Originally published Sept. 3, 1965
By John O’Connor
Everybody knows the confident acknowledgment of Eliza Doolittle’s grimy father that a lot can get done “with a little bit of luck.”
This is all one can ask in launching the Delmarva Dialog. Certainly everything else has been provided for: a bishop who has commissioned that the newspaper should be “lively, provocative and not afraid of controversy” and who has called to his side as advisors wise and generous layman representatives of a cross section of community leadership; a staff courageous and professionally polished, determined to perfect their product from week to week; a delightful and bountiful peninsular community jealously proud of its colorful past, retaining much of the charm of its origins, yet bursting with fresh new growth and demanding attention to pressing modern problems …
You could not ask for a more exciting challenge, then, than starting a weekly newspaper with a religious emphasis. But you might ask: who needs challenges? Obviously, it is the response to the challenge that counts.
And this response depends, to an enormous degree, on the reader. For it is one of the prime intentions of this newspaper to provide stimulation to public discussion and to offer a channel for the communication of public opinion on issues secular as well as ecclesiastical, both fields being “religious.” It is one of the joyful rediscoveries of the present time that the world is more sacred than profane since the Incarnation.
Were Dickens writing today he might begin his tale with the observation that these are the best of times yet somehow the worst of times. Certainly the Christian community — itself divided into anguished assemblies — reflects this wider apprehension, agony, turbulence and whirling confusion of the global community. The dizziness and uncertainty, as Father Hans Kung has pointed out, are to be expected of a people roused out of a long deep sleep.
Leaders civil as well as religious have underscored the urgent necessity of an alert, informed and participating citizenry. Christians who are at the same time citizens and participants in both the general community and their preferred religious group have a particular and imperative responsibility to keep themselves informed: to read, to discuss, and to arrive at their own conclusions.
Such self-informing is a prelude to interest in and involvement in the general world-rehabilitation now going on.
It is one of the hopes of this paper that it can serve as a starter for such interest and involvement. It is the intent of this paper to provide as full information as its special nature demands: if something is going on in the church, you’ll read about it here.
Keep in mind, this paper is not an official organ. It is not a chancery mouthpiece. It does not represent an “extension of the pulpit” with all the magisterial implications of that horrible and burdensome label.
Whenever the bishop has something he wants to say you will know it: he will sign his name.
Meanwhile, the editorials will remain the opinions of the editor. They will be so signed. They will represent not the opinions of any members of the board of directors of the publishing corporation, nor any vague and shadowy interests huddled behind the anonymous editorial “we.” Rather they will represent merely the opinions of one man, the editor, who asks your prayers that the Delmarva Dialog can help along the ongoing community dialog. If you don’t pray, well, then, wish us luck.
For along with the elder Doolittle, I know it takes some of that to get things done.
John O’Connor was the first editor of The Dialog
