Senator John Danforth calling for renewed civility in political discourse. This essay from 2014 inspired that piece.

The mission of America, wrote its first editor in chief, is not only to “chronicle events of the day and the progress of the church” but also to “stimulate effort and originate movements for the betterment of the masses.” When John Wynne, S.J., penned those words in 1909, he was expressing one of the venerable teachings of St. Ignatius Loyola: “Love manifests itself more in deeds than in words.” America has never been content to play the role of the aloof interpreter of events. We aspire to something more: to be contemplatives in action at the intersection of the church and the world. Thurston N. Davis, S.J., editor in chief from 1955 to 1968, put it this way: America is “a weekly raid on the City of God in order to publish, in the City of Man, a journal that talks common Christian sense about the world of human events.”


Yet while America’s mission remains constant, the challenges we face today are unprecedented. It is no secret that the vanguard of the digital revolution has toppled the ancien régime: a billion tweets, for example, will be sent in the five days it takes to process and print this issue of the magazine; more than 10 billion pieces of content will be added to Facebook in that same period. Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, once rightly regarded as the Ford and Chrysler of news magazines, have virtually disappeared.

America will not meet a similar fate. Like most magazines, we will probably stop publishing an edition in print someday, but that day is not anytime soon. For a variety of reasons, America is better positioned than most to meet the challenges of the digital age; we also have a talented staff and the most loyal readers in publishing.

The most important challenge we face, moreover, is neither technical nor financial; it is existential. It is also the most important challenge facing the Catholic media at large. In fact, if the Catholic media are to have any reasonable hope of meeting the serious technical and financial challenges we face, then we must first reckon with a more fundamental question: Who are we?

For America, indeed for all Catholic media, questions of mission and identity were more easily answered in times gone by. Throughout much of American history, when the church in the United States was relegated to a social, cultural and sometimes a literal ghetto, the need for a uniquely Catholic press was obvious. Today, thanks be to God, Catholics are no longer second-class citizens. At the same time, however, the public square has less space for overtly religious perspectives than at any previous time in American history. The last two decades have also seen the emergence of an increasingly moralistic and dogmatic secularism among the nation’s political class. The twin scandals of sexual abuse and ecclesiastical mismanagement have further enfeebled the church’s public witness.