Michael Davies full video on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. "The Fight over Catholic Orthodoxy

They finally put this up online and it is well worth your time

Buckley and Malachi Martin

I am happy to write that the Firing Line episode ""The Mission of the Pope" is finally available in the Amazon video library.

I had wrote awhile back on the Buckley, Michael Davies video that Malachi had been a guest on Mr. Buckley's show beforehand, but it was not up.  Here is the short clip of the hour long exchange:



It's an interesting episode and worth watching.  You can watch this and other Catholic related Firing Line shows like "The Fight Over Catholic Orthodoxy" with Michael Davies (yes that Michael Davies) and "The Jesus Movement"for free by trying an Amazon Prime membership.

Ten Days of Davies: Michael gets into a debate on William Buckley's Firing Line

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I think I have posted a link on this in the past but now I will provide additional things for you to chew on.

The Program was Firing Line, with host William F. Buckley (Founder of the National Review).
Mr. Buckley was a practicing Catholic until he died and one of the shows he invited Mr. Davies, Fr. Malachi Martin and Fr. Joseph Champlin, who worked for the USCCB at the time as a liturgical adviser, to discuss the struggle to maintain Catholic orthodoxy.  The debate was heated to say the least.  Fr. Martin was not a designated debater but an expert questioner brought in by Firing Line to propose questions more formal in nature.

Below I have posted a clip from the program on line as well as the transcript and a link to rent or buy the episode.  the following is an interesting part of the exchange:

Mr. Buckley: Well, lets pursue the question of whether there is a dilution implicit in the new form of the Mass over against the Tridentine Mass. As you know, the Protestants have been arguing very heatedly on the various revisions of the King James Bible with one segment insisting that there is a theological dilution. Do you believe that there is? 

 Fr. Champlin: Do you? 

 Mr. Buckley: In the new order? 

 Fr. Champlin: I don’t think so. Let’s go back to one of the earlier things that Mr. Davies mentioned about the dilution of the sacrifice notion and the priesthood and so on. When the new missal – the Vatican II document, or the new missal of Paul VI – came out, this was one of the criticisms. In the introduction to the ritual – or the introduction to the general instruction of the missal -  very clear notion of how the sacrifice of the Mass is present in the new order of Mass, how the priesthood is very clearly there, how the priesthood the layperson different in essence from the priesthood of the ordained person is still present there. The whole notion of the sense of the sacred is in fact present, and I think the kind of sense that he said at the beginning that the new Mass takes away from that – I don’t think it’s a dilution. I think it tries to bring that notion of the transcendent and then communitarian and bringing together; and the kind of abuses that he was talking about are abuses, but not the teaching of Vatican II.  I don’t see the new Mass as a dilution of what we had. 

 Mr. Bukley: Do you have a comment on that , Mr. Davies? 

 Mr. Davies: I certainly do.  As Father says, correctly, in the new missal there’s an introduction – there’s a thing probably that most people watching wouldn’t know called the “general instruction” to the new Roman missal. Well, when it came out --  First of all, you just had the new order of the Mass --  you didn’t have a complete missal with all the readings – you just had the new order of Mass which had this general instruction with all the articles explaining it. Some of theses articles, they were just totally protestant. For instance, they explained the nature of the Mass, Article 7 – they said it’s the coming together of the people under the presidency of a priest which is a  -- There’s nothing formally heretical in it, but its totally acceptable to Protestants. Article 48 said that during the Mass that the Last Supper was made present. That is heretical, actually. Well, when the missal which Father mentions – with this Forward, that came out in 1970, and the Forward he has mentioned – the premium, in Latin – as he said, it states every doctrine of the Council of Tent absolutely orthodox – ii in an orthodox manner – and says this is what the new Mass is intended to enshrine; but I think this Forward is the most damning indictment of the new Mass ever published – the fact that within a year of its publication, they had to put an introduction to it, saying, “Oh, yes, well, it really is Catholic after all.  It really is meant to show this.” It’s a far more demining indictment than anything traditionalists have written about it… “

Click here for the link to the full video and transcript

Buckley and the misfortune of being Ayn Rand

Its been a while since I wrote on Mr. William Buckley, but after Beck had some of the folks from the Ayn Rand center on his show to make him feel good about the positions he takes I thought it timely to look at libertarianism from the perspective of the founder of the once good National Review.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: Beware of Ayn Rand

I was an avid reader of the National Review for about 15 years in the 80s and 90s. For those of you not familar with this magazine, it was THE flagship conservative magazine for decades after its founding by William F. Buckley in 1955. In the editorial staff and content of National Review, Buckley did his best to hold together a very fractious conservative movement, made up of anti-Communist hawks, conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants, libertarians, and free-market business types.

But there were certain 'conservatives' who Buckley did not try to hold within his coalition. To the contrary, he saw certain groups on the Right as so radical and extreme in their ideological leanings as to be dangerous to true conservatism. Two of those groups were the John Birch Society and the devotees centered about Ayn Rand.

Reading through a biography of William F. Buckley that I picked up recently at the wonderful St. Francis Episcopal Church booksale, I found the following description of his encounter with the Randians. (This is particularly helpful, given the influence of Ayn Rand among today's conservative movement and Republican Party.)

[Whittaker] Chambers wrote irregularly for National Review, starting but not finishing many articles. His columns on foreign policy were mediocre. He was not so much interested in reiterating the threat of communism as in examining what he believed to be the spiritual crisis of the West. His most impressive articles were a critique of Ayn Rand's didactic novel Atlas Shrugged and a defense of Alger Hiss' right to travel. In both cases, he was trying to challenge the assumptions of his readers and fellow editors about the nature of conservatism.

Rand, a Russian émigré, had used her novels to proselytize for a philosophy of economic individualism that she called "objectivism," and she had assembled a devoted intellectual following. On purely economic issues, she differed little fromNational Review, but unlike National Review's editors, who tried to balance their economic individualism with a traditional conservatism, she made her economic views the basis of a psychology and politics that extolled selfishness and damned religion. Her movement's emblem was a gold brooch with a dollar sign, rather than a cross, dangling from it. (The first time she had met Buckley, she had not edeared herself to him by remarking, "You are too intelligent to believe in God!")

Chambers, like the other National Review editors, had come to the Right as a counterrevolutionary idealist. Like Schlamm and Burhnham he had no particular fondness for the rich. He saw economic freedom and capitalist individualism not as a path to wealth, but as the antithesis of Communist totalitarianism. Individualism was not good in itself, but only as a means to civic and religious virtue. Chambers condemned objectivism as a cousin of Marxism. "Randian man, like Marxian man, is made the center of a Godless world," Chambers wrote.

Rand and her followers were stung by Chambers' attack. Rand's young disciple, economist Alan Greenspan, who later became President Gerlad Ford's chief economist [and the Fed chair under Bush, Clinton, and Bush], wrote Buckley, "This man is beneath contempt and I would not honor his 'review' of Ayn Rand's magnificent masterpiece by even commenting on it." Rand herself complained aloud, "What would you expect from an ex-Communist writing in Buckley's Catholic magazine?" She never talked to Buckley again and refused to enter any room in which he was present.

But Buckley was not moved by their protests. For Buckley, Chambers' essay revealed a way to reconcile conservatism with the Catholic critique of laissez-faire capitalism. Chambers had not demonstrated that individualism was wrong, but only that it was wrong if taken as an end in itself. He applauded Chambers' attempt to "read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement." "Her exclusion from the conservative movement," he wrote later, "was, I am sure, in part the result of her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral."
My thoughts exactly. Wish you were still around, Mr. Buckley.

Another fun thing to think about was how he Euligized her upon her passing:

“Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn.”

h/t: http://clindquist-rudeawakening.blogspot.com/2012/06/william-f-buckley-jr-beware-of-ayn-rand.html

Buckley the Catholic

The late, GREAT, William Buckley who founded National Review was also a fervent Catholic. 

On marriage and divorce: “I see the Church as echoing the word of the Lord on marriage.”

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On contraception: “My own incomplete understanding of the natural law balks at the central affirmation of Humanae Vitae, even as I’d of course counsel dutiful compliance with it.”

On fidelity in general: “Which side to observe? But the answer, for a Catholic, has got to be: the position taken by the Pope, as spokesman for the magisterium.”

On a special note, Mr. Buckley was also a traditionalist and even invited the late Michael Davies onto his Firing Line show to discuss Catholic orthodoxy with a USCCB representative priest from New York once.  Its available for purchase or rent here.  I think its $5 to buy and $1 to rent, it was good either way and shows how tense things were at the beginning of Blessed JPII’s pontificate

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+Pray for Journalists and Teachers alike+

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