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...That Is Pure." C.D.'s approach has not always been secular. Born in 1936 in the cellar of the chancery of the Cathedral of St. Paul, Minn., the Catholic Digest of Catholic Books and Magazines, as it was then called, took its inspiration and format from the Reader's Digest, its contents from other Catholic magazines, and its charter from St. Paul (Philippians 4): "All that rings true, all that commands reverence, and all that makes for right; all that is pure, all that is lovely, all that is gracious in the telling...
...purveying its varied reading diet, Catholic Digest has grown into something resembling big business. Besides its two creators and its present editor, the Rev. T. Kenneth Ryan, 56, the magazine employs a fulltime staff of 100, with correspondents and offices all over the U.S. and Europe. Like the Reader's Digest, it has its own book club (56,000 members), from time to time also publishes profitable hardcover anthologies drawn from back issues. Next year it will begin publishing a FORTUNE-sized magazine geared to the $4 billion Catholic trade market in the U.S.-schools, churches, hospitals, monasteries, convents...
Truth v. Charity. The ambush was done skillfully: one anonymous paragrapher wrote slyly that a reader "has been for several days afflicted with a lethargy, owing to the perusal of three chapters" of Hawkins' book. The implication is unjust; Hawkins is long-winded but not dangerously sedative, and even the digressions cut out by Editor Davis (an essay on taverns, a list of 14 ways a criminal may avoid justice) sound rather lively. Boswell sums up the remaining objections in the fourth paragraph of his own Life. He charges Hawkins with solemnity and digressiveness (true), inaccuracy (partly true...
Bogs & Abundance. Heller's talent is impressive, but it also is undisciplined, sometimes luring him into bogs of boring repetition. Nearly every episode in Catch-22 is told and retold. With each telling, some new detail, some further revelation is dangled like a carrot for the reader who reads on and on until he feels like "The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice" (the ironic title of one chapter). Heller fights a nip-and-tuck battle with the twin temptations of redundance and abundance, succumbs shamelessly to blatant gag writing until much of his dialogue resembles an old Smith & Dale...
...average reader, the omission of "scammel" may not seem like a deathblow to the language. Yet, the Shakespearean scholar, and certainly many others with a far less professional interest in The Tempest, will find no sympathy for an "unabridged" dictionary that fails to recognize words from the mouth of so marvelous a speaker as Caliban...