Conservatism was not the most important thing in William F. Buckley Jr.’s life. Catholicism was. No one knew this so well as other Catholics. His Yale classmate Harry Albright, whom Buckley tried to set up with his sister Trish in 1947, came from a Democratic family in Albany and later worked for Nelson Rockefeller, “but that didn’t bother Bill,” Albright later said. More important by far was that Albright, like Buckley, had once wanted to become a priest, and was still “extremely religious.”
Over the years, the two friends often got together for lunch. Both had been dealt severe blows—death and mental illness in their families—of the kind that could test a believer’s faith. Buckley always began the conversation by asking, first, “How is your son?” and then, searchingly, “Do you still have your faith?” Even as he assured Buckley that he did still have it, Albright “would say to [him]self, ‘Yes, but not the way you do. It’s not even remotely resembling yours.’”
Buckley’s unshakeable faith was personal and familial and, like so much else in his life, enriched by ritual. Each Sunday in Stamford, he and his son Christopher climbed into the car—together with their servants, refugees from Cuba—and drove to church. Buckley saw his politics as very much in keeping with his churchgoing. To be a devout Catholic and also a devout political conservative came easily. For him, “Godless Communism” was not a hollow epithet. No great institution in the world was so fervently anti-Communist as the Roman Catholic Church. The two faiths were joined at the root; it was all but impossible to imagine them in conflict.
But what if disagreements should arise, if not precisely over Communism, then over some other all-important political question? To Buckley the answer was clear: “If I am ever persuaded that my attachment to conservatism gets in the way of my attachment to the Catholic Church, I shall promptly forsake the former,” he vowed in a 1961 letter to an acquaintance. Many years later—after politics, including Church politics, had driven them apart—Garry Wills would write, with ungrudging respect, “Bill takes his religion very seriously. He is almost super-Catholic.”
Buckley had inherited his beliefs from his mother and father and held fast to them all his life, with few, if any, second thoughts. It might seem the natural piety of a devoted Catholic son, but Buckley took it further than most other Catholic intellectuals. To the end of his life, he never once experienced even the mildest tremor of doubt. Wills described to me a conversation the night before Wills’s wedding in 1959 when, “after a night of toasts in the hotel where we out-of-towners were staying,” he, Buckley, and other good friends gathered for a long conversation. At one point, “Frank Meyer, as the only non-Catholic there, asked if any of us had ever had any doubts about our faith,” Wills recalled. “All but Bill said yes. When Frank asked Bill what he would do if any doubt should occur to him, he said, ‘I’d go to bed and sleep it off.’” Wills sensed “a timorousness not a robustness of belief—as if he were afraid ever to start questioning anything.”
That was before the 1960 election, when Buckley’s private faith took on a new prominence in his public career as a conservative intellectual.
As dull as the choice between Kennedy and Nixon had seemed at the time—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had described the two ambitious men in their forties as “stamped from the same mold, committed to the same values…the Gold Dust Twins of American politics”—the one important distinction between them was Kennedy’s Catholicism. Many feared the country was not yet ready for a Catholic president, and Kennedy might be attacked just as ferociously as the only previous Catholic nominee, Al Smith, had been in 1928. The first test had been in the West Virginia primary. There was still much anti-Catholic feeling in the state. It was Kennedy’s success in dispelling the hostility there and defeating Hubert Humphrey that had sealed the nomination.
But during the general election doubts had resurfaced. The country’s two most famous Protestant churchmen, Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale—each a celebrity with followings in the millions and each also close to Nixon—tried to stop Kennedy by planting fears about his allegiance to Rome. Catholics now made up “24 percent of the population, compared to 19 percent a decade ago,” Time (a pro-Nixon magazine) reported. There were more than 42 million baptized Catholics, an increase of over 13 million since 1951. Catholics were not only the country’s largest denomination, by far, but also the fastest-growing.
“Solid bloc Catholic voting” combined with Kennedy wealth could prove an unstoppable force, Graham and Peale worried. But they tried to stop it anyway, first convening a daylong summit in Washington D.C. and then holding a press conference. In response, the Kennedy campaign arranged for the candidate to answer questions from Protestant clergy in Houston with TV cameras rolling. It was a national event, and Kennedy himself made a statement still often quoted today. “I believe in an America,” he said, “where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”
As it happened, the charge Graham and Peale leveled against Kennedy—that he was the servant of Rome—was the same charge that had been leveled against Buckley when his first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951. Buckley’s accusers had included Yale’s own administrators (at the time, the college had strict quotas limiting Catholic and Jewish admissions). But Buckley seemed almost amused by the attacks on Kennedy. As he wrote in the September 24, 1960, issue of National Review, the magazine he had founded five years earlier:
Any man who knows something about the constitution of the Catholic Church, about the practical limits of the Vatican’s authority—and everyone should know more than Dr. Peale, before speaking out loud on the subject—will be satisfied that such a contingency as Dr. Peale and his friends feign to fear, is as unlikely as a surrender to the Soviet Union by President Nixon, responding to pacifist influence upon him of his fellow Quakers; or the abuse of the American Constitution by Felix Frankfurter for the benefit of the Zionists.
To Bill Buckley, the idea that a Catholic American needed to prove his patriotic bona fides was not hurtful or insulting; it was ludicrous. This was largely because his religious experiences and upbringing differed so much from that of most American Catholics. One close student of both the Kennedy and Buckley families, the journalist Richard Whalen—an Irish Catholic from Queens—sensed something more patrician in Buckley.
It began with the fathers. Joe Kennedy (about whom Whalen was soon to write a classic biography, The Founding Father) was Boston Irish. Will Buckley, Bill’s father, was just one generation removed from frontier Texas, and had a broader purchase on the national myth of self-invention. “His politics were those of a rich oil man and a Catholic and a very outspoken one,” Whalen told me in 2017. “I think he had a little more polish than Joe had.” The polish came from Will Buckley’s transnational and cosmopolitan background, his command of Spanish history, literature, and religious culture, the years he lived in Mexico and France, and the two estates he owned (one in rural Connecticut, the other in South Carolina), which were filled with religious art purchased in Florence and Madrid.
Bill Buckley’s Catholicism was also of a different kind from Kennedy’s, with no tincture of the parish hall or of ethnic or tribal sentiment. Even the Buckley family’s delinquencies—Bill’s sisters’ vandalism of an Episcopal church in Sharon, Connecticut, during the Second World War, and Bill and Trish’s secret sprinkling of drops of “emergency” baptismal water on unsuspecting guests to the family estate—showed the pride, privilege, and superiority they felt in belonging to “the one truth faith.” Put most simply, or most snobbishly, the difference between the Kennedys and the Buckleys came down to the distant homeland. “The Kennedys had an Irish cultural upbringing,” said Bill Buckley. The Buckleys did not. The first time William F. Buckley Sr. set foot in Ireland, Bill pointed out, he was almost sixty, and he did so only “because he wanted to see the horse show in Dublin”—a side trip while visiting Bill and his sisters Jane and Trish in their upper-class English boarding schools. Jack Kennedy’s sisters went to Catholic convent colleges. Four of Bill’s sisters went to Smith. A fifth went to Vassar.
Catholicism for Buckley meant Catholic belief, liturgy, ritual, and teaching. The very things Kennedy was praised for, his self-scrubbing of any Catholic taint, repelled Buckley. In his opposition to federal funding for parochial schools—the most contentious Catholic issue of the time—Kennedy did not sound like a Catholic at all and was “archly separatist and anti-Catholic in effect.” He even went “further than many Protestants.” So Buckley wrote on the letters page of The New York Times in October 1960, a month before Election Day.
Buckley himself opposed all federal aid of any kind to education, but as long as it was being provided, he believed Catholics should get it just like everyone else. And for those who praised Kennedy for emphasizing his belief in the separation of church and state, Buckley wrote, “It is just plain foolishness to suggest either that President Kennedy would move to curtail religious freedom, or that the Vatican would want him to do so.”
The question itself was an evasion. The one people should instead be asking was whether the presidency should be entrusted to a candidate “not governed by a higher law than that formulated by his constituents.” In fact, “by renouncing the political mandate in the event of conflict [between that mandate and the magisterium], a Catholic President would almost certainly be taking the more enlightened course; the same course which, most probably, properly instructed Protestants and Jews would also take under similar circumstances.” Kennedy’s Catholic problem, in other words, was that he wasn’t Catholic enough.
It was in the Kennedy years that Buckley solidified his position as the country’s leading Catholic conservative, though he was not especially conservative on matters of Church doctrine. It was hard to imagine another highly literate and thoughtful Catholic proposing, as Buckley did in the Catholic publication Ave Maria, that “Catholic liberals and conservatives” might find common cause in opposing desegregation in the name of anti-Communism. “The single-minded anti-Communist might argue that we should be even more opposed to the Freedom Riders than to the segregationists, inasmuch as it is the former, more than the latter, who are giving rise to the ugly explosions which the Communists exploit,” Buckley wrote. This was the same argument the Citizens’ Councils and other white supremacist organizations in the South were making. In another article for Ave Maria, Buckley proposed Catholic support for a renewed season of Red-hunting by “security officials” who would be given “access to the files of the FBI and the CIA” and empowered to dismiss accused government employees while the accused would “not be informed of the sources of accusations against him if there is any risk, in so doing, of exposing a counterintelligence operation.”
Buckley pursued these and other arguments in a series of debates with the Catholic journalist William Clancy, a former Commonweal editor, from October to December of 1960. These events often featured more accusation and name-calling than rigorous debate—“bloodbaths,” one of Buckley’s friends called them. In the first debate, Clancy accused Buckley of retreating into “the ghetto” of American Catholicism and of associating with racists and antisemites. “Mr. Clancy would probably criticize St. Paul if he were alive today and didn’t join the NAACP,” Buckley replied. He went on to disparage “slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic” Dorothy Day. (Characteristically, Buckley later developed a friendship with Clancy and loaned him his Manhattan apartment for a book party.)
The directness of these clashes was part of a new intellectual freedom within the world of American Catholics, ending the “self-imposed ghettoization” of Catholic intellectual life, according to one of the most respected Catholic journalists of the time, John Cogley. Buckley and Cogley, who was also a Commonweal editor, were utterly opposed in their politics but were also reciprocal admirers. Interviewed on television by Mike Wallace, Cogley praised Buckley—this at a time when attacking Buckley was sport for many intellectuals. In gratitude, Buckley sent Cogley a note. “It took a special kind of courage and generosity to speak so gently of someone whom your political convictions impel you to devote so very much time to fighting,” Buckley wrote. He was left to wonder, he added, “whether I am capable of comparable integrity.”
Buckley took all debates seriously and was especially concerned about his debates with Clancy, who had a PhD from Notre Dame and was far more learned in Catholic theology than Buckley was. As usual, Buckley found tutors to help him prepare. One was Wills, whom Buckley asked to study up on papal encyclicals.
Everyone remembered Al Smith’s remark, in 1927, when he’d been pressed for his views on Immortale Dei, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on the relationship between the Church and the state. “Will somebody please tell me,” Smith had said, “what in hell an encyclical is?” In a few short years, this had changed. Encyclicals and other Church statements were being cited as ecclesiastical versions of the Democratic Party platform. In the last weeks of the 1932 campaign, FDR had read aloud passages from the latest encyclical Quadragesimo anno, which made a distributist argument in defense of workers, to show that “one of the greatest forces for conservatism in the world, the Catholic Church,” was “just as radical as I am.” Eventually, Garry Wills wrote, Rerum novarum would be “taken as a charter for the legitimacy of unions, indeed for all the progressive programs of the Democratic party.” By the mid-fifties, Catholic liberals had invested encyclicals with near infallibility. One priest, addressing the question of how “binding” encyclicals were, concluded that “the possibility of error in these documents is so utterly remote that it is practically non-existent.”
Pope John XXIII’s Mater et magistra was officially issued on May 15, 1961—seventy years to the date after the great Rerum novarum and thirty years after its important sequel Quadragesimo anno, both pontifical “social teachings” on the economy and especially labor. Mater et magistra, longer than either at twenty-five thousand words, was presented as an updating of these earlier encyclicals. It had taken two months for teams of translators to turn the pope’s Italian into English, French, German, and Latin.
The argument of Mater et magistra was indeed striking. John observed the “immeasurably sorrowful spectacle of vast numbers of workers in many lands and entire continents who are paid wages which condemn them and their families to subhuman conditions.” It rejected the idea that prices should be “left entirely to the laws of the market” and insisted that they should instead “be determined according to justice and equity.” The encyclical recommended profit-sharing—the radical-seeming proposal of United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther—and called for assistance to all laborers paid “no more than the minimum salary.” All this should be pursued in the name of “socialization,” in the translator’s term (from the Italian socializzazione), carefully avoiding socialism (socialismo). To conservatives, this distinction seemed a bit too subtle.
Buckley asked his two most learned Catholic friends, Garry Wills and Doubleday book editor Neil McCaffrey, what he should do. McCaffrey urged a strong counterthrust against the “statist papal nostrums.” Wills counseled Buckley to “endorse it—both in its content and its purpose at this stage,” keeping in mind that, despite its title, it was not a binding document. Papal encyclicals were actually “pastoral letters, giving counsel,” not official statements of the magisterium, the Church’s infallible teaching. At National Review’s weekly editorial conference, Bill Rusher, the magazine's publisher, pointed out that the encyclical wasn’t pro-Communist. It did not urge appeasement. In fact, early in his pontificate, John had reasserted the Vatican’s anti-Communism and its opposition to socialism. “Socialization” might sound indulgent of the welfare state, but the encyclical also encouraged voluntarism—conservatives’ favored alternative to the welfare state.
But to Buckley the vagueness was the problem. Pope John sounded like the Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger saying the New Deal and its offshoot the New Frontier were the best defense against Communism instead of dangerous steps in its direction. Also, Buckley didn’t like the idea of backing off from a fight, especially if the enemy was high authority. And silence was no answer. The whole purpose of National Review was to join debates at the earliest possible stage. The editorial Buckley wrote for the July 29, 1961, issue was unsigned, but its authorship was unmistakable. “The large sprawling document released by the Vatican last week on the seventieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum will be studied and argued over for years to come,” the editorial began.
It may, in the years to come, be considered central to the social teachings of the Catholic Church; or, like Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, it may become the source of embarrassed explanations. Whatever its final effect, it must strike many as a venture in triviality, coming at this particular time in history.
Buckley went on to complain that the pope seemed more concerned about the faults of liberal democracies than about the sins of their enemies.
The most obtrusive social phenomena of the moment are surely the continuing and demonic successes of the Communists, of which there is scant mention; the extraordinary material well-being that such free economic systems as Japan’s, West Germany’s, and our own are generating, of which, it would seem, insufficient notice is taken; and the dehumanization, under technology-cum-statism, of the individual’s role in life, to which there are allusions, but without the rhetorical emphasis given to other matters.
What most people noticed, however, was not so much Buckley’s argument as the phrase “venture in triviality.” If not exactly blasphemous, these words were irreverent and offensive to many Catholics. “I follow the Papal teaching and oppose those who do not,” a Brooklyn priest informed Buckley. “Please send no subscription offers to me regarding National Review.”
Many years later, Buckley still maintained he had been right, and pointed to a different example of John’s double standard—not Germany or Japan, but one much closer to the United States and for that reason much on the minds of Americans in the spring and summer of 1961. Cuba’s new prime minister, Fidel Castro, had been raised in the Catholic Church. Not only that, Catholic clergy had provided crucial early support for his revolutionary activities. It was well known that in an early phase of the revolution, when Castro and other guerrillas had been captured in the Gran Piedra Mountains, Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes of Santiago, Chile, had persuaded one of Batista’s colonels to spare them. In his first days in power, in 1959, Castro had said he had no quarrel with priests or the Church. And John XXIII had reciprocated. He formally recognized the new Cuban government and granted an audience to Castro’s foreign minister, who had gone to Rome bearing the message that the “principles of Christianity” shaped the new regime’s vision of economic justice.
But as Castro tightened his grip on all the country’s institutions and moved closer to the Soviet orbit, enmity developed. Castro said the Church was soaked in the blood of the Spanish Civil War, which had elevated the dictator Franco, and that it was also guilty of complicity in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro claimed the mantle of true Christianity, which began in serving the poor. Then he expropriated Church property and began the mass deportation of foreign priests and nuns—but not only foreigners: when 135 clergy were brought to Havana and forcibly put on a freighter to Spain, a third of the “counter-revolutionaries,” “Falangists,” and “criminals in cassocks” turned out to be Cuban, including an archbishop. In June, all but one of Cuba’s ten bishops were reportedly under house arrest. Some took shelter in foreign embassies. Meanwhile, Castro had put “patriotic” clergy in charge of the new nationalized church. Nuns from Quebec who had been teaching in Cuban parochial schools but refused to include Communist propaganda in their lessons were hastily summoned home.
Through it all, John had been patient to the point of indulgence, cautioning against “hasty deliberations” against Castro. Cuba needed time to work out its political troubles, suffer its growth pains, and find its right footing with the Church. Meanwhile, the Vatican seemed more intent on lecturing the United States on profit-sharing and union wages than on protecting its own priests in Cuba. “When priests and nuns and Catholics of every stripe were being persecuted by Castro,” Buckley said many years later, it seemed “hardly the moment to dwell on lesser problems.”
The Castro connection occurred to Garry Wills as well. On the phone with the National Review editor Frank Meyer, Wills noted that the new encyclical’s title, Mater et magistra, was a stern reminder that the Church’s magisterial authority was fused with its nurturing role as “mother.” But should it be? Wills distilled the theological distinction into a joke. “Mater sí, Magistra no,” he cracked, making a play on “Cuba sí, Castro no,” the slogan anti-Communist Cuban refugees had been chanting at mass rallies in Miami and elsewhere. Meyer repeated the quip to Buckley, who found it extremely funny, all the more so since it came from a Catholic scholar who had studied for the priesthood. Bypassing his sister Priscilla, the magazine’s managing editor and in-house censor, Buckley slipped a blind one-liner into the August 12, 1961, issue of National Review: “Joke going the rounds in conservative Catholic circles: ‘Mater sí, Magistra no.’”
Publishing Wills’s joke, Priscilla later said, was her single biggest regret in forty-plus years at National Review, because it “got us into lots and lots of trouble with the liberal Catholic press over lots and lots of years.” And not only with liberals. Bill Buckley also got notes of distress from his own family, including his aunt Odette Steiner, who was a nun in Mobile, Alabama, and his in-law John Harding, the bishop of Charleston.
Buckley had wandered into an area he knew very little about and blundered into blatant self-contradiction. In his critique of Kennedy as a wayward Catholic, Buckley seemed to treat encyclicals as among the Vatican statements Kennedy should take more seriously. “Every Catholic is himself bound to regard with reverence papal generalizations,” Bill had scolded, “even those that deal directly with political and economic affairs, and is bound, where the Pope speaks formally in his role as pastor, to submit to his teaching authority in matters of faith and morals.” Now he was saying the opposite—that Catholics weren’t obligated to take encyclicals seriously.
The fact was that almost no one knew very much about encyclicals. When Buckley called Wills for guidance in advance of his debates with Bill Clancy, “He thought I knew more about encyclicals than I did,” Wills recalled. “But when I told him about my ignorance, he answered that no one else seemed to know much either—a condition I would find to be true.” At Buckley’s instigation, Wills researched the subject and wrote a book titled Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964), the first of his major writings on the Church.
Buckley was by then the most visible Catholic intellectual in America—lifted to that high status by Kennedy’s election—and it seemed to have gone to his head. Walter Matt, the editor of The Wanderer, the conservative Catholic weekly, told Buckley that his “imprudence” would give liberal Catholics just the opening they needed; they would pounce. Matt was right. Fr. Thurston Davis, SJ, the editor of America, who had welcomed Kennedy’s candidacy and its “sociological and cultural meaning,” said that Buckley’s editorial was “slanderous” and that he owed “his Catholic readers and allies an apology.” Davis suggested that Buckley’s arrogance had gotten the better of him. “It takes an appalling amount of self-assurance for a Catholic writer to brush off a papal encyclical,” Davis wrote.
But in their own “impudence,” said Buckley, the editors of America seemed to overlook a simple fact: National Review was not a Catholic publication—“no more Catholic than the [Kennedy] administration is Catholic because the President is Catholic.” The magazine’s editorial board included Protestants as well as Jews. Apart from Buckley, the only practicing Catholics on the board were the converts Brent Bozell and Willmoore Kendall. Buckley wrote a letter to Davis for publication in America:
Proceed, if you like, publicly to despair over our insouciance or frivolity—but to edge us over into infidelity is more than uncharitable; it is irrational, and, in the true sense, scandalous…a prurient search for sacrilege…. You are infinitely patient with the dogged materialism and secularism of the United Nations. Yet you seem to be denying to a Christian [not Catholic] journal the expression of its opinions on the tactical or strategic uses of a single encyclical and, in the process, calling into question the traditionally exercised right of Catholics generally, to analyze and discuss and weigh, in context of their abiding faith, the meaning of papal encyclicals. I am as a Christian journalist dismayed by your position. And as a fervent Catholic I am appalled by your methods.
When Fr. Davis refused to publish the letter, Buckley published it in National Review instead, with a further provocation on its cover: “Whatsa Mater, America?”
Buckley had a history of standing up for conservative miscreants—Joe McCarthy above all. Now he was the miscreant and had cast the liberal Davis in the role of censor and silencer of dissenting opinion from “so-called Catholic conservatives.” “Jesuits Attack Buckley on Pope,” ran a headline in The New York Times. A cartoon in The Providence Journal, the leading daily in that most Catholic of Northeastern cities, depicted Buckley nailing “Mater sí, Magistra no” to the door of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Thirty-five years later, in his religious memoir Nearer, My God, Buckley returned to the subject of papal decrees once more, this time defending them as revealed truth immune from challenge—the word of “revelation and providentially guided reason” that came from the “one Voice for whose decisions the people wait with trust,” the pope. Buckley did not mention Mater et magistra or the controversy he had created. This remarkable episode—in many ways the most daring in his long life of advocacy—was one he now wished had never happened.
