Catholic deja vu vu

Catholic politicians who loudly proclaim their religious devotion but try to waive away Encyclicals, combined with lay Catholics fantasizing about dropping out of American society—are evidence that rightwing American Catholicism is undergoing a profound crisis. Yet this crisis is not completely novel. To a remarkable degree, it was anticipated by the tumult of the 1960s, when Catholic conservatives associated with National Review struggled to battle both Vatican teaching and the rise of social liberalism.

The story of the shake-up of the 1960s church will offer little comfort to contemporary right-wing Catholics, since it is a tale of alienation, abandoned ideals, and powerful minds that severed their moorings from reality. Yet this story so strongly parallels contemporary concerns that it might offer clues as to how the Catholic right will deal with its current dilemmas.

While Buckley and Wills worked out arguments to diminish the impact of encyclicals, Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell went off in a different direction, seceding from mainstream American society. Like Buckley, Bozell had little use for encyclicals like Mater et Magistra or the general drift of Catholic liberals, whom he accused of denying “the mysterious ravages of original sin, the relevance of divine redemption, the subordination of matter to spirit.”

But for Bozell, the alternative to this weak-tea Catholicism had to be found by leaving America and going to a genuinely Christian country, Spain, then ruled by the fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Bozell moved to Spain in 1961 with his wife Trish and their kids. As Trish would recall, “It was in Spain that [Brent’s] hunger for a Christian society took seed. In Spain he was swept away … by the concept of Christendom. Where before he was a dedicated Catholic, he [now] became a Catholic who believed that all thinking, all action, no matter where and when, should be rooted in Catholicism.”

Although the Bozells would return to the United States, their experience in an immersively Catholic society left an indelible impression, one that deepened after he started the Christian Commonwealth Institute in 1970, a summer school that in its early years met annually in Spain. The powerful hold that Spain had on Bozell’s imagination disconnected from the American reality. He started a magazine called Triumph which became a hotbed of harsh critiques of society. In the manner of the New Left, Triumph would sometimes spell America with a “k,” suggesting that the country was inherently fascist. In a 1968 essay called “The Death of the Constitution” Bozell argued the founding document of the republic was inherently flawed because it didn’t mention God.

“The constitution has not only failed,” Bozell contended, “it was bound to fail. The architects of our constitutional order built a house in which secular liberalism could live, and given the dominant urges of the age, would live. The time has come to leave that house and head for home.”