Tributes to Fr Neuhaus

Father Richard John Neuhaus: A Man Animated by His Faith

By RAYMOND ARROYO

On April 11, 2005, I entered St. Peter's Basilica in Rome with my friend Father Richard John Neuhaus to pay our respects to the recently deceased Pope John Paul II. After kneeling before the pontiff's body, I remarked at how small the pope appeared. "That wasn't him. He isn't there," I said. "No," Father Neuhaus said. "He is there. These are the remains, what is left behind of a life such as we are not likely to see again, waiting with all of us for the Resurrection of the dead, the final vindication of the hope he proclaimed."

As was his wont, Father Neuhaus was capable of delivering impromptu corrections with an eloquence and precision that would elude the best of us. When I learned of his passing yesterday at the age of 72, his words echoed in my memory. He was not only a great intellectual and an exemplary man of letters but, as his remark to me illustrates, he was a man who put his mind and his literary skill at the service of his church and the truths it protected. He was first and last a man animated by his faith.

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For me personally, Father Neuhaus will forever be attached to the election of Pope Benedict XVI and, early last year, his journey to America. Father Neuhaus was my co-host for the Eternal Word Television Network's live coverage of those events, providing commentary that was erudite and occasionally cutting. When I announced to our viewers that the pope would be meeting with the American bishops in the crypt of National Basilica in Washington, Father Neuhaus quipped: "A fitting repository for the American Episcopacy."

When one steps back and looks at the turns of Father Neuhaus's life -- at his active engagement with social causes and, when American culture changed, with those "first things" that came to matter more than ever; at his willingness to forsake friendships and old alliances to pursue the truth -- it is ever more clear that he was willing to obey the promptings of his faith, no matter where they took him.

Death on a Thursday Morning

By the Editors of the National Review

Neuhaus was a superb, natural controversialist. His two regular columns in the magazine he founded and edited, First Things, commented on the overlapping topics of religion, culture, and politics both in long, thoughtful articles and in short, brilliant squibs. Both profound and witty, they were required reading for morally serious people. His wit was a vehicle for important truths, and some of his epigrams have entered the language.

Thus: “For the New York Times the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic.”

Or: “Whenever orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.”

Neuhaus never shrank from what he considered a necessary fight — even one with friends — when the issue was important enough. He abandoned his original allies on the Left over Roe v. Wade. On the same issue he later devoted a special issue of First Things to an attack on judicial supremacy that questioned whether an American political regime that tolerated mass abortions was a legitimate one. That formulation divided the Right and led to the Left inventing the term “theocons” to demonize him and the Christian conservatives. To the end of his life Neuhaus continued to fight passionately for the thousands of innocents we kill annually.

But fighting and controversy, though necessary to the propagation of religious truth in our age, were secondary themes in Neuhaus’s life. His achievements were essentially creative. He was a natural organizer who did not stop at reshaping his own religious identity. Along with Michael Novak, George Weigel, and others, he established First Things and made it the focus for an intellectually respectable resistance to the theological liberalism of the 1960s in Judaism and all Christian denominations. That achieved, he worked successfully to bring together Catholics and evangelicals — traditionally not the friendliest of fellow-Christians — in a new, unified political constituency for “Life” issues and other concerns of traditional believers. He reshaped that old-time religion.

Without Richard John Neuhaus, the Christian conservatives in America would have been politically much weaker and intellectually far less formidable.