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In Memory Of Father Richard John Neuhaus
By Gregory J. Sullivan, For The Bulletin
“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
John 10:10
The death of Father Richard John Neuhaus on Jan. 8 at the age of 72 is a loss beyond measure. There is no one in American religious and intellectual life who combined his erudition and eloquence on the most vexing issues of faith and politics. The judgment of Michael Novak is exactly correct: “Father Neuhaus was the most consequential American Christian since Reinhold Niebuhr. He was the most consequential American Catholic since John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He was a worthy successor in a long chain of great witnesses.”
As with any serious Christian, Fr. Neuhaus’ life was a complex pilgrimage. Born in Canada, this son of a Lutheran pastor, he became a Lutheran minister himself. He served an all-black congregation in Brooklyn for many years and was deeply involved in a number of liberal political causes through the 1960s and ’70s. The catastrophe of Roe v. Wade in 1973 occasioned Fr. Neuhaus’ turn in a more conservative political direction. He was among the most trenchant critics of the culture of death.
In September 1990, Fr. Neuhaus converted to Catholicism, and he was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of New York a year later. With characteristic grace, his wrote at the time: “As for my thirty years as a Lutheran pastor, there is nothing in that ministry that I would repudiate, except sins and shortcomings. My becoming a priest in the Roman Catholic Church will be the completion and right ordering of what was begun all those years ago. Nothing that is good is rejected, all is fulfilled.”
At the time of Fr. Neuhaus’ reception into the Catholic Church, a friend mentioned to me that it would be the most important conversion of this era. I was, admittedly, mildly skeptical. Everything that Fr. Neuhaus did once he became a Catholic proved me very wrong. He founded and edited First Things, the very best intellectual monthly journal on religion and politics. The regular section of the magazine with his writing on sundry topics, “The Public Square,” was — for this reader and thousands of other readers — invaluable. Commentary at that level of consistent insight and intelligence was unavailable anywhere else.
As a Lutheran, he wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1986). The role of Christian faith in American public life became the issue that Fr. Neuhaus was most widely identified with. Yet his theological work as a Catholic will undoubtedly be more enduring. In Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (2006), Fr. Neuhaus adroitly defended orthodoxy from contemporary assaults. In my view, his most important book is Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (2000). To select just one passage in a book overflowing with rhetorical force (an emanation of his years of Protestant preaching) and theological rigor:
“Atonement. At-one-ment. What was separated by an abyss of wrong has been reconciled by the deed of perfect love. What the first Adam destroyed the second Adam has restored. ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ We knew not what we did when we reached for the right to name good and evil. We knew not what we did when we grabbed what we could and went off to a distant country. We knew not what we did when, in the madness of excusing ourselves, we declared God guilty. But today we have come to our senses. Today, here at the cross, our eyes are fixed on the dying derelict who is the Lord of life. We look at the One who is everything that we are and everything that we are not, the One who is true man and true God. In him we, God and man, are perfectly one. At-one-ment. Here, through the cross, we have come home, home to the truth about ourselves, home to the truth about what God has done about what we have done. And now we know, or begin to know, why this awful, awe-filled Friday is called good.”
Death on a Friday Afternoon deserves a place on the shelf next to the works of Newman, Chesterton and Knox. (It is some consolation at this time that his final book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, was completed right before his death and will be released in March of this year.)
No Christian writer conveyed for our age the sense of wondrous adventure — of abundant life — that is the vocation in Christ better than Father Richard John Neuhaus. Nothing that is good is rejected, all is fulfilled. Requiescat in pace.
Gregory J. Sullivan (Gregoryjsull@aol.com) is a lawyer who resides in Bucks County.
John 10:10
The death of Father Richard John Neuhaus on Jan. 8 at the age of 72 is a loss beyond measure. There is no one in American religious and intellectual life who combined his erudition and eloquence on the most vexing issues of faith and politics. The judgment of Michael Novak is exactly correct: “Father Neuhaus was the most consequential American Christian since Reinhold Niebuhr. He was the most consequential American Catholic since John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He was a worthy successor in a long chain of great witnesses.”
As with any serious Christian, Fr. Neuhaus’ life was a complex pilgrimage. Born in Canada, this son of a Lutheran pastor, he became a Lutheran minister himself. He served an all-black congregation in Brooklyn for many years and was deeply involved in a number of liberal political causes through the 1960s and ’70s. The catastrophe of Roe v. Wade in 1973 occasioned Fr. Neuhaus’ turn in a more conservative political direction. He was among the most trenchant critics of the culture of death.
In September 1990, Fr. Neuhaus converted to Catholicism, and he was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of New York a year later. With characteristic grace, his wrote at the time: “As for my thirty years as a Lutheran pastor, there is nothing in that ministry that I would repudiate, except sins and shortcomings. My becoming a priest in the Roman Catholic Church will be the completion and right ordering of what was begun all those years ago. Nothing that is good is rejected, all is fulfilled.”
At the time of Fr. Neuhaus’ reception into the Catholic Church, a friend mentioned to me that it would be the most important conversion of this era. I was, admittedly, mildly skeptical. Everything that Fr. Neuhaus did once he became a Catholic proved me very wrong. He founded and edited First Things, the very best intellectual monthly journal on religion and politics. The regular section of the magazine with his writing on sundry topics, “The Public Square,” was — for this reader and thousands of other readers — invaluable. Commentary at that level of consistent insight and intelligence was unavailable anywhere else.
As a Lutheran, he wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1986). The role of Christian faith in American public life became the issue that Fr. Neuhaus was most widely identified with. Yet his theological work as a Catholic will undoubtedly be more enduring. In Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (2006), Fr. Neuhaus adroitly defended orthodoxy from contemporary assaults. In my view, his most important book is Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (2000). To select just one passage in a book overflowing with rhetorical force (an emanation of his years of Protestant preaching) and theological rigor:
“Atonement. At-one-ment. What was separated by an abyss of wrong has been reconciled by the deed of perfect love. What the first Adam destroyed the second Adam has restored. ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ We knew not what we did when we reached for the right to name good and evil. We knew not what we did when we grabbed what we could and went off to a distant country. We knew not what we did when, in the madness of excusing ourselves, we declared God guilty. But today we have come to our senses. Today, here at the cross, our eyes are fixed on the dying derelict who is the Lord of life. We look at the One who is everything that we are and everything that we are not, the One who is true man and true God. In him we, God and man, are perfectly one. At-one-ment. Here, through the cross, we have come home, home to the truth about ourselves, home to the truth about what God has done about what we have done. And now we know, or begin to know, why this awful, awe-filled Friday is called good.”
Death on a Friday Afternoon deserves a place on the shelf next to the works of Newman, Chesterton and Knox. (It is some consolation at this time that his final book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, was completed right before his death and will be released in March of this year.)
No Christian writer conveyed for our age the sense of wondrous adventure — of abundant life — that is the vocation in Christ better than Father Richard John Neuhaus. Nothing that is good is rejected, all is fulfilled. Requiescat in pace.
Gregory J. Sullivan (Gregoryjsull@aol.com) is a lawyer who resides in Bucks County.
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