First Things and Last Things
by Fr. Roger Landry - January 16, 2009
On Tuesday I traveled to Immaculate Conception Church in Manhattan for the funeral of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor-in-chief of First Things magazine, author of over 30 books, counselor and friend to presidents and popes, leading commentator on religion and society, famous convert, dedicated ecumenist and faithful priest. Though born and raised a Canadian Lutheran, he became, by God's grace and plans, one of the most influential American Catholic priests of the last fifty years. I was also privileged to call him a friend.
I met him for the first time in November 1997, when Pope John Paul II appointed him a delegate to the Vatican's Synod on America. Like most of the American Synod delegates, he stayed at the North American College, where I was preparing for the priesthood. The day of his arrival, he had trouble with his email connections on his laptop. He mentioned this to the rector who suggested that I might be able to give him a hand. I was very happy to be asked and happier still to get his computer working. As he thanked me, he mentioned that he was having a few friends over to his spartan seminary guest room later than night and wondered if I might want to join them.
Over the course of the next 27 days, I became a regular visitor to these informal nightly get-togethers at which he blended the many friends he had living in or visiting Rome with a few seminarians and priests from the College to talk about the issues that the Synod was confronting as well as the larger problems facing the Church and the world. With a cigar in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other, he served as an informal seminar leader. He proposed topics, listened, questioned, and gave his opinions. Especially with the seminarians, he seemed to want us to share the experiences of the Synod because he knew that God had called us to be part of the solution to several of the issues that the prelates and experts were discussing during the day.
A few years later, in July 2001, our friendship had a chance to grow during a three-week program in Krakow, Poland called the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society. Founded by Fr. Neuhaus and four others, it annually brings together ten North Americans and twenty central and eastern Europeans to discuss the cultural, economic, political and religious foundations of a free society. As great as the classroom instruction, pilgrimages and fellow students were, what I remember most was what I called "night school," when Fr. Neuhaus and George Weigel would host an outdoor table in Krakow's main square for some of us in the program. For two to three hours each night, we would nurse Polish beer and discuss the past, present and future.
It was there that Fr. Neuhaus told me at length about his background and his principal learning experiences. I was somewhat surprised to discover that he had left home at 14, got thrown out of high school for organizing beer parties in Nebraska at 15, bought a gas station in Texas at 16, was able to talk his way into Lutheran seminary at 18 despite not having a high school diploma, marched with Martin Luther King, protested the Vietnam War, was arrested for a sit-in demanding the integration of New York public schools, served as a delegate for Humphrey to the 1968 Democratic Convention, ran for Congress as a radical, was pastor to a large and predominantly black Lutheran congregation in Brooklyn and was considered a general all-around-liberal "revolutionary."
He told me how the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion changed things for him. He had always thought that the pro-life position should be a "liberal" one, because liberals are supposed to have a heart for the little guy, but when his fellow liberals started to defend the freedom to destroy the littlest human beings of all, he began to feel a gradual distance from them. When liberals in President Carter's administration began to push radical ideas on the family, he shifted political allegiances and threw his support to Ronald Reagan. In 1984, he wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square, to oppose the militant secularization of our culture forced on us by activist courts at the instigation of legal groups like the ACLU with their faulty interpretation of the first Amendment. Not only was this secularism incompatible with the vision of the Founding Fathers, Fr. Neuhaus forcefully argued, but it would bring dire consequences if allowed to continue, putting at risk the religious dynamism that De Tocqueville praised and that fueled Lincoln, Martin Luther King and so many of the other great figures and moments in our nation's history.
He also told me during night school about the details of becoming Catholic in 1990 — what he called his "embrace" of Catholicism rather than his "conversion," because he saw the Catholic Church as the fulfillment of what he had believed all along as a Lutheran. He had held out hope that he might be able to be an instrument of God in the reconciliation of Catholics and Lutherans, but when he realized that many other Lutherans did not share the same zeal for unity, he became the Catholic he considered himself always to have been. A year after he was received by John Cardinal O'Connor into the Catholic Church, O'Connor ordained him a priest.
As a priest he was, above all other things, a man and teacher of prayer. Whenever my annual summer priests' course was in New York City, I would send him an email to see if we could get together. When he was in town, he would invariably invite me over to his apartment for evening prayer and dinner. The young adults living in his brownstone would come for the vespers, singing hymns and the antiphonal psalms, and generally pouring themselves into the prayer in imitation of the priest who was leading them.
At one of these dinners I asked him his secret for being so prodigious a reader and writer. His response I took initially as a non-sequitur, until I had a chance to reflect on it more and put it into practice. His secret, he told me, was to make sure he did his morning prayer before he began to read the newspaper. Once he had put God first and received his help for the day, he could then get to the work God was asking him to do with greater concentration. God seemed to multiply his efforts.
One of our mutual friends, who was with him to the end, told me that as his mental capacities were beginning to shut down, the one thing he continued to do lucidly was to pray his breviary.
Because he was a man of prayer, he was peaceful in life and as he approached death. In the February edition of First Things, his final entry, written before Christmas, talked about last things, what he was facing and how he was facing it.
"Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much that I hope to do in the interim. … This is not a farewell. Please God, we will be pondering together the follies and splendors of the Church and the world for years to come. But maybe not. … The entirety of [my] prayer is 'Your will be done' — not as a note of resignation but of desire beyond expression. To that end, I commend myself to your intercession, and that of all the saints and angels who accompany us each step through time toward home."
I pray that this good disciple, faithful priest, bold apostle and friend is now experiencing the fulfillment of that "desire beyond expression" in the Father's house.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
