Mustard seeds: a conservative becomes a Catholic

National Review, June 5, 1987 by Kevin Lynch

Mustard Seeds: A Conservative Becomes a Catholic

by L. Brent Bozell (TrinityCommunications, 360 pp., $22.95 hard-cover; $12.95 paper)

The kingdom of God is like a grain ofmustard seed which, when sown upon the earth, is the smallest of all the seeds upon the earth; yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than any herb, and puts out great branches, so that the birds of the air can dwell beneath its shade.

LONGTIME READERS OF NATIONAL REVIEWwill remember Brent Bozell-- one of the magazine's senior editors in the early days, alongside such legendary figures as Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Whittaker Chambers. But Bozell, unlike the others, never made it into the conservative Hall of Fame. More than twenty years ago, he decided to play in a different league. Mustard Seeds explains where he was all those years.

In the book's opening chapter, writtenin 1986, Bozell looks back to the Sixties. Anybody in his position could be excused a little self-congratulation: During that period, in addition to his role at NR, he wrote a telling critique of judicial supremacy (The Warren Revolution) and played a pivotal part in the campaign to nominate Barry Gold-water (he ghost-wrote a book every conservative over forty can find somewhere on his bookshelf: The Conscience of a Conservative). But the Bozell of today is close to dismissive about his accomplishments back then. "What I had done . . . was to contribute certain writings, talks, agitations, and political campaigns to the cause of secular conservatism, a cause that I then imagined had a close connection with Catholicism. I began to see difficulties with this supposed connection while living in Spain in the early Sixties . . .'

It was in Spain that Bozell wrotea piece for NATIONAL REVIEW called "Freedom or Virtue?' This article, which is included in Mustard Seeds, is a vigorous defense of traditional conservatism against libertarianism, with its belief that freedom is the first principle of politics, virtue a distant second. Bozell believes libertarians have it exactly backward.

Freedom, instead of being the highestpolitical good, can take man on the path to disaster. That, he writes, is why man needs all the help he can get, in the form of supernatural grace as well as the natural grace that "springs forth from man's constructs: his institutions, his customs, his laws-- the ones that have been inspired by his better angel and that remain in time to give nourishment to all the human race.'

"Freedom or Virtue?' may havebeen written to defend traditionalist conservatism against the libertarian insurgency, but the article had another effect. It prompted Bozell to doubt whether any variety of secular conservatism could bring about what he was striving to encourage: a second Christian epoch. Not too long after, the lapsed conservative parted company with his colleagues at NATIONAL REVIEW; in 1966, at the age of forty, he founded a small "traditionalist Catholic' magazine called Triumph.

Though he had converted to Catholicismtwenty years earlier, Bozell believes that he didn't become a Catholic in a real sense, didn't begin to "do something with my life,' until Triumph. By most standards, certainly those of the harketplace, the magazine never lived up to its name. It lasted not quite ten years--its final issue appeared in January 1976--and for most of its existence never had more than twenty thousand subscribers.

But after reading Mustard Seeds,more than half of which consists of Bozell pieces that appeared first in Triumph, it seems to me indeed a triumph --if not a miracle--that a magazine so defiantly out of step with its times survived as long as it did.

Virtually everything Bozell wrote forthe magazine is included in Mustard Seeds. This section begins with an editorial, written in December 1966, praising Pope Paul VI for gently but firmly restating the Church's opposition to contraception:

The world deems the Church mad to havehitched its whole moral authority to this wretched piece of intransigence. Millions of Catholics and near Catholics and apostate Catholics over the years have felt the same way: If only the Church would give ground on this one, the rest would be easy to take. But this wretched piece of intransignece is the key to the mighty mystery of sex, which unlocks the door to the even more awesome mystery of life, which in turns reveals the reality of the supernatural. If the Church does not own this key, it does not own any keys at all. Even with the benefit of twenty years' hindsight, the pro-life position could not be stated more luminously. Whether he was writing about contraception, Vietnam, the Constitution, or the abortion movement, the editor of Triumph always got to the heart of the matter.

The disillusionment that began with"Freedom or Virtue?' was now complete. Bozell had no faith in the American way--be it liberal or conservative --because, he believed, there was no place for Christ in the American way. And while there is no prohibition against the private practice of religion in this country, faith must have a visible expression if it is to survive. "Even the man who can still cling to God in some interior fashion will admit that he does so not in joy but in anguish, in struggle against a world that conspires at every turn to dry up his spiritual juices.'