He was overcompensating for his Catholicism by being more WASP than thou. He was a member of the Knights of Malta.
“The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, in 1951 was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that “it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition.” Henry Sloane Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley’s book of “being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view” and stated that Buckley “should have attended Fordham or some similar institution.”[32]”
