Integrity

This is the first volume of a multi-volume project to republish all of the Integrity articles as they appeared between 1946 and 1956. This first volume includes the first three issues in 1946 (October - December). The original issues were edited by Ed Willock and Carol Jackson. They were replaced by Dorothy Dohen in 1952. Here follows an excerpt from the editorial for the first issue: In this first issue we are elaborating on the theme of our whole magazine, which is: We must make a new synthesis of Religion and Life. Possibly the Church has other tasks yet more urgent today, but this job is certainly high up on the agenda. It looks like the basic problem for us, who are lay people. Anyhow, we have chosen it as our special work to help solve it, and every issue will bear on the main thesis.... Integral Catholicism is already becoming a popular expression. It does not mean piety so much as wholeness. It means that what we profess to believe is consistent with the assumed principle by which we live out our daily lives. It suggests a consistency of theory and practice; a unity of public life and private morals; a reconciliation of commercial ethics and religious dogma, of individual conscience and statutory law. It means a cessation of the uneasy Sunday-lipservice-to-God-and-40-hours-a-week-with-time-and-onehalf-for-overtime-devotion-to-Mammon by which so many of our lives are compromised. The relationship between "wholeness" and "holiness" is as direct as the derivation of the second word from the first. It becomes daily more difficult to lead holy lives in disregard of the contradictory nature of the circumstances thereof. The guiding policy of contemporary society is expediency. Don’t act from high moral principles (it’s impractical). Don’t commit yourself either to thorough-going villainy (it isn’t nice). Just compromise, adjust, submit, water down, and make the best of a bad situation (after all, we have to eat). Our expediency looks less and less like the "sane policy of realistic leaders" and more and more like the degrading opportunism of ignoble men. Integrity is at the opposite pole from expediency. It is a quality which does not look first to the financial consideration involved, does not calculate its actions to please high worldly powers, or with an eye to the coming elections. It does not hold that the end justifies the means, but that we must do what is right, come what may. We hope to achieve it ourselves and in our magazine