How far Left can a Catholic go? Fifty years after the demise of Slant, the 1960s journal that outraged many with its embrace of Catholicism and Marxism, the question hasn’t gone away
Graham Greene once mourned the fact that British Catholicism produced eccentrics rather than revolutionaries. During the 1960s, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, a group of young Catholics set out to prove Greene wrong.
Their journal, Slant, launched in spring 1964, attracted furious criticism – and passionate supporters. Rumours circulated that the bishops were looking for a way to shut it down. Headlines in the secular and religious press alike deplored the rise of the “Catholic Marxists”. And then, 50 years ago, after 30 issues, it was all over.
It’s one of the most curious episodes in the recent history of the Church in England and Wales. It began with a priest and a pub. Or – as I came to realise when I spoke to surviving Slant contributors – several pubs, and an enormous quantity of bitter. The priest, Laurence Bright – a tall, softly-spoken Dominican friar – had started his spiritual journey as a far-Right agnostic. Now a Catholic priest, the former nuclear physicist had undergone a similar turnaround in his political beliefs. He was firmly on the Left: a socialist, of a distinctly radical hue.