The Passing of Father Richard Neuhaus

I was one of the legions who received First Things with a rush of delightful expectation, eager to jump ASAP into his “Public Square” reflections. He was unfailingly knowledgeable, insightful, erudite, clear, precise, witty, and delightfully humorous.

His personal pilgrimage is unusually emblematic of the crucial developments of the last half-century. A civil rights, anti-war, inner-city Lutheran pastor in the 1960s, he underwent a number of “conversions” to become the leading Catholic, pro-life, neo-conservative intellectual of our time.

Tributes to him by friends and collaborators (Raymond Arroyo, Michael Novak, and George Weigel) highlight his importance on several fronts:
1. He recognized with the Roe decision that the genuine moral trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement carried into the Pro-Life interest in the human dignity of each life. He correctly renounced the direction of the liberal stampede into the swamp of reproductive rights and sterile sexuality.
2. Sensing the emptiness of mainstream liberal Protestantism and entering the Catholic Church in 1990, he vigorously advocated the providential and brilliant agenda of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
3. He activated the implicit Catholic-Evangelical Alliance in the post-Roe Culture War, by convoking, with Charles Colson, a regular gathering of the best and brightest of both traditions to strengthen Communio and explore agreements and disagreements. He was ecumenist as intellectual and activist.
4. He demonstrated an extraordinary ability to attract talent, to network, and to form friendships and alliances with a wide range of gifted and influential thinkers.

The National Review eulogizes him as the most influential Catholic and Christian thinker of the last ½ century. That he gave their ideology an ecclesiastical and intellectual imprimatur surely effected their positioning him in the number one position. I think of competitors (Cardinal Dulles, Rick Warren, political evangelicals like Robertson and Falwell, Father Henri Nouwen and Jean Vanier, Father Groeschel, the Communio school of Schindler, Mother Angelica), but he would have to be on anyone’s short list, especially in tandem with theo-neo-con buddies Novak and Weigel. Surely he was unrivaled for his happy marriage of gracious and pleasing prose, clarity of thought, erudition, relevance, humor, Catholicity, ecumenism, influence, confidence, ferocity in argument, and mischievous delectation.

Father Neuhaus was sternly criticized by paleoconservative E. Michael Jones for his close ties to NY Jews, their money, and Pro-Israel militarism. As a Judaeo-phile myself, I am not persuaded: Father Neuhaus was a strong and independent thinker and nobody’s fool. In his engagement with Judaism, he never compromised on his defense of innocent life, unlike so many to the left of him. His friendship with Abraham Heschel and his evident love for the Judaism of yesterday and today clearly flowed from deep and genuine Christian roots.

A deeper and truer critique of Neoconservative Catholics came from David Schindler of Communio and the John Paul II Institute: their core image of human freedom and dignity inflated the importance of agency, activism, initiative and individualism to the detriment of the foundational antecedent of creaturely receptivity in the mold of Mary’s Fiat. Schindler detects a subtle but powerful neglect of contemplation in favor of action, of communion in favor of the individual, of being in favor of doing. Here we see a quintessentially Protestant, American, Anglo, liberal, and masculine temptation.

His dear friend Joseph Bottom attributes to him an extraordinary work ethic. He was, in other words, something of a “Martha.” A man of prayer, faith, action, and thought, his blind spot may have been this stress on agency. The invasion of Iraq, which he famously supported in disagreement with John Paul, the Vatican and most of the American bishops, was arguably a failure of contemplative and patient intelligence. The invasion was a rush into action out of anxiety and uncertainty, without sufficient information, patience, and trust in alternate intelligence analyses, diplomacy or multilateralism.

An admirable activist, intellectual, priest and Christian, Father Neuhaus was a good and faithful servant and has now departed to enjoy much-deserved rest, in the company of, among others, his friend, collaborator and confirmation sponsor, Avery Dulles. His presence and mission, as that of every genuine Christian, is inimitable and will be missed.