A True Pastor

The conventional story line on Father Richard John Neuhaus, who died on Jan. 8 at age 72, is that his eventful life was defined by change, transition, even rupture: Lutheran pastor's kid becomes teenage hellion becomes Lutheran pastor becomes Catholic priest; Democratic congressional candidate becomes adviser to Republican presidents; Sixties' radical becomes '80s neo-conservative. And truth to tell (as he would say), there's at least something to this.

The early influences on his religious thought and sensibility included the Lutheran theologian Arthur Carl Piepkorn (who taught him to think of Lutheranism as a reform movement within the one Church of Christ) and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (from whom he drew the idea that Christianity and Judaism were necessarily locked into a conversation from which both ought to benefit); his later interlocutors in matters theological shifted to include the German Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg (whom he introduced to the English-speaking world), Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), and Pope John Paul II.

He worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph David Abernathy in the classic period of the American civil-rights movement; his chastisement of William F. Buckley, Jr., in a letter complaining about the National Review's stance on civil-rights legislation, led to lunch and then to 30 years of friendship, conversation, and collaboration.

He was typically labeled a "conservative" Catholic in his latter years; yet for more than four decades, he was at the intellectual center of both the ecumenical and inter-religious dialogues, in partnership with a diverse crew that included, at various moments, Cardinal Avery Dulles, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Charles W. Colson, Alexander Schmemann, Rabbi David Novak, and Rabbi Leon Klenicki.

He was an early supporter of Jimmy Carter who became a counselor to George W. Bush; with the sociologist Peter Berger, he pioneered a new way of thinking about "mediating structures" (or voluntary associations) in society, thereby providing the intellectual foundation for Bush's faith-and-community based initiative.

He was a vocal critic of America's war in Vietnam who helped cause a major rift in the post-war peace movement by criticizing the new communist government's persecution of religious believers.