Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of William F. Buckley, Jr.

Despite its title, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s latest book is not an autobiography. Nor is it quite an autobiography of faith: Buckley's Roman Catholicism has not been the engine that has driven his course through life - journalism, writing, and politics have been. He is not Thomas Merton, not even Frank Sheed.

Buckley's book instead might have been titled Why I Am a Catholic; Why It Makes Sense. Buckley is Catholic because he was raised Catholic and because it has continued to ring true to him. His father, who was in his late forties when Buckley was born, was a highly successful venturing oilman, and a praying Catholic; his mother a daily communicant. Buckley was fifth or sixth of ten children and, it is clear, had a very happy childhood. The children were schooled at home by tutors or, if the family was traveling, in intervals at Catholic schools in Europe. Buckley himself, at the age of thirteen, had one important year in an English school conducted by warm and reasonable Jesuits. Certainly, by the time he was sent to a small Protestant (more or less) prep school near the family home in Sharon, Connecticut, it was unimaginable to Buckley to be anything other than Catholic. A postwar baccalaureate at Yale, notoriously, did nothing to change this.

The autobiography in Buckley's book ends here, forty pages in. The rest is episodes and topical essays - the intellectual content that Buckley has added to his Catholicism as an adult and on the occasion of writing this book. Buckley's root premise is that Revelation cannot finally contradict human reasoning. This is the dominant Roman Catholic position, and it fits nicely Buckley's indocile temperament and love of dialectics. He gives us, then, a review (with interesting reflections of his own) of classic Catholic apologetics: reasoned responses to the problems for belief posed by changes (or development) in church doctrine, bad popes (yawn), the church's support of the Inquisition, its acquiescence to slavery, the ghastly cruelty of eternal punishment (not reasonable, Buckley finds), the apparent incompatibility between divine omniscience and human free will. Other topics: the historicity of Jesus, his miracles, the Resurrection, Lourdes, theodicy, the lovability of God (an interesting one). One chapter is a lengthy vision of the event of Christ's Crucifixion. It is horrifying. Where each nail was driven in (first, the left wrist ...), the particular agonies of the crucified as the cross is raised and dropped into place in its hole, the three hours of slow, conscious dying by bleeding and asphyxiation. Forty years ago, such recitals were a staple of certain itinerant priests as they went from parish to parish preaching those Catholic minirevivals we called "missions." These dramatizations are out of fashion now, at least among American Catholics of European stock (they were abused and, I suppose, we've become too uptown), but the Crucifixion did occur, and it was like this. It is part of the Catholic deal, and Buckley does not shrink from it. Another chapter is an appreciation of Malcolm Muggeridge that concludes with a hilarious account of an audience Buckley, David Niven, and Muggeridge had with Pope John Paul II. The pope's staffers had failed him. He was completely mystified as to who this trio was - for all he knew they might as well have been the Musketeers.

The names in Nearer, My God tell much. The great English-language Catholic apologists: Cardinal Newman, Chesterton, Ronald Knox. Heroes and vessels of the American conservative, or reactionary, flowering in the 1940s and 1950s: Russell Kirk, Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, Whittaker Chambers, The National Review, Fulton J. Sheen, Clare Booth Luce. In the 1980s and 1990s, more recent National Review editors such as Jeffrey Hart and high-church clergymen who have converted to Catholicism - George Rutler, Richard John Neuhaus. It should not be thought, however, that Buckley's Catholicism is an ossification or a clique. The din of the last thirty-five years has not made an Evelyn Waugh of him. He has gone along with the liturgical reforms and the move to the vernacular while questioning their premises. Women priests? - he thinks not. Married priests? - he's with the pope, but continues to reflect on the issue. Annulments, divorce? he is a sympathetic companion to a church trying to muddle through. Contraception? "When there is reliable evidence that the faithful are simply ignoring a stricture of the church, the loyalist reposes his hopes in the possibility that at some point in the future a pope will modify the reasoning of Pope Paul...or else that the principle being urged captures the moral imagination of the next generation of men and women, who will then abide by it.

Many of these are difficult questions for any thoughtful Catholic, and no less for a Buckley whose purpose in Nearer, My God, after all, is to say that orthodox Roman Catholicism is an appropriate and blessed life for a serious, intellectually rigorous modern. The book closes in exultation, however. Nearer, My God's last chapter is a lovely memoir of his mother. And the penultimate chapter, the book's climax, is Buckley's account of his nephew Michael Bozell's recent ordination as a priest in a contemplative French Benedictine monastery where he will spend his life in prayer. The ceremony is a statement and celebration of the radical transfiguration that the Roman Catholic priesthood is, its profound distance from the lay state and, indeed, from other Catholic religious vocations. Buckley's heart is completely at ease here.

This is Buckley's Catholicism. He does not speak about his spiritual life in prayer, works, and the sacraments. He says this is because his natural discourse is argumentative, not devotional. I think it has more to do with his diffidence.

What is Buckley's Catholicism not? It is not dark. There is little of Pascal's terror before God; thanks to Christ and the church and the sacraments, salvation is there to be had. Many of the World War II-era converts to Catholicism, or to reaction, had despaired of man and politics. Not Buckley. In this regard, Whittaker Chambers, and even the Thomas Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain, are not his bedfellows. To Buckley, the world's our oyster. (Generally, one suspects him of happiness, and satisfaction.)

Buckley's Catholicism is liturgical, not evangelical. It is about whether individual souls will persist to salvation. Its devotional energy is private, not communal. There is little in Nearer, My God about a redemption of the people of God. Except for a claim that Rerum novarum (1891) inveighed not against capitalism but against materialism, there is not a word about the social and economic statements of the popes and the bishops, strong on human rights (Bill?...) and redistributionalist (oh). Of the worshiping congregation as a dynamic or mutually supportive body, nothing.

Buckley might want to rethink the reflex individualism of his Catholicism. Surely, he is the last person who would be content to see the church become just another fairly sizable Christian denomination. Charles Morris, in American Catholic (1997), has found that, for all the turmoil, the heterodoxy, the decline in numbers of clergy, Catholicism in America is flourishing in the parishes. (In the area of the country where I live large numbers of Catholics, not so much rejecting Catholic doctrine as seeking palpable, lively Christian communities for themselves and their children, have joined local Protestant churches - parishes, really.) It is clear in Nearer, My God that Buckley himself is at least liturgically active in his parish. I do not like to think what would become of a church that did not have Buckley's patrician, cerebral Catholicism in it. Inevitably, though, this is for relatively few of us. Tocqueville told us that individualism is what we have in America, and that it is communities and mutual support that we look for.

Neil Coughlan is a lawyer in Connecticut and the author of Young John Dewey. He is working with The Judicial Evaluation Institute for Economic Issues in Washington, D.C.