Not a Conservative But a Catholic

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 5:25 pm by David Mills

Not a Conservative But a Catholic 2014-06-28T17:25:36-04:00 David Mills

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I don’t think this is quite right: Brent Bozell, writes Alvino-Mario Fantini in an American Conservative review of Daniel Kelly’s Living on Fire,

was no marginal figure in the American conservative movement. He was — along with Russell Kirk, Frank S. Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham — a “founding father,” as his one-time National Review colleague Neal Freeman writes in the foreword, and one of conservatism’s most talented exponents.

I’m reading the book to review it for Modern Age and would commend this very good review, with one qualification. A founding father of the modern conservative moment, yes, but not at the end of his life a conservative in the sense his inclusion in that list suggests.

The significant thing about Bozell’s life, it seems to me, is that he shifted from a movement or party conservative — a man who naturally fits on a list with Burnham and Meyer —to a Catholic. The authority to which he submitted and the way he looked at the world changed. The two overlap a great deal, of course, but they are not the same thing.

In this, I think, he anticipated a movement we see now more and more, of people who had identified themselves as conservatives and registered as Republicans who, as that movement becomes more libertarian and makes more evident its disregard for the cultural and social issues they care about, are dropping that identification in favor of simply calling themselves Catholic and deferring explicitly to Catholic Social Teaching, which has a more affirmative view of government than the American right.

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