William F. Buckley, Jr. - Religion

Religion

Buckley was raised a Catholic, and was a member of the Knights of Malta. He described his faith by saying, "I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith." As a child, he attended St. John's, Beaumont, a boarding school in Old Windsor, for a time before the outbreak of World War II. Later, he attended Millbrook, a Protestant school, but was permitted to attend Catholic Mass at a nearby church. As a youth, he became aware of anti-Catholic bias in the United States, particularly American Freedom and Catholic Power, a Paul Blanshard book that accused American Catholics of having 'divided loyalties.'

The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition." Henry Sloan Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution."

In his 1997 book Nearer, My God, he condemned what he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school," and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God...multiculturalism." As an adult, Buckley regularly attended the traditional Latin Mass in Connecticut. He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Vatican II Council. Buckley also revealed an interest in the writings and revelations of the 20th Century Italian mystic Maria Valtorta. In his spiritual memoir Buckley reproduced Valtorta's detailed accounts of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, which were based on Valtorta's visionary experiences of Christ and the mystical revelations she reported experiencing between the years 1943–47, being shown Jesus' life in 1st-century Palestine and recording the visions in her book The Poem of the Man God.