Below is from Joseph Bottum’s eulogy of Richard John Neuhaus in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard.
I often refer to the fact that there used to be liberals but there is hardly a one still left. I usually point to Nat Hentoff as being one of the few remaining ones, but I should have included Richard John Neuhaus in that group, too. I wonder if the two ever met — the anti-abortion liberal who is an athiest, and the anti-abortion, conservative liberal who was a pastor and priest. I would have loved to sit and listen while those two talked.
Take abortion, for instance. In 1968, he won the award for best editorial of the year from the Catholic Press Association–Catholics liked giving awards to a Lutheran in those days; they thought of it as being bravely trendy and ecumenical–for an essay in which he cried, “The pro-abortion flag is being planted on the wrong side of the liberal/conservative divide.” It ought to be those heartless conservatives who want to define the fetus as a meaningless lump of tissue; it ought to be caring liberals who want to expand the community of care to embrace the unborn.
If he later came to have a kinder view of conservatives, that was because he finally met some of them. But the pattern established by abortion continued through to his death. His work in founding the communitarian movement in 1977 came not because he thought he had changed but because he thought the United States was abandoning its commitment to families and all the voluntary associations that Tocqueville observed as a defining part of a liberal republic. He wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square–his 1984 argument against the attempt to secularize every part of shared life–because he thought the nation was in danger of losing the religious dynamism that had fueled everything from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to Martin Luther King’s protests.
Even his conversion to Catholicism in 1990, and his ordination as a Catholic priest the next year, could be understood as a standing-still while the world altered around him. This was a man, after all, who titled his account of conversion “How I Became the Catholic That I Was.”