Richard John Neuhaus dies of cancer

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, one of the nation’s leading conservative Catholic intellectuals and founder of the journal First Things, died shortly before 10 a.m. Thursday of complications from cancer. He was 72.

“As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place,” First Things editor Joseph Bottum said in a statement. “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.”

Father Neuhaus was diagnosed with a serious form of cancer in November. He was hospitalized with an infection over the Christmas holidays and deteriorated rapidly this week. He lost consciousness Tuesday evening and received last rites.

Father Neuhaus was born one of eight children in Pembroke, Ontario, to a Lutheran minister and initially followed in his father’s footsteps - graduating from Concordia Theological Seminary and becoming a Lutheran minister.

He began political life as a liberal. An associate of Martin Luther King Jr., he backed Eugene McCarthy for president at the 1968 Democratic convention and led, along with actor Paul Newman, a tumultuous Chicago press conference backing the minority plank against the Vietnam War.

But starting with the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that declared abortion a constitutional right and running through President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 White House Conference on the Family, Father Neuhaus began moving to the right, becoming a supporter of Ronald Reagan.

He converted to Catholicism in 1990, was ordained a priest by Cardinal John O’Connor of New York a year later and became one of the leading figures - along with Michael Novak and George Weigel - in advancing a type of neoconservatism among Roman Catholics.

He explained his conversion in a 2002 First Things essay by saying that “I became a Catholic in order to be more fully what I was and who I was as a Lutheran.”

In a 1991 interview, he explained that ecumenical dialogue in previous decades meant that “the original intentions of Lutheranism - to be a reforming movement within the Catholic Church - can now be advanced in full communion with Rome.”

“I believe there is no longer any justification for a separated Lutheran Church,” Father Neuhaus said then, though he acknowledged that most Lutherans “are happy to be just another Protestant church.”

By the 2000s, the Catholic TV network EWTN was using him as a commentator in Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI.

“When I was an undergraduate beginning to discover Christianity as an adult, there was Richard John Neuhaus, presenting a Catholicism that I found witty and intellectually engaging,” said Rod Dreher, a religion columnist at Beliefnet and former reporter for The Washington Times.

Father Neuhaus was “a great-souled man, and his contribution to the intellectual life of American religion is hard to overstate,” he added. “For many orthodox Catholic intellectuals, Fr. Neuhaus was the pastor of a virtual parish. He is literally irreplaceable.”

Kevin “Seamus” Hasson, founder and president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, on whose advisory board Father Neuhaus served, called the deceased “one of the great thinkers of his generation.

“The Church lost a great warrior, the faith community at large lost a patient and insistent champion of ecumenism, and the world lost a magnificent human being,” he said, adding the Becket Fund will establish a permanent memorial in his honor.

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