By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, one of the most influential religious leaders in the United States died at 10:00 a.m. this morning at the age of seventy-two.
“He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering,” said Joseph Bottum, Editor of First Things, the monthly journal founded by Fr. Neuhaus. “He lost consciousness Tuesday evening after a collapse in his heart rate, and the next day, in the company of friends, he died. “
Bottum goes on to say: “My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted.
“I weep, rather for all the rest of us. As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place. The fabric of life has been torn by his death, and it will not be repaired, for those of us who knew him, until that time when everything is mended and all our tears are wiped away. “
Fr. Neuhaus was born in 1936 in the small town of Pembroke, Ontario, Canada. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he came to the United States at the age of 14 and eventually graduated from the Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.
In 1961, at the age of 25, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a Lutheran pastor, spending the first 17 years of his career working at an African American church in Brooklyn where he became an outspoken social activist. He marched in civil rights and peace demonstrations and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to end the Vietnam war. He was arrested in 1968 for protesting at the Democratic National Convention.
Although clearly a liberal in his social views, religion remained his sole focus and gradually led him to become disillusioned with the loss of religious values in the lives of every day Americans. Even though he supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, Neuhaus’ views were already beginning to change. By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, he had become a political conservative.
In 1984 he co-founded the Rockford Institute’s Center on Religion and Society which encouraged a new emphasis on religious values in public and private life. That year he published one of his best known books, The NakedPublic Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Since then, he has written more than 20 books and articles. In 1988 he was named one of the 32 most influential intellectuals in America.
It was Pope John Paul II who inspired Neuhaus to convert to Catholicism in 1990 and go on to become a Catholic priest. He said the decision was one “mandated by conscience” and that had begun years ago when he learned that the great Luterhan theologian, Peter Brunner regularly said that a Lutheran who does not daily ask himself why he is not a Roman Catholic cannot know why he is a Lutheran.
“That impressed me very deeply,” Fr. Neuhaus wrote in 2002. “I was thirty years a Lutheran pastor, and after thirty years of asking myself why I was not a Roman Catholic I finally ran out of answers that were convincing either to me or to others. And so I discovered not so much that I had made the decision as that the decision was made, and I have never looked back, except to trace the marks of grace, of sola gratia, each step of the way.”
Funeral arrangements are still being planned.
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