The Catholic William F. Buckley Jr.: In Gratitude
In 1965 New York City mayoral politics were enlivened by the insurgent candidacy of Conservative Party Wm. F. Buckley Jr., who believed that the choice between Democrat Abraham D. Beame and Republican John V. Lindsay was a distinction without a difference and that the public was entitled to a forthright voice in favor of financial restraint, reduced crime and improved education. (Hugh Markey ’40 ran as his Comptroller, described by Bill in The Unmaking of a Mayor as “A Staten Island business man with a fine sense of humor and proportion, incorrigibly modest.”).
In making his case Buckley combined rhetorical brilliance and frequent wit, the latter of which quality won over a thirteen year old nascent newspaper junkie on Long Island. To read Bill Buckley’s frequent put-downs of the oracular editorial page of the New York Times or his appeals to his debating opponents not to interrupt him, as in, “Could we please have a little more quiet from the zoo over there?” were a welcome departure from the dreariness of conventional campaigns. So you can imagine my delight a year later when I discovered that Bill’s son Christopher would become my classmate and, as the years went on, dear friend.
My first interaction with Bill came at Parents’ Weekend dinner two years later when I was the waiter assigned to the Buckley table to serve Father Peter’s best claret. As I finished pouring his wine glass and began to move on, Bill said, “Not so fast,” and, finishing his water, added, “Fill this one too.” When I had done that he held up his coffee cup, and when that was filled he asked me to follow the same arrangements for Mrs. Buckley. The other parents at the table appeared nonplussed. I, on the other hand, realized immediately that I had just learned a lesson of life-changing proportions. (When I reminded him of this interaction in a birthday note decades later he responded that, though he did not recall the event, it sounded “inherently credible.”)
Over the course of his 82 years Bill taught many lessons, most of them far more profound than the one someone as superficial as I was able to digest that night (on the JV football field, about an hour later, if memory serves).
Upon his death in late February, the papers and news magazines were full of his achievements as an author, editor, TV host, etc., all from the secular point of view to be expected from such organs. It was left to George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center to state the obvious point that Bill “belonged on any serious list of the five most publicly consequential Catholics in the 20th century.”
This was evident in his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), when he wrote:
I believe the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.
In Nearer, My God (1997), Bill wrote of his own Catholic schooling at St. John’s, Beaumont, the Jesuit school near Windsor:
I had been, notwithstanding the distance from home, very happy there, and I knew absolutely—about this there was simply no doubt—that I had a deep and permanent involvement with Catholic Christianity. They say about alcoholics that they are never “cured,” but I am a senior citizen and my faith has never left me, and I must suppose that Father Sharkey and Father Manning and Father Payne had something to do with it; they and the closeness I felt, every morning, to the mystical things that were taking place on the altar.
In the same book he wrote about visiting Lourdes:
They are in Lourdes because of this palpability of the emanations that gave birth to the shrine. The spiritual tonic is felt. If it were otherwise, the pilgrims would diminish in number; would, by now, have disappeared, as at Delphos, which one visits as a museum, not a shrine. What it is that fetches them is, I think, quite simply stated, namely a reinforced conviction that the Lord God loves His creatures, healthy or infirm; that they—we—must understand the nature of love, which is salvific in its powers; and that, although we are free to attempt to divine God’s purpose, we will never succeed in doing so. The reason is that we cannot know (the manifest contradictions are too disturbing) what is the purpose behind particular phenomena and therefore must make do with only the grandest plan of God, which treats with eternal salvation. Our burden is to keep the faith: to do this (the grammar of assent) requires the discipline of submission, some assurance that those who are stricken can, even so, be happy; and that the greatest tonic of all is divine love, which is nourished by human loves, even as human love is nourished by divine love.
And Bill believed that we must respond to divine and human love in our turn, though few can do so with the prodigious discipline and protean productivity that he did. As he wrote in a speech he gave in 1988:
To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or, as happened to us three weeks ago, to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.
Reading Bill was an excellent way to prepare for Father Damian’s daily vocabulary tests— from animadversions, through chiliastic, saphrophytic, and tergiversations, to viscidity, it was best to have a dictionary close at hand. If one were confronted with a handwritten note from him (he wrote one to the author of every National Review piece in addition to dictating over 200 letters a week to readers, controversialists and friends), it was also advisable to have a magnifying glass-- even a soothsayer-- such was the scale of the illegibility.
At the overflowing Memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on April 4, Father George Rutler (the “spiritual director” and longtime friend to whom Father Damian adverts in his article) said in his homily:
His indignation at the wrong ways of men was not savage like that of Jonathan Swift, for it was well-tempered and confident of victory. He fit Newman’s definition of a gentleman as one who is “merciful towards the absurd.”…..Since William’s death many people have told how he brought them to belief in God, and there are those who became priests because of him. His wide circle of friends encompassed those of different beliefs, but its width was the measure of his own unfailing confidence, in the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church…Our friend knew that Communism was worse than a social tyranny because it was a theological heresy. His categories were not right and left but right and wrong. What graces he had to change a century came by his belief in Christ who changed all centuries.”
In his eulogy, Henry Kissinger reminisced upon the sailing competition enjoyed each summer for fifteen years on Long Island Sound between Bill and Peter Flanigan ’41. Peter’s boat won every race, including the last one, when Bill insisted on skippering it. (Bill was also instrumental in publicizing via his syndicated column Peter’s initial class of Student Sponsor Partners, in which seven of the original forty-two sponsors—there are now over 1,000 annually-- were Portsmouth alumni.)
Dr. Kissinger also reflected on discussions he and Bill had on the relationship between knowledge and faith, how Bill’s brand of conservatism was not concerned with utopias but “the liberation of the human spirit, which is a deeper and more eternal undertaking than causes geared to political timetables.” His voice breaking with emotion, Kissinger concluded:
We will forever remember how we were sustained by Bill’s special serenity, the culmination of a long and very private quest. The younger generation, especially of his collaborators whom he so cherished, was inspired by the inward peace Bill radiated, which he was too humble and, in a deep sense, too devout to assert except by example. In the solitude of parting, all of us give thanks to a benign Providence that enabled us to walk part of our way with this noble, gentle, and valiant man who was truly touched by the grace of God.
In his own remarks Christopher Buckley noted that the rector of the Cathedral had told him that the Mass, with magnificent music by Bach (the 2nd Brandenberg, Firing Line’s longtime theme song), Palestrina, Albinoni, and Tomas Luis de Victoria and stirring hymns—Bunyan’s He Who Would Valiant Be, Jerusalem the Golden, and I Vow to Thee My Country-- would in effect be a dress rehearsal for the papal Mass two weeks hence when Benedict XVI would visit New York. “I think that would have pleased him,” Christopher added, “Though doubtless he would have preferred it the other way around.”
Christopher also recalled that his father was once asked in an interview in Playboy magazine (why did he consent to such an interview? “So as to communicate with my sixteen year old son.”) what he would want for an epitaph: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
“Only Pup,” Christopher concluded,” could get the Book of Job into a Hugh Hefner publication.”
Perhaps the best way to conclude is with Bill’s own words, delivered on April 4, 1965, to the New York Police Department Holy Name Society communion breakfast, an event that helped propel him into the mayoral election later that year, with which I began this remembrance:
Every age in which values are distorted, an age like our own in which truths are thought either not to exist, or as to exist only as quaint curios from the dead past, the wrath of the unruly falls with focus on the symbols of authority, of continuity, of tradition.
It is no accident at all that the police should be despised in an age infatuated with revolution and ideology. It is no surprise that the Catholic Church should in our time have been singled out for the brunt of the organized hatred of the principal agents of revolution—the Church with its unyielding devotion to eternal truths which resist the plastic manipulations of the willful revolutionaries. Who are the enemy? The agencies of order and tradition. The truths of Christianity. The guiding lights of our tradition. The loyalty to our country and to our traditions. The laws that were bequeathed to us, given to us as what T.S. Eliot called “The Democracy of the Dead:” These are the enemies of the calls whose restlessness of soul is ultimately a sign of spiritual anemia, of a rootlessness that expressed itself in a resentment of the old values….
You must know that you will be hated for doing your duty, and be reviled by those who misrepresent you. But bear this in mind, that there are the two worlds of which I speak [Roughly speaking, the world that makes the newspapers, and the world that doesn’t], and though the voices of the one sometimes seem so very much noisier than the voices of the other, that other world, the world of sensible men and women, looks on you with pride and gratitude.
Sustained by the implicit gratitude of the people, you are also sustained no doubt during this holy season by the knowledge of the silence with which the Author of all values walked during His own days on earth.
It goes without saying that all of the gratitude William F. Buckley Jr. expended in a lifetime of spiritual (as well as tremendous material) generosity has been abundantly reciprocated in thanksgiving these past months at Portsmouth and all the world over for a life, first and foremost, of loving and heroic Christian witness.
James MacGuire ‘70
(Jamie is the co-author with Christopher Buckley ‘70 of a play, Campion, and, thanks to Bill’s encouragement, not to mention his forbearance, has been an occasional contributor to National Review.)
