Fr Richard John Neuhaus, a faithful priest and hugely influential writer founded the journal First Things. His monthly essay "The Public Square" was always highly regarded and widely read. (He also featured in the "Notes from across the Atlantic" section for Faith Magazine.) He was a great apostle in the pro-life cause and an enthusiastic supporter of the papacies of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.Fr Neuhaus (72) died yesterday, 8 January 2009, from the side effects of the cancer he was suffering. He received the last rites of the Church from his long time friend Fr George Rutler. Shortly after he died, First Things re-posted Fr Neuhaus' February 2000 article Born Toward Dying.
Tributes to him listed at First Things include those received from the White House, and major US dailies as well as Catholic sources. John Allen has a good piece in the National Catholic Reporter as does Michael Novak (A second brother dies).
Here is the notice from First Things concerning the Funeral arrangements:
A Funeral Mass will be celebrated for Father Richard John Neuhaus at the Church of the Immaculate Conception—414 E. 14th Street, New York City—on Tuesday, January 13, 2009, at 10 a.m.Requiescat in pace.
Bishops and priests who wish to attend are asked please to inform Nathaniel Peters (by e-mail or phone 212-627-2288) by Sunday afternoon, January 11, at the latest.
A Christian wake service in the form of a Vigil for the Deceased will be celebrated at the Church of the Immaculate Conception on Monday evening, January 12, at 7:30 p.m. Clergy who plan to attend are asked to sit with the congregation.
In lieu of flowers, donations are requested for Fr. Neuhaus’ work, the Institute on Religion and Public Life, online at this page or by mail to:
Institute on Religion and Public Life
156 Fifth Avenue
Suite 400
New York, NY 10010
5 comments:
May Father Neuhaus rest in peace. I notice that there will be a Funeral Mass, as distinct from a 'Mass of the Resurrection'. I find that particular Catholic Americanism somewhat irritating.
Eternal Rest grant to Father Neuhaus, O Lord.
One typo in your piece, Father...
John Allen writes from the National Catholic Reporter, not the National Catholic Register.
Father,
John Allen writes for the Distorter (the only readable bit in it) not the Reporter.
“Whenever orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.”
Brilliant.
I knew “Father Richard”, as George W Bush called him, very, very slightly. And I am highly familiar with his work. Towards the end, he seemed to be coming round about the hoodwinking and hijacking of the American pro-life movement by the Republican Party, which is not in principle any more pro-life than the Democrats, and is in practice rather less so because of the consequences of its economic policies, not to mention, of course, its record of warmongering and convict-killing even worse than that of the Democrats (which is quite a feat).
A key strand in neoconservatism, at least in America, is made up of Catholics who agree with the Pope and his predecessor about sex but not about economics, seem immune to the enormous amount of work that they have done and still do in explaining how these things are connected, and manage to present themselves, quite falsely, as somehow more orthodox than those who, with similar disregard, agree with the Popes about economics but not about sex. But alike, they are in fact inheritors of the misappropriation of the name of the Second Vatican Council. And alike, they hark back to the nineteenth-century Americanist heresy, which conceived of an oxymoronic American Catholic Church autonomous from Rome.
Alas, for all his gifts, Father Neuhaus was a key figure in the sex-but-not-economics camp, and a leader in its support for the neoconservative war agenda. But was he shifting just before he died? I hope and pray so. His last book, 'American Babylon', to be published in the US in March by Basic Books (and which must therefore have been completed before the recent Presidential Election), depicts America as a nation defined by consumerism and decadence, and argues that Christians must learn to live there as if they were in exile from the Promised Land.
He had form as a trailblazer. So, after him, who? Catholics of his hue were intellectually indispensable to the neocons, just as Catholic opponents of abortion are electorally key to the actually pro-abortion Republican Party. But Obama won a clear majority of the Catholic vote (even if almost certainly not Father Neuhaus's vote). If the shift is finally happening, then praise God, not least for what it will do to the Democratic Party.
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
Sorry - did I write "Register"? :-(
Corrected.
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