The "notes found in the desk of a New York advertising executive" are thankful this person never carried out his threat to buy a block of seats at Yankee Stadium. Imagine a thousand people flashing cards spelling "Mater Si-Magistra No" during Mass [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 29].
Ever-present on television during the 1960 and was a prominent opponent of the liturgical changes wrought by Vatican II. He was even fonder of salting his conversation with Latin phrases than a lawyer, and no doubt he was deeply conscious that his knowledge of that language marked him as a Superior Person, notes Bowen.
"I thought that Buckley had a reasonable point when he argued that the Church should have allowed people who still wanted the Latin liturgy to have access to it, but the Vatican couldn't stop at merely permitting worship in the vernacular -- it had to command it," notes Bowen. "As of a certain Sunday, worship in the vernacular of each community was commanded, and worship in Latin was forbidden thenceforth and forever more. The sort of ham-handed policy that typified the Papacy operating in Imperial Mode, as its Roman heritage often prompted it to do. The Church's intransigence regarding the Latin liturgy led to a well-publicized schism in Europe. This attracted many conservatives, but Buckley was not involved with it.
"What John was referring to here, however, was another legacy of Vatican II that seems to be almost forgotten nowadays: its endorsement of a progressive approach to politics, favoring the rights of laborers and the freedom of colonized peoples. This was spelled out in the encyclical Mater et Magistra where the Church described itself as 'mother and teacher' of its members. So Buckley would, in the imaginary scene, have been agitating against its right to teach him anything about politics (unless the message was deeply conservative, of course). '¡Cuba sí, Yanqui no!' was a chant we were all familiar with at that time from the nightly news.
"The imaginary executive in the text says that Buckley would have carried out his threat if the papal visitor had been John XXIII, who called the Second Vatican Council and was reasonably held responsible for its liberating influence. Paul VI, his successor who was the first Pope to visit the US, is best known for reining in the tendencies Good Pope John had let loose. The last couple of sentences in the paragraph suggest that the remote and dignified Paul was closer to Madison Avenue's image of a Pope than his earthy and relaxed predecessor."
