On Nov. 2, 1959, Puerto Rico awoke to a new daily tabloid newspaper pitched to its English-speaking population. It was called the San Juan Star. Bill Dorvillier, who wanted to edit and publish the paper, had persuaded Mike Cowles of the family that published Look magazine to finance the Star’s founding.
A Massachusetts native who had come to Puerto Rico in 1939, Dorvillier focused on the paper’s editorial policy. The result was stunning. Within a year he wrote a series of editorials that won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize.
The subject was the Roman Catholic bishops’ attempt to influence the Puerto Rican gubernatorial election. Dorvillier’s editorials challenged the church’s intrusion into politics. Short, pointed and powerful, this editorial from Oct. 22, 1960, is from Dorvillier’s prize-winning entry.
The Pastoral Letter
The Catholic bishops who signed the pastoral letter forbidding Catholics from voting for the Popular Democratic Party have transgressed grievously against the people of Puerto Rico, against their country and against the Catholic Church.
Archbishop James P. Davis, Bishops James McManus and Luis Aponte Martinez have sinned against the people by making it mandatory that they equate their religious faith with democratic political convictions.
The bishops have sinned against their country by making Puerto Rico the helpless pawn for bigots to use for their political ends, and to injure the Catholic Church in the national campaign.
They have sinned against the Church by making it a temporary synonym for bitterness and hatred, instead of love, among a people who know how to keep their worship and their politics separated.
The bishops have all the rights of citizens to express political opinions and to urge support for their chosen candidates. But they have no right to use their religion and the weight of spiritual sanctions to intimidate faithful Catholics in the exercise of their franchise at the polls.
This pastoral letter is more than an indiscretion. It is an action devoid of any virtue because it so obviously is a result of long and thoughtful premeditation.
Because this pastoral letter is indefensible and inexpiable as an affront to the people who have built a modest democracy, we hope Pope John Paul XXIII will transfer the bishops to posts outside Puerto Rico and that they will be replaced by representatives of Catholicism who recognize the indispensability of the principle of separation of church and state in a democracy.
Sources: Vol. 16, The Pulitzer Prize Archive: Complete Biographical Encyclopedia of Pulitzer Prize Winners 1917-2000, by Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, K.G. Saur, Munich, 2002, p. 59; William J. Dorvillier obituary, New York Times, May 6, 1993; Pulitzer files.