America's editors (l) and William F. Buckley (r) in undated photos. Credit: Composite/Wikimedia Commons.

“Lines spoken to the Pope just shouldn’t sound like lines pitched at the editors of The New York Post.” 

You’d be forgiven if you thought those words were spoken by someone objecting to the way President Donald Trump treated Pope Leo XIV in his comments last week on social media. As Terence Sweeney pointed out last week in America, they get to the heart of a tension in American politics vis-à-vis Catholicism. 

But the quote isn’t from last week. It’s from America in 1961, part of a brief tête-à-tête with National Review editor and political conservative nonpareil William F. Buckley. And yet its subject matter is eerily proleptic in light of Mr. Trump’s war of words against the pope and the latter’s assertion of church teaching on just war.

In 1961, Buckley—then one of the most prominent Catholics in the United States at the tender age of 36—and his fellow editors had responded negatively in the pages of National Review to “Mater et Magistra,” the encyclical of Pope John XXIII released on the 70th anniversary of the release of “Rerum Novarum,” the famous social encyclical penned by—you guessed it—the last Pope Leo. The encyclical’s engagement with social and economic justice and its implied argument for greater governmental regulation of markets struck Buckley and his confreres as ill-advised, to say the least.

In an unsigned editorial in the June 29, 1961, issue of National Review, they wrote: 

It may, in the years to come, be considered central to the social teachings of the Catholic Church; or, like Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, it may become the source of embarrassed explanations. Whatever its final effect, it must strike many as a venture in triviality, coming at this particular time in history.

It was surprising to many that such criticism would come from Buckley’s magazine, as he had been fond of criticizing John F. Kennedy for downplaying any political loyalty a Catholic had to Rome. As Sam Tanenhaus noted in a 2025 essay in Commonweal, Buckley had previously said: “Every Catholic is himself bound to regard with reverence papal generalizations, even those that deal directly with political and economic affairs, and is bound, where the Pope speaks formally in his role as pastor, to submit to his teaching authority in matters of faith and morals.”

Shortly after, an unsigned note in National Review played on a popular anti-Castro slogan of the time, “Cuba si! Castro no!” (and its anti-American version, “Cuba si! Yanqui no!”) with the following short quip: “Going the rounds in conservative Catholic circles: ‘Mater si, Magistra no!’” That is, “Mother yes! Teacher no!”

The editors of America quickly weighed in against Buckley, criticizing him in sharp tones both for National Review’s criticism of the encyclical and for his flippant comments on a papal document in his magazine. “It takes an appalling amount of self-assurance for a Catholic to brush off an encyclical,” stated an unsigned Current Comment in an issue of America shortly after. Further, “To some of us it has always been extremely difficult to tell just what Mr. Buckley’s conservatism was trying to conserve. It has always been easier to say what he was trying to destroy,” the editors noted before delivering the aforementioned jab about lines pitched to the New York Post.

“Mr. Buckley has a large and enthusiastic following,” they conceded. “Indeed, it’s hard not to like so competent a young man—deft word-handler, agile master of the debater’s point, teemingly talented editor, never-winded panelist that he is. We like him too, but with a difference. And we would be much fonder still of Mr. Buckley and of his program of ‘conservativism’ if he showed signs of comprehending an old, old conservative adage: Qui mange du Pape, en meurt.”

The author of the piece is identified in America’s archival records as editor in chief Thurston N. Davis, S.J. And the 15th-century French adage, loosely translated? “He who tries to eat the pope chokes on him.” 

The battle was joined, and letters and editorials were traded back and forth, with Buckley complaining in The New York Times that it was “impudent for America to catechize National Review for exercising in behalf of its readers its independent editorial judgment on a papal encyclical.” He then wrote a letter to America defending his position and accusing his Jesuit interlocutors of “calling into question the traditionally exercised right of Catholics generally, to analyze and discuss and weigh, in context of their abiding faith, the meaning of papal encyclicals.” 

“I am as a Christian journalist dismayed by your position,” Buckley wrote. “And as a fervent Catholic I am appalled by your methods.” 

When America’s editor in chief Thurston N. Davis, S.J., declined to run Buckley’s letter in America, Buckley ran it in National Review instead. He gave it billing on the cover as well: “Whatsa Mater, America?”

Tanenhaus, whose Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America was published in 2025, noted in his Commonweal essay last year that even members of Buckley’s family regretted the exchange. 

In September 1961, Buckley wrote Father Davis a letter that has survived in America’s archives, defending his general position but conceding he might have been more judicious in his choice of words. “I take no objection to your denouncing the flippancy as having been in imperfect taste,” he wrote. “I am quite prepared to subject myself to the criticism of my elders on such matters.” He also told Davis that the real author of the “Magistra no!” quip was not he, but a “Catholic scholar in Virginia.” It was in fact a former Jesuit who had left the order four years before and would later become famous, albeit not for political conservatism: Garry Wills.

When Pope John Paul II came to the United States in 1987, the editors of America asked a number of prominent American Catholics: “If you had 5 minutes alone with the pope, what would you say to him?” Among their number was Buckley, whose choice of topics might not surprise. He did, however, conclude with his own take on the events of a quarter-century previous:

My time is up, I fear, but I will sneak my phone number and address to your Secretary of State in the event you should want to hear more, out of earshot of the editors of America, who 25 years ago, I kid Your Holiness not, tried to get me excommunicated!

Well, it may have pleased William F. Buckley to think so. 

The long view of history, of course, tells us that politicians have been telling popes to butt out of their business—military, marital, monetary—since Nero got fired up about St. Peter 20 centuries ago. In the last century—though no one is quite sure when and where he said it—Joseph Stalin was often quoted as asking, re: the church’s interventions in politics, “how many divisions has the pope?”

More than a century before Stalin, another notorious European politician struck a more cautious tone: It is said that when Napoleon was negotiating a concordat between France and the papacy at the turn of the 19th century, he advised his envoy to “treat with His Holiness as if he had at his back one hundred thousand bayonets.” Why, when Napoleon seemed to hold all the cards? Because he knew, one would presume, that there are some resources more powerful than weapons.

One last note: Soon after the America/Buckley kerfuffle, a reader coined a quip witty enough to have come from Buckley himself. It was a letter to the editor sent to America, and it was only four words long:

 “Cancellation, si! Refund, si!”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Ars Prophetica,” by Timothy Adam Parker. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.