Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-85.

CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS AND CONSERVATIVE POLITICS IN AMERICA, 1950-85

Patrick Allitt

Cornell University Press, $29.95, 306 pp.

Patrick Allitt's fascinating book on conservative Catholic intellectuals makes an important contribution to the history of American Catholicism from the confident fifties to the unsettling eighties. The painful irony at the heart of this study is related to timing: "the centrality of Catholicism to the conservative movement diminished just as the movement itself was coming to power." Allitt raises some suggestive questions about the intellectual genealogy of the next generation of conservative Catholics and should interest historians and interpreters of American Catholic culture.

In the swaggering years following World War II, conservativism, if known at all, was perceived as a generally harmless pastime for those who had missed the last train to the future. Allitt shows how the conservative movement--a coalition of Catholics (for example, William F. Buckley, Jr., Brent Bozell, Garry Wills, John Noonan), libertarian capitalists (Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov, Henry Hazlitt), and disillusioned former communists (Max Eastman, James Burnham, Will Herberg)--grew into the dominant cultural philosophy of the eighties. The Catholic thinkers, by far the largest part of the new movement, drew their political convictions from their religious beliefs. Their assumptions about an inherently imperfect human nature, an objective moral order, and an indispensable tradition clustered around a set of "family values" and natural law principles.

This small but influential group of thinkers, which gained prominence in the fifties, set a pattern that is being repeated in the nineties. Their movement was dominated by laymen (like John Noonan, Ross J.S. Hoffman, and Francis Graham Wilson) whose faith gave them a way to think about the world and to propose solutions to its most vexing problems. They were deeply Catholic and politically conservative. Some like Russell Kirk were converts and many like Garry Wills were capable of writing the kind of provocative prose that drew public attention. As we look back at members of this group-- many of them still active--we see a portrait of the movers and shakers of the Catholic right wing, though many of us did not know there were left and right wings in the fifties.

Many Catholics who grew up before Vatican II remember the Catholic church as prosperous, self-assured, and monolithic, a faithful flock guided by a united hierarchy. One of the merits of this book is its ability to show the hidden fissures in this granite facade. If Catholics were united against communism, they were divided about McCarthy, the Spanish Civil War, and eventually, in more visible and inexorable ways, about Vietnam.

Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics is a tantalizing account of the men and matters of an earlier time, and an introduction to the resurgence of a Catholic conservative movement in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Yet the structure of the book is uneven because Allitt's task is enormous: he traces a movement from the fifties through the eighties and suggests some links between a pre- and postconciliar conservative Catholicism. That story--the one which traces more precisely the intellectual ancestry of a new generation of Catholic conservatives-remains to be told and we can only hope he is working on a sequel.

The first four chapters, an intellectual history of Catholic conservatives from the early fifties through the sixties, introduce a generation of "lost" thinkers (and lost causes) to postconciliar Catholics. More importantly, these early chapters show how political events before the sixties (like McCarthyism or support for Franco) set off the first depth charges that would bring down the rock face of Catholic conviction and splinter the burgeoning conservative movement. As long as Catholic conservative intellectuals could assume that they shared the same religious convictions, they were united around political questions. In the postconciliar uproar, however, a minority faction (led by Buckley's brother-in-law, Brent Bozell) chose issues more for their religious significance rather than for their political importance. Triumph, Bozell's magazine, "became a bulwark of Hispanophile Catholics" and Bozell moved his family to Spain because, "you breathed the Catholic thing there." "For Buckley and the majority, the conservative political program seemed the most important issue; for others, religious purity in the face of ever-more threatening contaminants had to take precedence." The monumental changes in the church that accompanied Vatican II, therefore, hastened the conservative divide.

The minority, those who were driven by a desire to preserve orthodoxy and religious order, took extreme measures: Walter Matt left the Wanderer to start the Remnant; H. Lyman Stebbins founded "Catholics United for the Faith"; and Bozell left the National Review to begin Triumph. Their political causes--Carlist Spain, for example, or Diem's regime in Vietnam--were dictated by a perfervid anti-Communist Catholicism. Allitt carries the reader along the canyon rims of these divides so sensibly that it is a bit of a letdown when he shifts gears in the middle of the book.

Chapter 5, a transitional analysis of "sex, law, and nature," is meant to show how conservative Catholics responded to the birth control and abortion debates of the sixties and seventies. As a thematic rather than an analytical approach, it is not as fluid as previous chapters. Chapters 6 and 7, written to test the generalizations of the first half of the book--that the conservative movement generated by Catholics broke apart before it could become effective on a national scale--do not work well either. In choosing two minor figures from the early fifties (Hungarian refugee intellectuals John Lukacs and Thomas Molnar) and two major figures from the sixties to the present (Garry Wills and Michael Novak), Allitt manages to set up interesting internal comparisons, but I do not see how they test his earlier assumptions.

The epilogue brings the story up to date from Novak's responses to the bishops' pastoral letters on peace and the economy, through a group of new Catholic journalists: Dale Vree and the New Oxford Review, E. Michael Jones and Fidelity magazine, James Sullivan and Lay Witness are the latter-day shapers of a new Catholic conservativism. Like their earlier counterparts, they see themselves "as a morally exalted outsider group." Distinct from the majority of the earlier group, however, their concerns are far more religious than political. The links between then and now, therefore, probably have less to do with the vibrant conservativism of William Buckley than with the defensive Catholicism of a marginal figure like Frederick Wilhelmsen (who today is one of the intellectual heroes of Christendom College). It may be too early to say.

This book is redolent with suggestive parallels and will, I hope, inspire others to venture into this territory. Allitt's occasional interpretive inadequacies should not take away from the fact that this is an important, deftly-written, and exquisitely useful book.