Summoned to Greatness

William F. Buckley Jr. had published forty-five books by the time his only volume about Catholicism, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, appeared in 1997. Buckley admits in the Introduction that the work, which had been in partial draft form for five years, was nothing new. The arguments, he writes, were “imperfectly done” and used frequently by others, while his lack of qualifications as a theologian or Church historian along with his argumentative tone might leave the reader wanting a version more gratifying. “I am not,” Buckley explains, “trained in the devotional mode, nor disposed to it.”