BUCKLEY'S SECRET GARDEN

By John Elson

That polysyllabilistic panjandrum of the American right, William F. Buckley Jr., is even more devoted to his Roman Catholic faith than to his conservative political principles. Yet writing about that faith has not been easy for him. In 1992 he started but soon abandoned a book with the working title Why I Am a Catholic. Now Buckley has tried again--and his discomfort in writing about something so personal as religious belief is still apparent.

Nearer, My God (Doubleday; 313 pages; $24.95) is less a formal "autobiography of faith," as the subtitle has it, than a pastiche: part memoir, part commentary on religious issues past and present. No theologian by his own admission, Buckley has relied on others to do that heavy hitting. He submitted questions about the ordination of women, for example, to a "forum" of four Catholic converts, two of them priests, and prints their answers at length. On a more theoretical problem--how hell and eternal punishment are compatible with God's mercy--he cribs copiously from Difficulties (1934), an exchange of letters between Sir Arnold Lunn and Father Ronald Knox. Lunn, who invented skiing's slalom, was then an agnostic--he later converted--and Knox a famous Catholic apologist. Most readers will have to take on faith Buckley's assertion that this out-of-print tome has not been fatally "anachronized."

As Buckley sees it, four main issues in the church today "strain reason as well as faith": clerical celibacy, women priests, contraception, and the indissolubility of marriage. He accepts Rome's position on all four, although he is troubled by the reasoning behind the ban on birth control, hopes for a tad more flexibility on remarriage after divorce, and sees no doctrinal barrier to the eventuality of a married priesthood (which exists in the church's Eastern rite).

Not surprisingly, the conservative Buckley has a lingering nostalgia for the Latin liturgy of old. Dripping scorn, he describes a nuptial Mass celebrated "according to the current cant, with everybody popping up and kneeling down." To Buckley, the jazzed-up ritual with its implicit boosterism ("Who do we appreciate--Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!") is "awful." In fairness, though, he could have mentioned some of the Tridentine excrescences that led to the Second Vatican Council's reforms: hymns of stunning vapidity and priests muttering their way through Low Mass with the graceless speed of tobacco auctioneers.

What animates Nearer are Buckley's personal chapters: his recollection of a year or so at a Jesuit boarding school in England, an awed visit to Lourdes, and a moving account of his nephew Michael Bozell's ordination as a Benedictine priest in France. In a charming tribute to onetime Punch editor Malcolm Muggeridge, he recounts, with dry hilarity, a private audience with the Pope at which a badly briefed John Paul II seemed utterly baffled as to who his guests were. (Buckley nonetheless managed to inform the Pope--and us--that he too has a private chapel at home.)

Midway through Nearer, Buckley writes that if Christ provably did not rise from death, "I would myself instantly enlist in the Judaic faith." Despite that piquant confession, he also admits, "I shrink from any religious communication that could possibly be thought intrusive." Becoming in a person, such diffidence is severely damaging to an apologia. Nearer, My God, accordingly, provides an exterior view of its author's spiritual life but little of the interior. Buckley quotes one member of his learned forum, the late Russell Kirk, as writing, "I do not let anyone into my secret garden." The same might be said of William F. Buckley.

--By John Elson