It is an interesting experiment to take ten Catholics at haphazard and to ask them two questions :

1. Do you buy a Catholic weekly paper?

2. What chiefly do you buy it to read?

The experiment is interesting and even illuminating because of the curious judgements passed, the strange motives given, and the individual character of the replies.

First, to Question i the majority answered that they did not buy it themselves, but that they usually ‘saw’ a Catholic paper, though they could not honestly say that they read it through. They ‘looked at it,’ which seemed to mean that they scanned headlines and sometimes for some particular reason read an article or heard bits of an article read out to them at home. Indeed, the usual answer given to Question i was, ‘No, I don’t buy it myself, but they usually take it at home.’ Naturally Question produced a far greater variety of answers. Here it would not be possible to give any ‘majority report’ ; almost each had a different reason for buying it. Those who bought a Catholic paper for themselves and regularly, answered for the most part that their chief motive was that they supposed it was the proper thing to do. You went to Mass and ate fish on Fridays, and sent your children to a Catholic school and had a Catholic paper in the house, and you did these things more or less as part of the general scheme of salvation. Duty, not pleasure, was evidently the dominant motive for supporting the Catholic press!