When William F. Buckley founded National Review he had the help of his brother-in-law and Yale classmate, L. Brent Bozell. At school Bozell was as good a student and, remarkably, a better debater than Buckley. The two shared a conservative approach to 1950s politics: support for free markets, opposition to the welfare state, suspicion of civil rights and anti-communism strong enough to make them able defenders of Senator Joseph McCarthy. And they were Catholics, Buckley by birth, Bozell by conversion and very strong convictions. They chafed under Yale's soft liberalism. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, published as he left the University, made him famous. Almost no one suspected that it was the first step in a long process of building a “religious right” that would help remake the maps of American culture and politics. Instead, it seemed at the time less a religious than a political event, setting the stage for National Review's work of bringing intellectual weight to American conservatism, long brushed aside as nothing more than cranky resistance to New Deal reforms.

As Catholics, both Buckley and Bozell were unhappy with the changes associated with Pope John XXIII and the second Vatican Council (1962–1965). When the Pope affirmed the post-war democratization of Catholic social teaching in the encyclical “Mater et Magistra” in 1961, National Review offered a lay declaration of independence caught in the widely noted quip “Mater, Si, Magistra, Non.” Bozell and a few others thought Catholic questions were of central importance, but Buckley's ambitions lay elsewhere. Religious perspectives were welcome, and Catholic concerns were honored, but they were sidelines to what most conservatives regarded as more important questions of the political economy and national security. Buckley remained a staunchly orthodox Catholic and he shared his contributors' nostalgia for Catholic traditions but he wanted to change the country, not the church.

So in 1966, Bozell, working with philosopher Frederick Wilhelmsen, left National Review and launched Triumph, a journal aimed at carrying out the lay Catholic's responsibility to bring the faith into public life. Historian Richard Popowski makes clear that these were truly “radical” Catholics, as radical in their way as their better known contemporaries of the “new Catholic left” like Daniel and Philip Berrigan. They were determined to translate orthodox doctrine, the truth, into missionary work designed to make everyone and everything Catholic. They saw this as a cultural project—measuring issues by Catholic teaching and arguing the Catholic case. By that standard America was becoming a truly barbarous country, even a “culture of death” to use a phrase later common among Catholic conservatives. And it was political work: they advocated policies based on the truths of faith made known through revelation, deepened by human reason, backed by the divinely endowed authority of the Catholic hierarchy. America's commitment to unlimited liberty needed to be replaced by “ordered liberty”; God, not the people, should be sovereign. On every issue, from abortion to nuclear weapons, there was a Catholic position which deserved adoption by citizens and the state, not simply because they were Catholic but because they were true.

Other religious conservatives then and now claimed that all this could be done within American practices of religious liberty and the separation of church and state. In 1965 the Vatican Council reversed long standing church teaching and affirmed religious liberty, but Bozell and his colleagues would have none of that. Whatever compromises the church might make with modern practices, Catholicism should be the faith of the people and it should be supported by the laws of the state. Other religions should be restricted from public expression. When critics said this was similar to the situation in Franco's Spain, the editors agreed. Both Bozell and Williamson had lived in Spain, they admired the Carlists, a Catholic royalist movement, and they encouraged formation of an action arm, “Sons of Thunder,” modeled on the Carlists, complete with red berets.

Historians are interested in the role of Catholics in American life in the 1960s. So far reform and social activism have drawn attention, but there was a conservative Catholicism, originating in the 1950s, pushed to the margins in the sixties, but eventually to become more influential after John Paul II became Pope in 1978. There were many forms of conservative American Catholicism; Triumph was only a small part of the mix. But, on the radical edge, with a circulation that topped out at 28,000, Triumph and its editors carried on a sharp critique of mainstream liberalism. They demonstrated the counter-cultural capabilities of Catholic faith and organization, a stance that could be more effective in less radical hands. They had a vision of an integral Catholic society and culture, a vision they thought worthy of complete commitment. They were prepared to accept marginalization for now in full confidence that someday, in God's good time, the truth would win out.

This monograph is enriched by historian Patrick Allitt's generous sharing of his lively interviews with some surprisingly serene veterans of the Triumph project. The story is well told as Popowski ably explores the ideological sidelines of Triumph's “radical counter-cultural stance.” He honestly admits that, while he disagrees with some of its ideas, he found Triumph “refreshing,” especially when compared to the “apologizing, defensive, feckless, indifferentist lay world of the Roman Catholic Church in America” (xxii).

Popowski is a good scholar whose sympathy for his subject does not render his work uncritical. But it is a bit incomplete. We would like to know more about how Buckley regarded his brother-in-law's work, and why some impressive intellectuals like historian Stephen Tonsor dropped their connections. Perhaps as a next project Propowski might try to locate the episode in some wider contexts, such as the varieties of Catholic integralism well known in Europe, with offshoots in Latin America and Quebec. Even more interesting would be American Christianity's bewildering array of gospels soft and strong. Catholic subcultures kept evangelical personalism and innovation at bay, but only for awhile. The American combination of religious liberty and ever multiplying pluralisms allows, even encourages creative religious initiatives. The usual response invites dialogue, aimed at mutual understanding. For Bozell and his friends that kind of bemused toleration was unacceptable. How people like this, Christians of deep faith, Catholics with their commitment to a strong church, negotiate their way through modern religious pluralism is what makes American religious history so remarkably interesting. In studying recent American religious history the origin and development of conservative, counter-cultural Catholicism deserves more attention. This book marks a good start.