Over at GetReligion, Mark Stricherz asserts that "[William F.]
Buckley was not a conservative Catholic, in the religious,
doctrinal sense of the term." Rather, he was a "idiosyncratic
Catholic" because he "favored decriminalizing drugs and wrote for
Playboy" among other sins crying out to
heaven for vengeance. Also, "He called himself a Catholic and a
libertarian. Go figure."
Oh please. Buckley was a Latin Mass-attending, abortion
opposing, Vatican II-doubting Catholic. Yes, he opposed some
assertions about the Church's social teachings, because he thought
Catholicism and socialism were not synonyms.
And, yes, Buckley wasn't overly fond of "going there" when it
came to talking about some types of birth control, because he
understood, correctly, that the Supreme Court had seized on the
Catholic-Protestant divide over contraceptives in the first place
to create an unlimited warrant for legal
abortion.
topics:
Religion, Catholicism, Abortion, Supreme Court, Socialism
