Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

“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.