“The Mission of the Catholic Press,” 1920’s Style

From the thirties through the sixties, The Brooklyn Tablet was considered “the most influential diocesan paper in America.” Jesuit historian James Hennesey writes that few papers “had the spice” of the Tablet, with its hardcore anticommunism and general conservative tenor. No one embodied the image of the pugnacious Brooklyn Irish Catholic better than its longtime editor Patrick F. Scanlan (1894-1983), one of the most controversial figures in the American Catholic press. At 23, Scanlan took a temporary job as the paper’s managing editor. It lasted 51 years. He soon became known as a “one-man Anti-Defamation League.” Obsessed with the menace of anti-Catholicism in 1920’s America, a time when crosses were burned in front of Brooklyn and Queens parishes, he wrote: “Between the Church and a successful football team there is an analogy. Both have to fight.” In one incident, he and his fellow Knights of Columbus members infiltrated a Klan meeting in Floral park in 1923, and drove them out of the neighborhood. This 1920’s cartoon, titled “The Mission of the Catholic Press,” sums up Scanlan’s editorial policy better than any book could do.