Mater Si, Buckley No: The Jesuit Who Took on National Review’s “Compartmentalized Catholics”
In his way, Father Louis J. Twomey, S.J., did have the last word against William F. Buckley Jr.—and not only because Buckley eventually repented of his racist and segregationist views. Twomey had the last word through continuing, until his final illness in 1969, to call Catholic laity, clergy, and institutions to end racial discrimination and “build a society in which the dignity of every man is acknowledged, respected, and protected.”
Photo courtesy the Louisiana Digital Library - Loyola Collection
On February 16, 1960, National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr., who took pride in his Jesuit prep-school education, wrote to the Jesuits’ New Orleans Province Institute of Social Order to request a copy of its newsletter, Christ’s Blueprint for the South.
Blueprint editor Father Louis J. Twomey, S.J., must have done a double-take when Buckley’s letter arrived on his desk at Loyola University New Orleans. In 1948, a year after founding Loyola’s labor school, the Institute of Industrial Relations, he had started the newsletter to facilitate a frank discussion among his fellow members of the Society of Jesus on how best to promote the social teachings of the Catholic Church. Since Twomey often used his editorial platform to call out the Society’s failures to practice what the popes were preaching on social justice, the newsletter’s circulation was limited to Jesuits—officially, at least.
Privately, the fifty-four-year-old Twomey, who had been active in civil rights since the late 1940s, occasionally made an exception to the Blueprint’s in-house restriction and shared it with non-Jesuits who wished to learn about the Church’s social teaching—most notably his friend Martin Luther King Jr. But there was no way he could make an exception for Buckley, given the National Review editor’s penchant for deriding Catholics who denied the tenets of libertarian conservatism. Twomey’s office sent Buckley a polite note informing him that the newsletter was for Jesuits only.
Buckley may have learned of the Blueprint from the lone Jesuit National Review contributor at that time, future McLaughlin Group host John J. McLaughlin, S.J., who was then a scholastic (Jesuit lingo for seminarian). If that was the case, McLaughlin likely told him that the Blueprint frequently criticized National Review’s promotion of what would today be called cafeteria Catholicism, which Twomey termed “compartmentalized Catholicism.”
Twomey had in fact been criticizing compartmentalized Catholicism since before National Review’s inception in November 1955. In the May 1955 Blueprint, he condemned the hypocrisy of US Catholics who professed to hold the true faith while “[allowing] themselves to be bracketed with the middle class and [failing] to ‘go to the workingman’ in the manner prescribed by every pope from Leo XIII” (see Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris §61). He then proceeded to list positions held by such compartmentalized Catholics—each of which would come to be held by National Review:
We not only do not oppose but oftentimes promote laws to restrict immigration (cf. the many Catholics favoring the McCarran-Walter Act); to deprive unions of legitimate security measures (cf. the many Catholics favoring “Right to Work” bills); to allow the state to reach into the nature of the marriage contract and arbitrarily to declare it void as in the laws against miscegenation; to enforce segregation in schools and in other aspects of political, economic, and social life, etc.
By the December 1959 Blueprint, when National Review’s circulation had quadrupled from 7,500 at its inception to 30,000, Twomey was no longer content merely to call out policy positions that contradicted Catholic teaching. He was now naming names: “There are many Catholics who seem much readier to follow the leadership of The National Review, the Manion Forum Network, Fulton Lewis, Westbrook Pegler, Father Richard Ginder, etc., in their views on the United Nations and world government, etc., than those of the popes.”
Like the trained rhetorician that he was, Twomey did not let his point rest with a critique. Against compartmentalized Catholicism, he proposed a positive counter, which he called “integral Catholicism, Catholicism as an all-pervading way of life.”
By integral Catholicism, Twomey did not mean integralism, but rather what today would be called the consistent life ethic. He held the Church’s priests and teachers responsible for educating the faithful in Catholic social teaching so they could give a full-bodied witness to the faith. “Catholic men and women […] should be able to agree on at least the essentials,” he wrote. “And one of the essentials is that the Church has ‘the right and the duty to pronounce with supreme authority upon social and economic matters’ [Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno §41].”
Whether or not Buckley was aware that the Blueprint was criticizing National Review’s editorial stance, he refrained from responding at the time. But he could not remain silent when Twomey took his criticisms into a public forum, at the height of the controversy that would go down in media history as “Mater si, magistra no.”
A Mere Mater of Opinion? National Review vs. John XXIII
Pope John XXIII’s Encyclical Letter Mater et magistra, which was signed on May 15, 1961 and promulgated on July 15, 1961, took its title from its first sentence, which calls the Catholic Church the “Mother and Teacher of all nations” (Mater et magistra §1). But when Buckley acknowledged it in a July 29th National Review editorial, he made it clear that he was an unwilling student.
Buckley professed perplexity at John XXIII’s priorities in writing the encyclical, claiming “it must strike many as a venture in triviality coming at this particular time in history.” He complained that the pope made “scant mention” of the communist threat and took “insufficient notice” of “the extraordinary material well-being that such free economic systems as Japan’s, West Germany’s, and [America’s] own” were producing.
Between the lines, however, it was clear that Buckley was more disturbed by what the encyclical included than by what it omitted. Tellingly, he likened it to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, suggesting that, like the Syllabus, John’s encyclical might in future “become the source of embarrassed explanations.” Indeed, Buckley could well have imagined that the Pope wrote the encyclical with a copy of National Review before him, for parts of it read like a syllabus of American libertarian-conservative errors.
Against National Review’s sneering attitude towards the United Nations, John praised the UN’s International Labor Organization as well as its Food and Agriculture Organization. Against National Review’s insistence that unbridled free-market economic policies were essential to the survival of Christendom, John wrote that Christendom was morally bound to order itself around the “complete synthesis of social principles” in Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (MM §15). And against National Review’s placing the right of private property above more fundamental human rights, such as the right of African-Americans to be served in restaurants, John called private property “a right which must be exercised not only for one’s own personal benefit but also for the benefit of others” (MM §19).
For those reasons and many more, Buckley and his fellow National Review editors wanted their readers to know that they had no use for the encyclical, despite the widespread acclaim it was receiving from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders the world over. The magazine’s following issue, with the cover date of August 12, carried the unsigned quip, “Going the rounds in Catholic conservative circles: ‘Mater si, Magistra no.’ ”
Buckley proved to be unprepared for the level of outrage that his magazine’s ridicule of the pope’s encyclical, and especially its play on the title, provoked in the Catholic press. Particularly distressing to him was the response from America, which accused National Review of slandering Catholic conservatives by projecting upon them its own disloyalty. He hit back with “The Strange Behavior of America,” in which he complained that the Jesuit magazine’s editors had committed a “disrespectful” misconstrual of a mere “flippancy.”
Despite Buckley’s attempt to excuse the magazine’s comments, however, National Review’s Catholic contributors’ public dissent from the Church’s social teaching went well beyond flippant remarks. In the very same issue that stated, “Mater si, Magistra no,” the magazine featured an essay by Buckley’s brother-in-law, contributing editor L. Brent Bozell Jr., on “The Strange Drift of Liberal Catholicism.” (“Strange” was one of National Review’s favored euphemisms for “un-American.”)
Although the article purported to critique “the kind of thing that [was] preached under Catholic auspices” in America and Commonweal, Bozell’s true target was those who sought to place moral conditions upon the fight against communism. He mocked what he called “the familiar theme […] that the West must, forthwith, cleanse itself of certain internal contaminations, e.g., racial inequality; otherwise, it not only cannot, but does not deserve to win.”
Bozell may have had in mind a widely circulated essay that William Faulkner wrote for United Press in September 1955 after the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till in which the Southern novelist wrote, “If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” He also may have seen news reports about the many speeches Father Twomey had given where he repeated Faulkner’s warning, including his addresses that very summer to students attending the touring Summer School of Catholic Action.
The “key ingredient” of the “familiar theme” sounded by liberal Catholics, Bozell wrote, was “an apocalyptic sense of urgency.” “Apocalyptic” was another of National Review’s terms of art. Its writers used the word in much the same way they used Erich Voegelin’s critique of modern-day “gnosticism”: to dismiss efforts to change society in ways they deemed unacceptable.
Bozell proceeded to provide examples of such alleged apocalypticism: “On Southern schools: they must be opened to Negroes now. On segregation generally: nothing must stand in the way of immediate and complete abolition of racial barriers. Any compromise is a compromise with evil. Any delay of full success till tomorrow is a denial, today, of social justice.” Never mind that seven years had passed since the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education. To Bozell, integrationists were naïve postmillennialists seeking to immanentize the eschaton.
It was “materialist,” that is, unspiritual and thus un-Christian, to argue that “we must address ourselves to the elimination of human misery throughout the world with the same zeal and single-mindedness that the communists lay claim to,” Bozell wrote.
“The truth, of course, […] is that the stakes are much higher,” Bozell continued. “Yes, God is involved in the Cold War; but more to the point: God’s civilization is involved. The West makes this claim over against the rest of the world: that it has been vouchsafed the truth about the nature of man and his relationship to the universe, and has been commissioned to construct and preserve an earthly city based on this truth” (emphasis in original).
Although Bozell made no mention of Mater et magistra, his logic—positing the “apocalyptic” proponents of integration against Westerners engaged in a (truly apocalyptic) battle to preserve “God’s civilization”—contrasted sharply with that of John XXIII’s encyclical.
To Bozell, individual human rights were secondary to the rights of the divinely ordained Christian state. But to John XXIII, who sought to transmit anew the teachings of Leo XIII and Pius XI, Catholic social teaching “[rested] on one basic principle: individual human beings are the foundation, the cause, and the end of every social institution (MM §219, §220).” That was why John could write that “true Christians cannot help feeling obliged to improve their own temporal institutions and environment [and] do all they can to prevent these institutions from doing violence to human dignity.” Although he would not explicitly condemn racial discrimination until 1963’s Pacem in terris, with Mater et magistra he gave every indication that it was the integrationists, and not those attacking their zeal, who were the true representatives of the kingdom of God.
Twomey: “Communism Is on the Conscience of the West”
National Review’s mockery of the pope and “Liberal Catholics” weighed upon Father Twomey as he prepared to address the Christian Family Movement’s national convention at the University of Notre Dame on August 26, 1961, on “Communism and Catholic Social Responsibility.”
Twomey had been speaking on the topic since the late 1940s, arguing that Catholics seeking to fight communism abroad should begin by pursuing social justice at home. A key text he employed to make his point was Quadragesimo anno §62: “Unless utmost efforts are made without delay to put [Christian social principles] into effect, let no one persuade himself that public order, peace, and the tranquility of human society can be effectively defended against agitators of revolution.” In speaking before the CFM’s members, who sought to integrate their faith with their social and civic life, he could be confident of a receptive audience.
But if his topic was familiar, Twomey approached it with renewed intensity. He knew that, despite the CFM’s progressive leanings, its nearly all-white membership endured the same intra-Catholic disputes as the rest of the US Church on questions of civil rights and how best to combat communism. The entire country, in fact, was at an inflection point on those issues. Membership in the segregationist John Birch Society was at or near its height, white mobs were attacking Freedom Riders, and, in the midst of the trial of Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann, American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell was teaming up with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad to denounce Jews.
In his address at the convention, Father Twomey appealed to his audience’s desire to know how, in fighting communism, they could “most effectively contribute to the final victory of peace with justice and charity in the struggle in which all of us have an equal stake.”
To answer that question, Twomey told his audience of about seven hundred married couples and three hundred priests, “In the first place, we must recognize communism for what it is.” He observed that many people put their energy into “[attacking] communism for what it is not”: “By directing their energies at mistaken targets, they not only miss the real target, but oftentimes utterly confuse themselves and others as to what the real target is.”
In case there was any doubt as to whom he meant, Twomey went off-script to cite the John Birch Society as a group that “violated not only the principles of Americanism but the principles, more importantly, of Christianity.” It took courage for a Catholic priest to say such a thing at a time when the Catholic hierarchy’s only public comment on the Birchers was Richard Cardinal Cushing’s fulsome praise of the society’s founder. When Twomey offered similar remarks in a homily the previous May, he made national headlines.
Although Twomey’s prepared text did not name names, not only Birchers but also National Review editors would have recognized their own objectives among those of the anti-communists he criticized—particularly when he called out those who insisted “the segregation issue be handled as a state rather than as a federal problem.”
After listing the policy goals common to the John Birch Society and their allies, Twomey said, “If by some unforeseen tragedy, any or all of these goals could be attained, it is difficult to conceive how more devastatingly the cause of communism could be served.” Although such groups were sincere in opposing communism, they were “tragically misguided” in their means, Twomey added: “For communism is an effect and not a cause. It is rushing in to fill the voids created in men’s material as well as spiritual nature by our failures—the failures, namely, of Western man to fulfill his commitment to the Judeo-Christian philosophy of human living.”
Of all the things Father Twomey said in his public talks, his calling the West to account for its sins against human dignity was most offensive for listeners accustomed to conservative talking points. By his lights, the Western civilization that National Review deemed unimpeachable was guilty of “gross violations of justice and charity here and abroad,” as he said to the audience at Notre Dame.
“It is these violations,” Twomey added, “which give deceptive plausibility to the psuedo-messianic appeal of communism to hundreds of millions of underfed, underhoused and underclothed victims of Western white man’s arrogant belief that his is the anointed race to be served by all lesser men.”
The language was not new for Twomey; he had made similar comments at least as far back as 1956. Nonetheless, had he been consciously seeking to undo Bozell’s boast that the West was “God’s civilization,” he could not have been more direct.
But Twomey wasn’t finished. Recommending to his audience Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s 1948 book, Communism and the Conscience of the West, he noted that the title was accurate: “Communism is on the conscience of the West. […] We are responsible for communism! And we will not rid ourselves of the guilt by shouting, however long and loud, for communism to go to hell. Nor will we solve our problems by joining anti-Communist organizations whose ends and the means employed to reach these ends are often at variance with the clear teachings of the Church.”
The only way for Catholics to clear their conscience, Twomey said, was by receiving fully John XXIII’s message in Mater et magistra: “We must reaffirm most strongly that this Catholic social doctrine is an integral part of the Christian conception of life” (MM §222).
Twomey spent the remainder of his address calling out the political positions of libertarian “compartmentalized Catholics,” much as he had done in the Blueprint for years, demonstrating how each position was refuted by the social teachings of the popes. William F. Buckley Jr. was not present to hear the Jesuit’s remarks. But in time they would reach him, and when they did, he would make his feelings felt.
Buckley Strikes Back: “Moral Sex Appeal” Is Useless against Communism
For a time, after America expressed outrage over National Review’s dismissal of Mater et magistra, Buckley was fearful that the heresy charges might stick. (He would later claim, without evidence, that the Jesuit magazine’s editors had tried to get him excommunicated.) Intent upon defending himself, he wrote a lengthy open letter to America, which he copied to other editors of Catholic magazines that had criticized him. When none of those publications chose to run it, he published it himself. But he continued to wait for an opportunity to defend himself in a Catholic forum, while monitoring articles by Catholics countering his stance on John XXIII’s encyclical. Apart from America’s commentary, the article that appears to have disturbed him the most was the published version of Twomey’s address at the Christian Family Movement convention. It appeared in the October edition of the movement’s official magazine, Act, edited by prominent Catholic layman Donald J. Thorman.
A few weeks after Twomey’s article ran, Buckley was reading another magazine helmed by Thorman, Ave Maria, when he was intrigued to see the editor offer an olive branch to conservative culture warriors.
“The fact does remain that Catholic conservatives and liberals are often conducting a sometimes unhealthy, often unchristian and totally unnecessary internecine feud,” Thorman wrote. He proposed that “members of both camps” seek to “work out Christian ground rules for debate and to decide on a basic, minimal program for a united fight against communism and for the promotion of justice and charity in our society.”
Buckley saw his chance. He wrote to Thorman, ostensibly seeking to take him up on the offer: could he respond in the form of an essay to be published in Ave Maria? Thorman was pleased to assent. But when the National Review editor submitted his essay, Thorman was aghast to discover that Buckley devoted much of it to antagonizing Father Louis J. Twomey, S.J., for his address to the CFM gathering.
In “Conservatives and Anti-Communism” (later anthologized as “Catholic Liberals, Catholic Conservatives, and the Requirements of Unity”), published in Ave Maria’s issue of April 7, 1962, Buckley ridiculed Twomey’s assertion that “we are responsible for communism.” To Buckley, the idea that “the Communists have advanced […] because of ‘our supreme unconcern with gross violations of justice and charity here and abroad’ ” was “nonsensical.” He framed his argument in bluntly utilitarian terms: “The distinction is not between ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ acts in relation to fighting communism, but between relevant and irrelevant means of fighting communism.”
To drive home his point that implementing principles of Catholic social teaching would be totally ineffectual against the spread of communism, Buckley indulged in a reductio ad absurdum that surely qualifies as one of the more bizarre statements in his voluminous canon: “The communists could not care less whether there is segregation in the South. […] If every white Southerner were to miscegenate tomorrow, the Communist Party would not be set back by five minutes.”
Rhetorical flourishes aside, the greatest contrast that Buckley drew between his position and that of the “Liberal” as represented by Father Twomey (who himself never identified as a liberal, conservative, or anything other than a Catholic priest) was in the area of methodology. Whereas Twomey preached that persons and nations should treat one another with justice and charity, Buckley insisted, like an anachronistic Bizarro World conflation of Brent Bozell with Malcolm X, that the Western world defeat communism by almost any means necessary.
“In our time, and in respect of world forces which are insurgent against civilization itself, it is I think desperately clear that the West must survive, or we shall have entered the longest and bitterest night in human history,” Buckley wrote. “To effect that survival, I am prepared to do almost anything. And as a Catholic conservative, I wish to seek out that program which is relevant to diminishing communist power, not necessarily that program which has the highest moral sex appeal.”
When Buckley’s article appeared, Thorman wrote Father Twomey inviting him to reply. The Jesuit, after consulting with Loyola New Orleans President Andrew C. Smith, S.J. (who had his own experience standing against segregationists), politely declined, unwilling to find himself bogged down in “an unending series of articles and counter-articles.”
In his way, however, Father Louis J. Twomey, S.J., did have the last word against William F. Buckley Jr.—and not only because Buckley eventually repented of his racist and segregationist views. Twomey had the last word through continuing, until his final illness in 1969, to call Catholic laity, clergy, and institutions to end racial discrimination and “build a society in which the dignity of every man is acknowledged, respected, and protected.”
