Month: January 2009

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Richard John Neuhas died yesterday after a protracted battle with cancer. Anyone familiar with Christianity in the public square will recognize Fr. Neuhaus as one of the first to sound the alarm that a public square stripped of religious values would lead to a culture stripped of benevolent morality. In his seminal work “The Naked Public Square,” Fr. Neuhaus argued that “moral neutrality” was anything but neutral and would lead to a society in which moral universals would be overthrown in favor or utilitarian interests.

What did he mean by this? He meant that once religion has been relegated to a private interest (you believe what you want to believe, I will believe what I want to believe, it really doesn’t matter), the universals by which men govern themselves would erode, and society would becomes susceptible to, and finally shape itself around, an ethic drawn from the decisions of elites. The pressure on Christians to privatize their faith Neuhaus argued, was in fact an attempt to remove religion from cultural life altogether, and Christians needed to meet this challenge.

Fr. Neuhaus, like so many of his generation, came to the conclusion through a circuitous route. He was a Viet Nam protester when he was younger, but the suffering of the boat people after the US withdrawal made him rethink his position on many things. He took some personal responsibility for their suffering I remember reading, because he never fully comprehended how the unconditional withdrawal from Viet Nam would affect the people there. That was many years ago (although still fresh for many of his generation), and while it can be argued whether or not the United States should have ever entered that war (Eisenhower said no, Kennedy said yes), it is clear that it shaped Neuhaus and many of his generation.

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