Buckley at 100: Catholicism, Communism, and Conservatism, by Clark S. Judge

By Clark S. Judge, The American Spectator, November 21, 2025

A warrior for morality, democracy, and freedom.

Editor’s Note: This speech was originally delivered by the author at “The Catholic Bill Buckley Conference,” hosted by the Portsmith Institute at Portsmith Abbey School on June 6, 2009.

At this conference, we have talked about Bill Buckley as a man of faith, a man of letters, a man of creativity.  That creativity included founding National Review magazine, becoming the central figure in a new kind of debate television with Firing Line, authoring thousands of columns and articles, dozens of books, founding the New York Conservative Party and the American conservative movement.

But let me suggest that his greatest creative act — at least his greatest act of creative intellect — was the introduction of a Catholic sensibility into the main currents of American political thought.

Yes, Catholics had been major players in American politics since the 1840s, as the Irish and later the Italians, still later other Catholic ethnic groups, transformed the new nation’s urban governance. But these Catholics acted as what academics like to call practitioners.

Catholic political thinking was largely on the left and not at all consequential, even in the development of America’s major left-leaning political movements. The Progressives of the early 20th Century were mainly Protestants and of the managerial mindset that gripped so many Protestant reformers of the time. The authors of the New Deal were also primarily Protestant — heirs of the Progressives, with large measures of British and German socialism thrown in. Left-oriented Catholics were tagalongs. …

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