The Catholic William F. Buckley Jr.

Roger Kimball, First Things

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

Bill Buckley (1925-2008), the conservative icon, was born 100 years ago yesterday. For him, the most depressing innovation in the Church was one that will be familiar to anyone who has been exposed to the Catholic liturgy in its contemporary, which is to say in its pop-populist manifestation, which means, of course, the chilling ten-word enjoinment: “Let us all give each other a sign of peace.” That oleaginous hebdomadal injunction was possibly even more distasteful to Bill than another common offender, “Why don’t we skip drinks and go directly into dinner?” At the center of Bill’s conservatism was his Catholicism. Our secular age is unfriendly to Catholics, to religion generally, but the irony is that secularists are often less jubilantly worldly than their Jewish and Christian compatriots.