Nearer, My God
Coughlan, Neil
A contented believer Neil Coughlan espite 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...
...Many of the World War II-era converts to Catholicism, or to reaction, had despaired of man and politics...
...He has gone along with the liturgical reforms and the move to the vernacular while questioning their premises...
...Indeed, Pelikan advises the reader to return to the "text edition" for more complete exposition and documentation...
...Are we drawn to the icon or to the fleeting image...
...It should not be thought, however, that Buckley's Catholicism is an ossification or a clique...
...Tocqueville told us that individualism is what we have in America, and that it is communities and mutual support that we look for...
...ConCommonweal | 5 March 13, 1998 traception...
...A postwar baccalaureate at Yale, notoriously, did nothing to change this...
...Casting Jaroslav Pelikan in the role of curator for The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries is a shrewd idea and for the most part the enterprise succeeds...
...There is little of Pascal's terror before God...
...A hankering for the real behind the illusion...
...He does not speak about his spiritual life in prayer, works, and the sacraments...
...The book closes in exultation, however...
...Surely, he is the last person who would be content to see the church become just another fairly sizable Christian denomination...
...Buckley's book instead might have been titled Why 1 Am a Calholic...
...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...
...Women p r i e s t s ? - he thinks not...
...The pope's staffers had failed him...
...and redistributionalist (oh...
...It is hard to say exactly why religious art in all media and genres is so popular...
...The names in Nearer, My God tell much...
...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...
...Generally, one suspects him of happiness, and satisfaction...
...Or is it an obsession with the visual and tactile...
...I think it has more to do with his diffidence...
...Its devotional energy is private, not communal...
...But the "little" that does need to be said also applies to Pelikan's magisterial multivolume work, The Christian Tradition...
...It is clear in Nearer, My God that Buckley himself is at least liturgically active in his parish...
...He is not Thomas Merton, not even Frank Sheed...
...In neither Tile Christian TradiCommonweal | 6 March 13, 1998...
...One chapter is a lengthy vision of the event of Christ's Crucifixion...
...Buckley was fifth or sixth of ten children and, it is clear, had a very happy childhood...
...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...
...Inevitably, though, this is for relatively few of us...
...Neil Coughlan is a lawyer in Connecticut and the author of Young John Dewey...
...This is the dominant Roman Catholic position, and it fits nicely Buckley's indocile temperament and love of dialectics...
...It is about whether individual souls will persist to salvation...
...Buckley himself, at the age of thirteen, had one important year in an English school conducted by warm and reasonable Jesuits...
...He is working with The Judicial Evaluation Institute for Economic Issues in Washincton D C THEOLOGY GETS GRAPHIC Joseph Fete s the phenomenal success of last y e a r ' s "Glory of Byzantium" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art attests, religious art continues to exert a powerful attraction even in a secular age...
...Nearer, My God's last chapter is a lovely memoir of his mother...
...What is Buckley's Catholicism not...
...In the 1980s and 1990s, more recent National Review editors such as Jeffrey Hart and highchurch clergymen who have converted to Catholicism~eorge Rutler, Richard John Neuhaus...
...This is Buckley's Catholicism...
...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...
...There is little in Nearer, My God about a redemption of the people of God...
...The great English-Ianguage Catholic apologists: Cardinal Newman, Chesterton, Ronald Knox...
...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...
...I do not like to think what would become of a church that did not have Buckley's patrician, cerebral Catholicism in it...
...The children were schooled at home by tutors or, if the family was traveling, in intervals at Catholic schools in Europe...
...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...
...He says this is because his natural discourse is argumentative, not devotional...
...It is not dark...
...When there is reliable evidence that the faithful are simply ignoring a stricture of the church, the loy alist 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...
...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 might want to rethink the reflex individualism of his Catholicism...
...Forty years ago, such recitals were a staple of certain itinerant priests as they went from parish to parish preaching those Catholic ndnirevivals we calied "missions...
...It is horrifying...
...Buckley is Catholic because he was raised Catholic and because it has continued to ring true to him...
...Other topics: the historicity of Jesus, his miracles, the Resurrection, Lourdes, theodicy, the lovability of God (an interesting one...
...To Buckley, the world's our oyster...
...Married priests?--he's with the pope, but continues to reflect on the issue...
...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...
...Buckley's Catholicism is liturgical, not evangelical...
...Buckley's heart is completely at ease here...
...He was completely mystified as to who this trio was--for all he knew they might as well have been the Musketeers...
...Where each nail was driven in (first, the left w r i s t . . . ), 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...
...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...
...his mother a daily communicant...
...In that sense, then, little need be said about the seventeen-yearold text...
...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...
...thanks to Christ and the church and the sacraments, salvation is there to be had...
...A demand created by television and computer screens for what can be taken in at a glance and does not demand to be read or wrestled with...
...l y It Makes Sense...
...Except for a claim that Return 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...
...Annulments, d i v o r c e ? - he is a sympathetic companion to a church trying to muddle through...
...In this regard, Whittaker Chambers, and even the Thomas Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain, are not his bedfellows...
...Not Buckley...
...It is part of the Catholic deal, and Buckley does not shrink from it...
...His father, who was in his late forties when Buckley was born, was a highly successful venturing oilman, and a praying Catholic...
...A restlessness that is quelled only when our "hearts rest in Thee...
...Buckley's root premise is that Revelation cannot finally contradict human reasoning...
...Of the worshiping congregation as a dynamic or mutually supportive body, nothing...
...The din of the last thirty-five years has not made an Evelyn Waugh of him...
...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...
...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 illustrated Jesus is actually an expansion or visual supplement to Pelikan's well-received 1985 Jesus through the Centuries...
...The autobiography in Buckley's book ends here, forty pages in...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
