Integrity

Superficially, they were almost as unlike s two young people could be. Square-aced, serious Ed Willock, 30, a Boston Catholic with a high-school education, supported his wife & four children as a shipping clerk, studied commercial art on the side. Thin, big-eyed Carol Jackson, 35, was born in Oshkosh, Wis., the daughter of a corporation lawyer. She majored in philosophy at Wellesley, traveled around the world, free-lanced, was converted to Catholicism in 1941. But when Ed Willock ind Carol Jackson met last spring, as contributors to the Dominican magazine, the Torch, they found they had a lot in common.

Both were fed up with the secularized, Sunday-only piety which they felt was becoming characteristic of U.S. Catholic ife. Catholicism's crying need, said they, is "a new synthesis of religion and life."

Equipped with a great deal of faith and a great scarcity of money and publishing experience, they decided to start a new religious magazine. Its name: Integrity. Its aim: to blast lay Catholics loose from materialism and worldly compromise, help hem lift their daily lives as sacraments to God.

Uncertain Voice. Last week Integrity's first issue was mailed to 1,100 subscribers (at $3 a year). Wrote the editors: "Because it is a child, we are pleased with it. Because it is just a child, we look forward to its growth and development." To readers of such sophisticated Catholic journals as Commonweal and America, Integrity looked like a child indeed. Its gait was sometimes uncertain and its voice had a tendency to crack and tremble with emotion, but its eyes were wide and clear.

Contents: a devout essay in praise of the Virgin Mary; a comparison of the two worlds represented by Rockefeller Center and its neighbor, St. Patrick's Cathedral; an amateurish satire on the totalitarian state; two denunciations of modern materialism. A reactionary point of view pervades the sharp, provocative piece, "Are You Ashamed of the Gospel?", which pulls Catholics up short for yielding to liberal influences, for forgetting that separation of church & state, freedom of worship & speech, freedom of conscience on religious revelation have special and limited meanings for Catholics.

Future issues will be devoted to one subject each--The Lay Apostolate (in November), Christian Abnormal Psychology (January), Protestantism (February). Contributors, as in the first issue, will be little rather than big names. But many a subscriber will look forward most of all to more of Editor-Artist Willock's satirical drawings and the jingles they illustrate. Sample:

Mr. Business went to Mass,

He never missed a Sunday.

Mr. Business went to hell

For what he did on Monday.

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