For Those Who Desperately Need Organ Donations

Within the next month or so, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) will introduce a bill in the Senate that does two things: (1) Closes off a loophole in the existing law that permitted “transplant tourism”—desperate Americans seeking transplants overseas in often substandard medical conditions; and (2) distinguishes between “buying and selling organs,” which is a felony, and the non-transferable “benefits” under the legislative authority of the individual states. (The federal government had never intended to criminalize non-transferable benefits.). In 1994 the Pennsylvania legislature voted a bill into law, signed by Governor Casey that would enable the state to offer a funeral benefit; that is, an in-kind reward not transferable to anybody but the donor. It permitted donors to receive burial benefits; that is, an in-kind incentive not transferable to anybody but the donor. It is not a commercial transaction, but it does provide a modest incentive for potential donors.

Other nations such as Israel have permitted non-transferable benefits, so that donors can choose from tax credit/deductions, comprehensive health care for life, life insurance policies, and free admission to natural parks for life. This law too bans the buying, selling, and bartering of organs.

Why do I judge Senator Specter’s carefully crafted bill a major step forward for “the culture of life”? Let me tell the story.

A colleague of mine, whom I admire very much, faced a harrowing challenge a few years ago when she learned she had kidney failure. Her options were to get a transplant or go on dialysis—an often debilitating treatment with a guarantee of premature death. Even when she learned of potential donors, and her hopes rose, medical incompatibilities (or simply cold feet) ruled them out.

My colleague, a medical doctor herself, was one of the lucky ones. Another scholar, activist, and writer volunteered one of her kidneys. That transplant has been a complete success, thanks to the donor’s amazing generosity.

The wider problem is that now over 100,000 Americans need an organ transplant just to stay alive. Of those, 6,000 died last year awaiting a new liver, heart, lung, or kidney. The arithmetic is deadly. Those whose lives could have been saved have perished, often in a sort of despair as possibility dies out. Fifty-three percent of those in need are racial or ethnic minorities.

Pope Benedict XVI made note of this very problem in his 2008 address to participants at an international congress organized by the Pontifical Academy for Life:

The problem of the availability of vital organs to transplant, unfortunately, is not theoretic, but dramatically practical; it is shown by the long waiting lists of many sick people whose sole possibility for survival is linked to meager offers that do not correspond to the objective need.

Just a year or so ago, I took part in a debate at the American Enterprise Institute on the morality of offering incentives to help hesitating volunteers to come forward. I pointed out what everybody already knew: that such a straight cash system could lead to awful abuses—a market for organs in which the poor and vulnerable would be victimized by “harvesters,” who would make money by using intimidating techniques. Impoverished people might also feel driven to sell their organs for money. Further, I argued that the voluntary sector—the churches, benevolent societies, and the like—had not yet given enough attention to this matter. We who favor that sector have not really done our best to encourage donors to come forward. We have not taught that such generous giving is an exercise in love—a principle that Jews, Christians, and humanists recognize as the central ethical reality.

The more I faced the facts, however, the clearer it has become to me that voluntarism is not meeting the desperate need. Today, almost 80,000 need a new kidney. In 2007, only about 6,000 volunteers stepped forward to offer a healthy kidney to a loved one; about 7,000 donated their own kidneys after death. In other words, fewer than one in six who needed a kidney got one that year. In major cities the waiting list is as long as five to eight years. Scores of thousands of the needy count the minutes and days, as the clock ticks inexorably.

It is shameful that people whose lives could be resumed in their fullness stare for months into the eyes of death—hoping, waiting, mostly in vain. The Roman Catholic Church has deservedly won a reputation for careful thinking about these matters. Attentive to new technologies and new possibilities, it is also unblinking about the moral hazards and weaknesses of humanity. Slippery slopes await us all around. An intellectual error made early becomes all too soon a monstrous practice; and the logic of that error is applied to other matters (e.g., the logic of ending life through abortion has applications in ending life through euthanasia).

In the matter of organ transplants, the Church tenaciously rejects complicity in making a market in organs, of a sort that could be easily abused—at the expense of the vulnerable, and to the profit of the cynical. But the Church has also become aware through empirical evidence that while its teaching finds the voluntary and freely considered donation of human organs admirable, and highly approves of it when appropriate, the number of needy patients far outstrips the current levels of donors.

Pope John Paul II made a point of writing a few years back that finding ways to invent incentives that might raise the frequency of donations is a worthy step, provided that potential abuses are detected and blocked in advance. Transplants are “a great step forward” he said, “in science’s service of man.” He added:

It must first be emphasized, as I observed on another occasion, that every organ transplant has its source in a decision of great ethical value: “the decision to offer without reward a part of one’s own body for the health and well-being of another person.” Here precisely lies the nobility of the gesture, a gesture which is a genuine act of love.

The Pope then warned against a potential for abuse:

Any procedure which tends to commercialize human organs or to consider them as items of exchange or trade must be considered morally unacceptable, because to use the body as an “object” is to violate the dignity of the human person.

A key aspect of ensuring dignity, he says, is

the need for informed consent . . . the human “authenticity” of such a decisive gesture requires that individuals be properly informed about the processes involved, in order to be in a position to consent or decline in a free and conscientious manner.

In this light, Senator Specter’s legislative action does two necessary things: (a) it blocks potential abuses by commercialization and international (or even intra-national) trafficking; and (b) it allows individual states to make concrete judgments about non-transferable, non-cash benefits to potential donors, providing these incentives fall within moral guidelines. Senator Specter’s legislation establishes that the 1984 federal law prohibiting the commercialization of organs (that is, a sale between individuals or through a broker) does not apply to state governments, when they encourage organ donation through non-transferable incentives. These incentives are not “compensation,” and they are not tradable.

Senator Specter’s legislation is a limited step forward; it commands nothing, it finances nothing. Essentially it clarifies the legal situation of voluntary donation, and it adds new heft to legal obstacles to trafficking. It calls for legitimate, constitutional experiments in the invention of donor benefits, in order to narrow the gap between the large number of those in need, and those who freely rescue them by giving of themselves.

We need to change our mindset. What Specter’s bill does is frame government benefits for donors as what they really are: gifts from the government in appreciation for the generosity of the donor. They are not intended inducements to donate. For John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the invention of appropriate incentives for more frequent donations of organs is a noble endeavor. The U.S. Congress and the several states should take thought about this important task.

Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Published in First Things Online April 1, 2009

George Washington Urged American Governors to Imitate Christ

(CNSNews.com) — At the close of the American Revolution in 1783, Gen. George Washington composed a circular letter to the governors of all the states urging them to imitate “that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion.” He was, in fact, asking the governors of the nascent United States to imitate Jesus Christ. Indeed, Washington told the governors that if Americans failed to imitate Christ’s “example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

In “Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country,” scholar Michael Novak and his daughter Jana Novak have illuminated the religious life and sentiments of America’s first president and preeminent Founding Father.

The book is based on a careful and thorough reading of Washington’s own writings, both personal and public. These words, consistent the length of Washington’s life, paint an unmistakable picture of a quiet, reserved, yet steadfast Christian.

Novak, who won the 1994 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, visited CNSNews.com recently to discuss “Washington’s God” in an episode of “Online with Terry Jeffrey.” Here is a transcript of the conversation.

Terry Jeffrey: Welcome to Online with Terry Jeffrey. Our guest for this episode is Ambassador Michael Novak. Novak served President Reagan as ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission and as ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

He is a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse, State University of New York, and Notre Dame. He has written numerous books, including the “Universal Hunger for Liberty,” and the one we are going to talk about today, “Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country,” which he co-authored with his daughter, Jana Novak.

Ambassador Novak, thank you very much for coming in to talk to us.

Michael Novak: Hi. How are you, Terry.

Jeffrey: In your book, you write about--I know there are a couple of apocryphal events that people believe happen, or some people believe did happen in regard to George Washington and his religious experience. But in your book you write about a couple of very real experiences that I think affected his life. One was in July 1755, when as a young officer he went with General Braddock’s British army towards where Pittsburgh is today. What happened on that march?

Novak: Well, you have to remember that Washington had already explored that territory by himself and was one of the most famous men in America by that time because he wrote a diary that was published in Europe. So, anyway, he had unsurpassed knowledge of that area from having trekked through it so many times. And Braddock had him with him. And Braddock was marching along toward Pittsburgh two miles a day, because he insisted on clearing the trees and building a road. He didn’t have scouts up on the hills or anything. And Washington kept telling him: You can’t fight like that here.

Jeffrey: And these are British lobster backs with redcoats on?

Novak: They are great troops out in the open. They can get in rank and lay down a curtain of fire—you know, one and then another and then another. They can stop anybody.

Jeffrey: But here they are sort of crawling through the Appalachian Mountains, through dense forest, trying to move their wagons?

Novak: To make a long story short, Washington finally persuaded him to break his unit in two, and send a faster group—1,200 men—ahead and let the rest of the army come on slower, and then bring up supplies as they needed them. Well, it happened that there was a spy party, a scouting party for the Indians—French and Indians--and they caught sight of this smaller group of Braddock’s men, before Braddock and Washington’s group did. And they were surprised. They weren’t looking for them exactly. They thought they were back with the army. And they laid into them. And, soon, every officer fell--every officer on horseback was shot off his horse. Washington was shot off his horse twice, ended up the day with four bullet holes in his jacket.

Braddock was wounded, seriously wounded. Then they slowly began to retreat--finally they ordered a retreat--and slowly began to retreat.

At a certain point along the way, Braddock died. And Washington then, in effect, took over—though he was a colonial. He ordered Braddock buried right in the middle of the road, and had all the wagons go over it on their way out of the woods, so there would be no sign of a fresh grave. Because he was afraid the body could be dug up and scalped and so forth.

Jeffrey: You say there were four bullets that actually pierced Washington’s clothing?

Novak: Yeah.

Jeffrey: But they didn’t hit his body?

Novak: No. And later there was an Indian chief of a small band who lived there who later reminisced about that battle with Washington and some of his colleagues, too, and said how he himself had 17 clear shots at Washington and couldn’t get him.

Jeffrey: And Washington wasn’t a small target.

Novak: No, and Washington was not a small target. He was one of the biggest men out there—at six-foot-three, six-foot-four, something like that. And he thought he must be protected by a greater power from that day forward. And he so told his men.

Jeffrey: A pagan Indian believed that?

Novak: Yes.

Jeffrey: What did Washington believe?

Novak: You know I think Washington deep down thought that might happen. He thought—I am answering to the great man part. He certainly thought he was protected by Providence. In fact, he wrote after words to his brother that he had heard there was a report out that he had been killed, and even a report about what his dying words had been. And he said he would like to step forward and say that never happened: My horse was twice shot out from under me. I had four bullet holes in my jacket. But by the hands of a Good Providence I am here.

Jeffrey: Washington thought he had been protected by God on that day?

Novak: Yes, that’s not the only time in his life. Later, he said twice later, that no man in America had a greater reason to rely on Divine Providence than he did.

Jeffrey: That was 1755. Twenty-one years later, George Washington is the commander of the Continental Army. The British have come to New York. They’ve had the Battle of Boston. The British evacuated there. Washington brings his army down, and he makes a stupid move. He places them on Long Island.

Novak: Yep.

Jeffrey: Across the East River from Manhattan.

Novak: That’s right.

Jeffrey: What happened then?

Novak: Well, what he forgot is the British had the ships. They had 300 some ships in New York harbor, and they just out-flanked him, up the bottom of Long Island, and landed inland and then pressed toward Washington’s troops from the other side from where he expecting. And he didn’t catch wind of it until the last day. He found this column marching down on him to roll up his flank. So he gave orders to buy and steal every boat they could locate on Long Island, and he started getting his men off—some barges--and get his men off. And he had good New England men to take the ships over. They were from Marblehead and were very good at handling the boats. So, all night they labored to get the men across. Daylight came and only half the men were off. They had kept the fires going down the line, so the British didn’t know they were evacuating.

Jeffrey: So they are sitting ducks on the water—to the British Navy.

Novak: They were sitting ducks. And a huge fog rolls in, a thick yellow fog. You could only go by keeping your hand on the shoulder of the fellow in front of you onto the barges. But the fog lasted for between five and six hours, almost until noon time. By the time it lifted, they were all gone. So Washington, again, took that as a sign of a beneficent Providence.

I want to point out, though, he didn’t always think Providence was beneficent, because in that earlier case with Braddock, his line of reflection went like this: This is how Providence works. This tiny accident to this small group--discovering us when they didn’t expected to--and they won an incredible victory they never even dreamed of, and there are other times when it looks like success is yours and it is taken away by a small little incident.

Jeffrey: At one point, he actually quoted Alexander Pope, did he not, that “whatever is, is right”?

Novak: Yes. Washington didn’t have a formal education but he read widely. He maybe felt self-consciously about his education. He collected some 900 books in his own personal library, a lot of them on agriculture--every aspect of agriculture that he could possibly read to improve his orchards and his other crops and his vineyards.

Jeffrey: This was a man who not only was familiar with the practical science of agriculture but also with 18th century English poetry.

Novak: Yes.

Jeffrey: We know that Washington understood there was a God who cared for him as a young man when he was serving as a colonial with the British army. How was he raised? Was he baptized a Christian, for example?

Novak: Yes. He was baptized. His mother was a very devote Anglican. He came from a line including Anglican preachers, back into their roots in England. After he was dead—now, he didn’t have children of his own---but Martha’s children went on to produce yet another Anglican divine. So, he was a member of the Church of England all this time.

Jeffrey: From birth.

Novak: Yes.

Jeffrey: He was baptized as an Anglican?

Novak: Yes.

Jeffrey: His early education--would he have been taught some form of catechism?

Novak: At his mother’s knee--and she was an imperious woman. Practically as soon as he could, he moved out of the house. I mean, she had the face of the Statue of Liberty in New York. She was one of those women who are severe. She knows where she’s going, she knows where you’re going.

Jeffrey: He didn’t get along with her very well.

Novak: No, not real well. But he did in a certain way adore her. Because he took very seriously, she gave him from a very early age a set of prayer books and readings, and the meaning of faith and so forth. You can see little under linings. You can still see the copies up in the Athaeneum in Boston, where all his books ended up. A group of good citizens in Boston bought the books before the British could buy them.

Jeffrey: So, quite literally, as a young boy, George Washington was reading religious books and learning about his Anglican faith--

Novak: He was—and about Providence. He collected sermons on Providence, too. There were many given during the war, and he collected them. This was maybe the theme of religion that maybe most grabbed his imagination because of its immediacy. You know, even today, Terry, tests have been done of different American elites, and the ones who are most religious in the sense of having a sense of Providence—these small little things that can turn events--are athletes, the military and businessmen. The least religious, I don’t have to tell you, are journalists and lawyers--

Jeffrey: And some politicians.

Novak: Yeah.

Jeffrey: So, George Washington as a boy was trained in an understanding of a particular expression of Christianity, and this happened to be the Anglican denomination that he learned from his mother and from attending church also.

Novak: Great historians, like Joe Ellis, describe him as a lukewarm Anglican. But, hey, that’s what an Anglican is supposed to be. It’s against the Anglican middle way to show too much enthusiasm.

Jeffrey: In terms of his public expression?

Novak: Well, yeah, but even you are supposed to be self-contained, and keep it private, and not show too much fervor or devotion, even if you feel it—even if you feel it very deeply. Let the river run deeply inside, but nobody else should know

Jeffrey: He wasn’t trained to be an Evangelist.

Novak: No, not at all.

Jeffrey: He was trained to be a devout Anglican.

Novak: The best argument that he isn’t an Evangelist is that he soon created the largest still in all of North America and sold more whiskey than anyone else.

Jeffrey: Which was perfectly in keeping with his religious beliefs.

Novak: Yes, it was.

Jeffrey: And he attended church?

Novak: Well, he did. He attended church. In fact, he attended two. There was the Christ Church in Alexandria, not so very far from where we are filming this—wonderful little church. And then one out closer to Mount Vernon, but still about seven miles from his home, where they went. They didn’t go every Sunday, but then there wasn’t a minister there every Sunday. The minister came about every second Sunday. And that is almost the frequency with which they attended there. He would drive Martha. Or she would go in the wagon, and he would go on his horse.

Jeffrey: And later he eventually became a member of the vestry of that church?

Novak: Yes, when they decided to move the church and build a new one, he was the layman who, in a sense, took as much charge of the move as anybody else. Because he was the kind of man, his pastor said, the kind of parishioner you really hope for, that takes the responsibility and is regular in his service.

Jeffrey: He was deeply involved in the management and the affairs of his personal parish?

Novak: Of the church, yes. And lots of little gifts to the church--to both churches--to help their altar embroideries and things of that sort.

Jeffrey: Thanks to the Supreme Court over the last 70 years, and the modern liberal understanding, we have this view of separation of church and state that, I think, is quite different from what George Washington had. You, in your book--

Novak: Well, let me put it this way: He certainly didn’t want the state—well, I have to be careful: Because in Virginia there was an established church.

Jeffrey: Right, which was the one he belonged to.

Novak: Yes, it was the one he belonged to. But so did Madison, and Madison and Jefferson were two of the chief instruments of disestablishing the church. And that was fine with Washington. But he did believe in the importance of religion. He didn’t want the state to do what the church should do, or the church to do what the state should do. But he didn’t think a government like ours could survive unless the people had the qualities, the virtues, the character, which Judaism and Christianity tried to develop.

Jeffrey: Which, of course, he discussed in his Farewell Address. But before we get to that: You have in your book a number of orders he issued when he was general of the Continental Army. Let me just read you one. This was a general order of May 15, 1776.

Novak: He had to write that out by hand.

Jeffrey: He personally wrote this?

Novak: Yeah. The orders were written out—he may dictate them to his aide, but a permanent record is kept of those. So, you can always trace what happened day by day through these

Jeffrey: And there is no doubt that these are legitimate orders that Washington is giving to his army.

Novak: Right.

Jeffrey: Let me read you one from May 15, 1776, that you have in your book: “The General commands all officers, and soldiers, to pay strict obedience to the Orders of the Continental Congress, and by their unfeigned, and pious observance of their religious duties, incline the Lord, and Giver of Victory, to prosper our arms.” So, he’s actually ordering his troops to practice their religion?

Novak: Yeah. And he’s even giving an order about their inner life—that they should do it with sincerity, unfeigned. His idea here was a very simple one, that, look, if you don’t have a munitions factory on this side of the ocean, you don’t have an army, you don’t have a navy, and you are facing the greatest army and the greatest navy in the world with a bountiful supply of munitions coming over in these great ships, you better have faith in Divine Providence, because you’re really outmatched. As they argued in the Continental Congress, a number of the representatives: This is a foolish war for us to get in. How can we beat a power that nobody in Europe can beat?

But Washington thought and others thought that there are special advantages here and great disadvantages for the king. We think the king is on our side—I’m paraphrasing their thoughts—and maybe if we could only awaken him. We’re his subjects. We don’t belong to the parliament. If only he could awaken to what it is we want, and what we are doing. We’re not rebels. We are a united force wanting to remain loyal to him but with the rights of Englishmen, full rights of Englishmen. We don’t want Parliament to treat us like slaves. Of course, they never got through to the king. But that is the way they approached it, anyway.

Jeffrey: But here you have in this one year of 1776, Washington’s army escaping in this mysterious fog from Long Island back to Manhattan.

Novak: By the way, it doesn’t have to be a miracle.

Jeffrey: It doesn’t have to be.

Novak: If you’ve ever lived on Long Island, you get a lot of those fogs. But the timing was exquisite. That’s one thing that Washington believed about Providence: It wasn’t necessarily miraculous, but events conspired together to bring about a surprising thing.

Jeffrey: And at that very same time, this same general is telling his troops in orders that he thinks there might be a connection between their religious life and their virtue and how they live and whether or not the American cause succeeds.

Novak: Yes. How can they expect to have God bless America, how can they expect it, if they don’t live worthy of God? It’s empty words.

Jeffrey: Somehow, Ambassador Novak, I don’t think they are teaching this image of George Washington in our public schools today.

Novak: By the way, the used to until well into the 20th century. Washington was regarded by the vast majority of writers as a very religious man. It’s only as the 20th century went on that the balance of reporting tipped the other way.

Jeffrey: There has been a revisionist understanding of George Washington as modern liberalism and its antagonism toward religion has progressed?

Novak: But even Madison and Jefferson, both men were far more religious than the normal university professor is today.

Jeffrey: Even though they would have been on the religious left in terms of the spectrum of their day?

Novak: Well, Jefferson particularly was as much of an outlier. You take the 100 top Americans of the time, all those who signed the Constitution and the Declaration and a few others besides, Jefferson was the far most to the left, or to the right, whatever you want to call it, outside the consensus. He couldn’t even count on moving Virginia with him all the time, let alone Massachusetts and the other states.

Jeffrey: And he ended up being a rival of George Washington in many ways.

Novak: Yeah.

Jeffrey: At the end of the war, General Washington in 1783 wrote a circular letter to the states that you wrote about in your book.

Novak: Yes, a lovely letter.

Jeffrey: Let me quote from it: “I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the Field, and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

Novak: Now, I wonder who the Divine Author of our religion is?

Jeffrey: Who is He?

Novak: Any hint there about mercy and charity and love for one another, humility. There’s a few clues there as to just who it might be. It is not Thor.

Jeffrey: It’s not Thor.

Novak: It’s not Zeus.

Jeffrey: Well, it’s clearly Jesus Christ.

Novak: Of course it is.

Jeffrey: And he’s asking--This letter went out to the governors of the states?

Novak: Yes.

Jeffrey: And he’s asking them to imitate Jesus Christ?

Novak: Yes.

Jeffrey: This is the Founding Father, George Washington.

Novak: But that’s where he was. He later said to Delaware chiefs—To understand this, you have to see that because the Americans were various. Some were a new group, just beginning to form and grow large, the Baptists. Many were Anglicans, but many in New England were not Anglicans, they were dissidents from the Anglican Church. They were Puritans, the Church of Christ they later became. There were Presbyterians. There were Methodists—or beginning to be Methodists. And they all spoke of God a bit differently. And, thus, Washington, he’s the first one, even in his twenties, to govern a body of four hundred men from the frontier--rough people, unchurched usually because there were no churches out there--and he had to find some way to bring them together in psychology and moral and discipline. And here he would find nothing else that would work as well as Christian religion. So, he asked the assembly of Virginia to send him a chaplain for each unit. And throughout the war he kept that up. Every day they had to pray together. He thought that was extremely important.

Jeffrey: This common Christian faith was binding America together as a nation.

Novak: There were some reasons he gave why he liked his faith, why he found it so helpful to him. It’s not that it was an instrument for him, but it was reality, a greater reality, to which we paid deference and in return sought the help of that Providence. We may not get it. To be on the side of Providence is not necessarily to be on the side of the winners in the end.

Jeffrey: And Washington willingly accepted suffering when it came?

Novak: Oh, gosh, he took defeat after defeat after defeat and he still didn’t lose his trust in Providence. I was about to say that Providence is with you in defeat, so you shouldn’t be cast too low. And Providence is with you in victory, so you shouldn’t get to uppity. You shouldn’t let it go to your head. You should come down to the ground again. You should try to find your balance, your ballast, and try to do the will of God. He believed, as all the Americans believed, that God has to be on the side of liberty because the reason God created the world at all is so that somewhere in it there would be women and men who could freely accept his call to walk in friendship with him. That is the whole point of the universe. You may think it’s crazy. But that is why they thought they had a chance to beat the British.

Jeffrey: One the thing I found remarkable about this circular letter: I assume that he sent this out to the leaders of the states. This is the general that led their armies, he’s asking the political leaders to imitate Christ. And if they imitate Christ, we will be a happy nation. But we can’t hope to be a happy nation unless we do. The people who received this letter did not take this as odd or unusual or some sort of--

Novak: No, it’s the way one governor talks to another.

Jeffrey: In 1783.

Novak: Yeah, it’s not necessarily what they would expect from a leader on the battlefield, but on the other hand it’s not unexpected either.

Jeffrey: Later that decade they made this person the first president of the United States.

Novak: In a way you can look at that Circular Letter as the last Farewell Address—you know, from his service in the military. Well, that’s not quite right, he’s just giving a report to Congress.

Jeffrey: But it’s at the end of the hostilities, really.

Novak: Yes.

Published on CNSNews.com March 31, 2009

Help Us Choose the First Twenty Selections for the Catholic Family Classics Series

Catholicism is not just a “belief system” but a whole culture to be lived, a culture universal in time and range, an inexhaustible store of rich human living and reflecting, immensely creative and leavening among all other world cultures. For more than a decade, Ralph McInerny and I have been trying to find a publisher for a vital series of books that illuminate this cultural heritage. Tens of millions of Catholics do not know their own intellectual and artistic heritage and those who want to remedy the situation have pitifully little guidance. We believe this is a series that ought to be found in every Catholic home, school, and university library. We have finally found a publisher, Transaction Press, and preparing the first twenty volumes. Each volume will have a fresh introduction to help readers learn about the author, the setting, and the importance of the work. The series will be especially helpful for young people just beginning their intellectual inquiries, and for older adults who somehow missed out on these treasures.

Some might object to titles we are already choosing; others might wish to suggest others not here on our initial lists. Obviously, other editors might choose titles quite different from our choices. However, Ralph and I have experimented with many lists, taken titles off, putting other titles on. The decisions weren’t easy but we used the following criteria in making our choices:

(1) Each volume should bring pleasure, and in a fairly direct and clear way. Every user of the series should get a taste of some of the more difficult classics-but no so much as to turn them against the whole series. On the whole, the series must be accessible and inviting.

(2) Every short sequence in the series ought to include a variety of literary form-biography, fiction, poetry, philosophy-as well as providing a variety of experiences-some questioning of Catholic beliefs, some nourishment for the soul, and practical hints about how to deepen one’s mind and one’s faith.

(3) Those who use the series should feel they have been amply rewarded by the reading and that they have taken yet one more step in understanding the depth and breadth of the traditions of their Church’s history.

The following is a tentative list of the first twenty choices (we plan on expanding it to fifty) of our “Catholic Family Classics.” Please help us to amend it, and to strengthen it by helping us select competing alternatives. What books or selections would you include? Who would you want to see edit each volume and which authors should write the introductions?

We will gladly consider volunteers. The pay will not be great, but the service to Catholic history will be immeasurable. Please contact us at www.michaelnovak.net.

Catholic Family Classics - The First Twenty Selections

1. Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
2. The Best of Charles Peguy (God Speaks, Night, Mysticism & Politics)
3. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
4. The Inferno, Dante Aligheiri
5. Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain
6. The Making of Europe, Christopher Dawson
7. The Best of John Henry Newman (selections from The Idea of the University, Essay on the Development of Doctrine, and The Grammar of Assent)
8. The Best Catholic Mystery Writers, edited by Ralph McInerny
9. The Best of St. Augustine (selections from The Confessions, On the Trinity, On Time, The Two Cities)
10. The Best of Thomas Aquinas (selections from his Hymns, On Prudence, On Love and Charity, On the Bodily Senses and Imagination, On Beauty, On Law, on Reason and Faith, and Commentaries on Scripture)
11. The Best of St. Teresa of Avila
12. The Greatest Catholic Poems, edited by Dana Gioia
13. The Best of Georges Bernanos
14. The Best of St. Therese of Lisieux
15. The Best of G.K Chesterton
16. The Best of Gabriel Marcel
17. The Best of Alexis de Tocqueville (Religion and Democracy, Liberty and Equality, the French Revolution, Voluntary Associations, et al.)
18. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
19. The Best Catholic Short Stories, edited by Joseph Bottum
20. The Best of Lord Acton (Notes on the First Vatican Council, On the History of Liberty)

Published in First Things Online March 27, 2009

Ashes to Ashes

  At the heart of Christianity are sinners. It is a matter of simple self-knowledge that we have done things we know we ought not to have done, and have not done the things we know we should have done. The only honest thing to do is to repent. And try to do better.

Lent feels like the stern winds of March, testing the barren branches, snapping off the dead ones, chilling the live ones to the inner juices of spring, calling them to awaken.

The Good News is that God is not only the immense power of the hurricane and the swollen turbulent rolling seas. He is not only the Source of all good, attracting all things by His Beauty, as Plato conceived of Him (Aristotle, too).

The Good News is that He invites poor humans, alone of all creatures, to walk with Him as friends — if we choose. No liberty, no real friendship.

To accept being a friend of the Almighty Who rules the seas and the explosions of stars, the coming to be and the dissolution of vast galaxies — there is a destiny difficult to believe. It is obviously one of which we are in no way worthy. It is fear-causing, stunning us into silence.

For this reason, too, all around this hurtling Earth, Christians today wear ashes on our foreheads, in repentance for our many sins and in wonderment.

The able ones fast lightly and abstain from eating meat, to break from normal routines, as if to feel the cutting winds of this season calling the dead greens back toward life.

Read the entire symposium here.

Published in National Review Online February 26, 2009

Mushy Christianity

One of the greatest of recent seductions by that wily devil Screwtape – perfectly fitted to the times – is to puff a tiny sugar crystal of Christianity into sweetish airy cotton candy. “IN-clusiveness!” he will insist. “Christianity is about nothing if not IN-clusiveness.” That is how Screwtape sweet-talks you into affirming that some abomination (divorce, abortion, euthanasia, adultery, gay marriage) is, actually, included within the broad reach of Christian love. It would be positively un-Christian to think ill of that “abomination.” You should be ashamed you ever thought it was wrong. Are you a bigot or something?

“Strange!” I would have thought, “Christianity is about EX-clusion.” On the last day the Judge shall divide the world into sheep and goats, you over on the left, you over on the right. A few of you will be chosen to enter with me into Paradise. The rest will descend, as you have chosen, into everlasting punishment. I have come not to bring peace, but the sword. He who is not with me is against me. God sent His light into the darkness, and the darkness received it not. The gate is narrow, and the way is strait. Only a tiny remnant will be saved. There was much weeping, and tears, and gnashing of teeth.

You can look it up.

Take half an hour, skim through the gospels of Matthew and Mark. (Even more “un-Christian” are some of the Epistles of St. Paul.)

Screwtape has it all wrong. The moment you encounter someone stressing how IN-clusive Christianity is, walk away from him quickly, for the truth is not in him.

Conspicuously was this true of the infamous Newsweek article putting homosexual liaisons in paradise, and picturing marriage (in the Christian view) as a kind of hell. This article appeared at Christmastime – Christmastime! And it was later defended by the usually clear-eyed editor of Newsweek, John Meacham. That is the shrewdest sign of how skillful Screwtape is. He picks none but the best.

***

But another case: Much that passes today for “environmentalism” is exceedingly vulnerable to sudden and unexpected factual disproof. Old-fashioned preachments of hellfire and brimstone (in certain types of Christian churches in generations past) seem to have become a template for today’s dire depictions of the way the world will end all too soon.

If twenty years from now, however, world climate seems to have become dramatically colder year after year (temperatures have been flat or slightly cooler since 1997), and if more discoveries are made about the effect of activities within the Sun, which affect Ice Ages and Warming Ages on Earth, current panic may seem to have been exceedingly naive. Our children and grandchildren may look back at our gullibility with embarrassment. Or maybe not. The point is, to become careful and empirical and fact-oriented, not cause-oriented.

For myself (no scientist), I calculate that global cooling is more likely than global warming.

***

Mushy Christianity also results in obscurantist thinking about abortion. Some people think it is more “tolerant,” “broadminded”— more inclusive - to accept abortion as a new social reality. In fact, until 1973, nearly all jurisdictions in the United States regarded abortion as a disgusting violation of natural right. Alas, what our new abortion regime has done is narrow the circle of life and liberty.

This is liberal? This is Christian?

President Lincoln not only opposed slavery but also opposed the rights of states to have a “choice” in whether to permit slavery or not. His purpose in opposing both slavery and “choice” was to expand the circle of life and liberty. (No one can choose to put himself in slavery; no one can choose to abort himself; therefore, no one has the right to enslave or to abort anyone else.) The dismantling of the institution of slavery was, indeed, a liberal purpose, and a Christian one.

Again, on January 23, our new president reinstated the culture of death in American overseas programs and foreign aid. American tax money will again be used to pay for abortions overseas. “What is the solution,” I have often heard people overseas ask, “that the richest country on earth brings to the poorest peoples on this planet? Surely a wealthy and caring United States has something better to offer than to pay women of the neediest nations to kill their own children.” And to do so during the very months when the children are most defenseless, in their mother’s womb. Many here and abroad find this strategy disgusting.

Moreover, this crude procedure deprives poor peoples (colored peoples mostly) of the full talents and beauties these not-yet-born human individuals are poised to contribute to the world. Children are the greatest natural resource any nation inherits. Human capital is the greatest and most irreplaceable of all forms of capital. It is the chief cause of the wealth of nations.

Each of the discarded little boys and (mostly) girls possesses an utterly individual DNA. No other is quite like any one of them. Abortion deprives Earth of their creative gifts.

Christianity came into the world to relieve us from, not add to, these and many other forms of human mush.

Michael Novak’s website is www.michaelnovak.net and his wife’s is laub-novakartist.com/

Published in The Catholic Thing February 10, 2009

The Coming Fall

Lewes, Del. — My wife and I escaped from Washington out to the shore (at the Cape just where the Atlantic Ocean meets Delaware Bay), partly because we couldn’t face the traffic and large-scale “lock down” in which Washington, invaded by hundreds of thousands upon thousands, now finds itself. We were not permitted to drive downtown. Subways are jammed. My office is closed. Taxicabs are all occupied. But worst of all as we left town was the Leader-focused enthusiasm of the crowds, and the pre-inaugural grandiosity of the new president-elect.

At the pre-inauguration concert on the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial, dark red banners on the temporary stands of the amphitheater built for the occasion, with adulatory crowds packed into them, brought back ugly newsreel images from my childhood. The feeling expressed by many who were there and others who watched on television reveals a strain of messianism that ill becomes a democratic republic. It fits better with political systems based upon the cult of personality.

Every day, President-elect Obama was finding a new way to associate himself with Abraham Lincoln, the great hero of the American imagination, slain by an assassin’s bullet in Ford’s Theater in April of 1865.

Yet Lincoln was the first Republican president, not a Democrat. and he led the nation into what many thought was an unnecessary and unpopular war, the bloodiest war in the entire history of the United States, the Civil War of 1861–65, the War “to save the Union,” which also emancipated the slaves. Lincoln was the bravest, most long-suffering, and often in those days most popularly despised among all our presidents. Some 24 hours before President Obama gave his inaugural address someone on his staff said in the hearing of journalists that the new president fully expects some of his word to be one day chiseled in marble.

It may happen. But that pretension captured the pre-inaugual atmosphere. It was even believable, for the new president has proven to be a very eloquent speaker. Thus, no new president has ever come to Washington with higher standing in the popular polls, and higher expectations of a swift upturn in the nation’s well-being.

In January of the year 1993, I was called upon to give a talk at the Renaissance Weekend at which President-elect Bill Clinton and his “co-president” Hillary were present (two for the price of one, the campaigner had earlier quipped). I said on that occasion what I now repeat on this: There was too much enthusiasm in the air, and too much false association with the Camelot of John F. Kennedy so early in 1960. Every president in my adult lifetime, I said, has come in with high hopes and been dashed into humiliation before his term of office had concluded. Kennedy. Johnson. Nixon. Ford. Carter. Reagan (dimmed by Iran-Contra). Bush 41. Clinton. Bush 43. The job of president is to cope with his own coming tragedy. No man can fulfill all the hopes that go with the office. His own strengths often undo him.

President Obama’s great strengths are his capacity for myth-building and seduction, by sowing unreasonable hopes. His fall may be especially sad . . . even though he is likely to experience, before that, a run of good luck in the economy.

The run of good luck will show up when the economy slowly begins to turn upwards in June or July of this year, as the number of mortgage foreclosures of owner-occupied homes steadily falls. Mortgage companies are already resuming their traditional controls over credit, as in the more solid past, and they are now over-busy trying to handle a great wave of home-refinancing. Citizens are overwhelming national mortgage companies such as Wells Fargo (Des Moines) and USAA (the financial services company for the military, based in San Antonio) with applications for re-financing, as home owners rush to take advantage of the unusually low interest rates.

A number of banks and mortgage companies have announced that they are willing to write down hefty losses on loans they earlier and foolishly made. They judge it better to save what they can from their own bad decisions of the recent past. If this happens, many families will keep their homes, while paying interest on lower principal. And the banks will keep receiving steady income. A certain realism seems to be slowly overtaking the recent panic.

In addition, growth in productivity is still visible. Further, even though in the last six months the economy lost more than a million jobs, the number of Americans employed as 2009 begins is still higher than on January 21, 2000—by about 3 million on the Labor Department’s payroll survey, and by about 11 million on their household survey.

Moreover, it has been a mistake for Obama supporters to vent their anger at outgoing President Bush, by exaggerating the plight of our admittedly wounded economy. It is self-defeating to talk down the economy, while talking up the miracles about to be worked by President Obama. The inaugural address did not quite go that far, but it may have turned the tone of discussion in that direction.

To point now to existing strengths in the economy would have two advantages: it would help the new president change the national atmosphere, and it would be honest. It is time to shift from the negativism of campaigning to the realism of making things better, by building on existing strengths.

Another bit of good luck for the president will be a dramatic change in the attitude of the press. Beginning on Day One, the press will start focusing on optimism and magnifying every faintest sign of progress, in order to help President Obama. They will blow out the sails of his myth-making and miracle-working. All to the good! It beats unrelenting negativism.

American presidents are, inevitably, something like Christ figures. They must all suffer and, eventually, fall. Human nature, as the Poet says, cannot bear too much success.

We may hope that the new president, who has an acute mind, recognizes what fate has in store for him—and puts if off as long as he can by adjusting the myths under which he campaigned, to the realities of the way the world works. There are signs he has already begun that (in protecting the transition in Iraq, in defending the homeland against terrorist attacks, in seeking the economic benefits of low tax rates, just to mention a few just now in evidence). The new sober tone of the inaugural may be a further indication.

But there are other signs he and his team have a lot to learn, in order to come down to the world as it is. He has already seriously neglected some of the traditional courtesies and deferences that a president owes to individual Senators, his team has failed properly and solidly to vet several of his cabinet choices. His mantra of “change” is indiscriminate and myth-building. There are many solid rocks in American life that, his inaugural address affirmed, he would not want to change.

Also, we Americans inherit a happy tradition, which it is good to see the new administration celebrating. Abraham Lincoln once taught us that being born in a log cabin in the hard-scrabble hills of Kentucky was no bar to being elected president of the United States. Power has been peacefully handed off from one administration to another 44 times in American history (including the first to take up this office, George Washington, who was handed off power peacefully by a new Constitution). It has usually been done with a personal courtesy and a popular enthusiasm about which the Constitution is silent—unless one counts the Constitution written down in American hearts and mores. Leges sine moribus vanae. (Laws cut off from mores are empty.)

These lessons of principle and of tradition—and many other practical ones learned by presidents down the years (about appeasement, about the effects of government spending on inflation, etc.) — Obama is now in a position to learn, if he chooses to do so. Traditions live only by changing. But where to prune and where to let live is the highest of human arts, Aristotle taught.

So, as the earliest Americans greeted Washington, for Obama, too: “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!” Plus also a little sadness for what must come.

Published in National Review Online January 23, 2009

March for Life

This afternoon, EWTN broadcasted the March for Life. I watched for nearly three hours as the march just kept streaming up the street, often as many as fifteen abreast. As we think of the first African-American president in history, our minds drift to one class of Americans who will never be allowed to become president—the 45 million lives aborted in the womb since 1972.

Has it touched the heart of our first African-American president that the largest single number of the aborted are black children in the womb—13 million of them? These are children who will never be allowed to achieve the dreams they would have developed. These are children who will never be able to vote. These are children whose unique contributions to American politics, the arts, our culture, and the many different professions and occupations of our working lives will never come to full bloom.

I think many are now praying that the eyes of Barack and Michelle Obama will be opened and that they will not seek to narrow the circle the number of Americans whose rights are protected in law, but rather to widen the circle so that the rights of these great potential talents and loving persons will be protected during the months of their greatest vulnerability.

Published in National Review Online's Blog The Corner January 22, 2009

Studying Obama's Rhetoric

The change from President Obama's campaign rhetoric to his presidential rhetoric is striking. The change was, in fact, so abrupt that the vast crowd seemed largely puzzled by it, and applause was neither frequent nor greatly animated—even though the pilgrims on the cold two-mile Mall seemed ready to burst out with emotion. The presidential Inaugural was quite conservative in its vision of "revolution," in the distinctly American way. For us, from the beginning, revolution has always meant re-volution, from the Latin for "turn back to one's beginnings" as a wheel turns around from top to bottom and back to the top again. The reason Americans do this is that they love this nation's first principles, the origin of its idealism and its energy. As the motto on the Seal of the United States says, "Annuit Coeptis," that is, "Providence smiled on our beginnings or, better, on the principles in which we were conceived."

President Obama's rhetoric about these first principles had the ring of a political conservative—its emphasis upon founding principles, tradition, patriotism, courage, honesty, and responsibility. His rhetoric was not nearly so much Big-Government oriented as his campaign speech had been. He praised the market as having no peer in its ability to favor the creation of new wealth and the expansion of liberty. He seemed to set both government and the market as co-equals. The principle he chose for giving priority, case by case, to one dynamism or the other was "what works."

His turn of thought and phrase here was, it seemed to me, a good deal more Burkean than most of today's liberals know how to feel and speak. He did not show quite the fear of the self-aggrandizement of government that conservatives have traditionally invoked, in order to encourage vigilance. But he was far more cautious than utopian liberals about how well the government can actually function.

The address itself was far more pedestrian than I had expected, far less given to stirring utopian flights than his campaign speeches generally were. It was often given to easy clichés—about shadows, storms, and onward marches despite the odds. There were a few quite eloquent passages as the Address approached its conclusion, passages summoning witnesses from the past to stir contemporary hearts with love for first principles and for personal responsibility.

I suspect that the address did more to reassure conservatives than to excite liberals; and that those farther left might have felt the stirrings of anxiety about it.

Rhetorically, at least, between election day on the first Tuesday of November and his swearing in on the third Tuesday of January, Obama has made quite a turn in the direction of realism, and away from his earlier soaring utopianism.

On these points, there may be a churning interior struggle in his own heart.

Published in National Review Online's Blog The Corner January 20, 2009

The Use of Religious Studies

Nothing is less certain over time than the certainties of successive generations. Each generation tends to be wrong in a different way. Between the end of World War II and 1971, when I published Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Introduction to Religious Studies, many great secular universities neglected the living realities of religion, believing that religion would soon vanish from history, i.e., the “secularization hypothesis.” Its proponents didn’t anticipate the decline in the self-confidence of secularism after 1975, partly from the rise of post-modernism and other such attacks (feminism and some black studies advocates, too) upon human reason, and partly from the very real upsurge of religious energy in many places around the world. Europe, indeed, became more secular, but in the United States a broad religious awakening was gathering force. The civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-Vietnam War movement often found themselves using churches for their meetings and religious leaders as sponsors of training sessions and seminars. The growing sense of the inner emptiness of modern secular culture drove a significant number of secular Jews into a reinvestigation of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition, and many Catholics and Protestants drifted back towards religious engagement. By 1971, departments of religious studies were beginning to open at secular universities, and journalists seemed to write more and more stories about the internal and external dramas of religious awakening. The secularization hypothesis seemed to have gotten things exactly backwards. Secularism, its inner vitality played out, was beginning to decline, while religion was turning out to be far more dramatic. The belated turn towards religious studies revealed realities of intense interest to investigators.

Religion even seemed to have become in a way the center of the action. On the negative side, the orange flames and brown-black smoke at the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, shocked even some of the most distinguished secularization proponents in Europe. For the first time, some recognized that their small secular world was only an island in a vast turbulent sea of highly differentiated religious energy. The rapid growth of Christianity in coercively secular China, and vastly more so in Africa, slowly came to be acknowledged.

Even in Europe, intellectuals who consider themselves secular (like Jurgen Habermas in Germany, and Marcello Pera in Italy, both of whom have been in serious dialogue with Benedict XVI) have stated publicly that many Enlightenment ideals such as “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” owe their origins to Jewish and Christian aspirations, as do “compassion” and “solidarity.” The dream of a merely “secular” world was an illusion.

Initially, this new branch of investigation, “Religious Studies,” was created to do two things. First, these new departments would teach about all religions, not one only, and even about unbelief itself, as one choice among many for seeing and living life. Second, their subject matter and methods would differ from those of the schools of divinity and traditional courses in theology that had appeared here and there since the earliest days of the founding of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other early universities. The new point of view would shift from one strong, enduring tradition, to learning to “cross over” (intellectually) from one tradition to another, for purposes of enriching students’ comprehension of each.

For example, Jewish students would gain some understanding of the way Christians of different varieties approach life’s big questions; Christian students would gain a better comprehension of how Jews read the Bible, and divide into secular and religious; departments would also deal with how unbelievers cope with questions of evil, suffering, loss, and personal moral fault. Today, re-reading my short book some thirty-eight years later, I find that the tools it presents for identifying one’s standpoint and horizon, and the horizons of others, are still highly useful: “standpoint” and “horizon” themselves need defining, as do terms such as experiencing, imagining, understanding, judging, and deciding to act. The same goes for grasping the twists and turns of narrative or “story” in each of our lives. At age thirty, though we are much the same person we were at twenty, in some ways we will have changed quite a lot – in our standpoint, in our horizon, and perhaps in our habits. I have certainly experienced such changes, along with such continuities, over the past four decades.

“Religious Studies” is not the deepest way to study religious vitality. “Theology” is deepest, and the theology of a specific tradition at that because, at the end of the day, there is no generic religion, but a set of particular faiths that engage in reasoned reflection on their own religious traditions, together with respectful reasoning about other major traditions. It is an always incomplete exercise and some have criticized it because it may suggest that all traditions are equally true – or false. But properly understood, it is an inescapable part of the modern world that we be aware both of ourselves and of our relations with others, and here as in much else, we should not let the best become the enemy of the good.

(c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing January 15, 2009

A Second Brother Dies

For the second time, my brother Richard has died, first my blood brother Father Richard Novak in January many years ago in Bangladesh, now today Father Richard John Neuhaus in New York City. Surrounded by many of his friends and surviving family, Fr. Neuhaus died peacefully in his sleep, having been unconscious since the day before. He had been hospitalized Dec. 26 for the second (and last) time in recent weeks. Not long after having been diagnosed with a serious cancer about a month ago, he fell ill under a severe infection that (if I understand correctly) refused to be stopped, and slowly spread until it reached his heart.

It has been a very long time (if ever) since any American Catholic priest had as much influence in the Vatican, in the highest reaches of American life, on the intellectual culture of Christianity here and abroad, on Christian-Jewish conversations of the deepest and warmest sort, on the relations of Evangelicals and Catholics in this land, and on the intellectual life of his beloved New York City, which he first began to serve almost fifty years ago as a Lutheran pastor in a large black church in Brooklyn.

He died short of his 73nd birthday, which falls on May 14.

Neuhaus founded the journal First Things in 1990.Fr. Neuhaus was the best leader of a seminar that many participants in his many seminars had ever experienced. He seemed always to be in the lead of important moral, religious, and political movements, often even years before others came to see any such need. Friends teased him that Martin Luther nailed a mere 95 theses in one manifesto on a church door in Wittenburg, whereas Fr. Richard seemed to draft whole manifestos every three or four years. For instance, on the non-negotiables of Christian Faith, on religious liberty, on what was morally wrong with the conduct of the war in Vietnam, on ecumenical study and conversation, on Evangelical-Catholic cooperation, on abortion and other pro-life issues, and so forth.

He was many times a guest at the table of Pope John Paul II, and at least once, before he became Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was speaker, seminar-leader and guest of Father Richard at his Institute for Public Life in Manhattan.

The cherished center of the public life of Fr. Neuhaus has been the monthly journal First Things, which many around the world take to be the most serious and best religious publication in the entire English-speaking world – and perhaps without rival in any language. His own monthly round-up in that journal The Public Square always took up ample space, showed the most amazing wide range of reading and witty prose, and was by far the best-read section of each monthly issue. Its readers felt that no one they knew was in touch with as many vital cultural currents and on such a deep level, and wrote about them with equal wryness, humor, and adroit puncturing of pretence.

Richard Neuhaus always followed where the best evidence available to him called. He moved to the radical side of the critique of the too-complacent liberalism of the late 1960s, and then slowly toward the criticism of radicalism when it lost its Christian moorings, and drifted before the winds of unguided passion and political fantasy.

He bore with grace the charge of having become “neo-conservative,” when the term was intended as an insult, and even turned that charge into a positive advantage, carving out a new blend of Christian orthodoxy and political realism. Increasingly, he regained his love for the nobility of the American experiment, a term he understood with all its attendant ironies.

He was a great friend to Martin Luther King, William F. Buckley, Jr., Peter Berger and many other great public spirits of our time. In fact, few people in the world have shown his talent for friendship. Even fewer have a heartier laugh or a more frequent witticism. Almost none have his range of serious reading and profound observation. His judgment on ideas and events was unusually compelling and often much more on target than that of others. He welcomed objection, criticism, and open disagreement, taking all of them in generously and well, even when he sometimes felt their sting.

He was an extraordinary pastor of souls. He influenced, even directed, some thousands of personal voyages through dark and dubious times, and spoke with immediacy to many troubled hearts. He encouraged many budding talents, and gave many young writers (and preachers and others) a first start.

Brought up as the son of a Lutheran pastor, the younger Neuhaus was nourished from his seminary days on by the community of those Lutherans who held that the aim of Luther was to bring the Catholic Church back to fidelity to its origins, and who were deeply committed to a much-desired reunion of the two separated communities. Painfully, the younger Pastor Neuhaus came to judge that nowadays the Catholic Church was ever more serious about such self-reform, just as some key leaders among Lutherans were drifting toward not concretely wanting such unity, in any case not soon. He felt obliged to follow his vocation to join the Catholic Church, not as a conversion, but as a public declaration of what he had always believed. He did so despite a certain cultural resistance from others, even in his new communion.

Father Neuhaus was the most consequential Christian intellectual in America since Reinhold Niebuhr. He was the most consequential Catholic since John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Fulton J. Sheen. He was a worthy successor in a long chain of great witnesses.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board at First Things, is a scholar in residence at the American Enterprise Institute.

Published in National Catholic Reporter January 8, 2009