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"Our
Great, Good Friend is Gone"
Part
Two of Three
Joseph Bottum, editor of "First
Things," breaking the news that Fr. Richard John
Neuhaus had died.
I was struck by how many people
wrote back yesterday to say that losing Fr.
Neuhaus was almost like losing a family member.
They said they had devoured each issue of his
monthly "First Things" magazine and because his
writing was so clear and gripping (particularly
"The Public Square"), they came to feel that
they almost knew him.
John Podhoretz, blogging at
commentarymagazine.com/blog, described Fr.
Neuhaus as "perhaps the most important and
influential religious intellectual in the United
States since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr."
That's pretty rarified air, but the compliment
is more than justified.
Fr. Neuhaus understood as well as
anyone I've ever known how deeply abortion had
wounded our nation. He wrote over and over and
over again (as he explained in his speech to the
2008 NRLC convention) that ours is "the great
human rights cause of our time and all
times--the cause of life." (See
Part Three.)
Let me elaborate on that great
insight. First, atrocities such as abortion
start with an implicit or explicit commitment to
the dangerous-beyond-words idea that there are
lives "unworthy to be lived." In the abortion
context this is most obvious in the
determination to search and destroy any unborn
child unwise enough to be genetically
"imperfect."
But unworthy can also mean not
worth the effort. In a crisis pregnancy
situation, is that child "worth the effort" to
go through hard times? Embarrassment? Criticism?
Each day, every day, our job is to help these
young girls and women understand that their
little one is worth the effort.
Second, way back in 1988,
Fr. Neuhaus wrote an essay that appeared in the
April issue of Commentary magazine, "The Return
of Eugenics." He penned this sentence which I
have never forgotten. "Thousands of ethicists
and bioethicists, as they are called,
professionally guide the unthinkable on its
passage through the debatable on its way to
becoming the justifiable, until it is finally
established as the unexceptional."
As it happens I know several
bioethicists fairly well. I have no doubt that
they are good fathers, faithful husbands, and
kind to their dogs.
But as I have corresponded back
and forth with them, I've been utterly
amazed--stunned, actually--by what often comes
out of their mouths. It's a gross understatement
to say it's the "quality of life" ethos on
steroids.
They are unwaveringly committed
to "helping" the less-than-perfect exit this
world. Worse than that, they are on a perpetual
hunt to find more categories of people to
"help." And they see utterly nothing
wrong with their enterprise.
Fr. Neuhaus often talked of how
pro-lifers had been "recruited." Most of us
don't join because we have a road to Damascus
experience--that moment of recognition when we
can no longer deny the evil that has been
unloosened.
But some of us do. Fr. Neuhaus'
came when he was pasturing a "very poor, very
black inner city parish" in Brooklyn. He read an
article by one of those typically elitist types,
about the qualifications for "A Life Worth
Living." Neuhaus told us,
"And I remember vividly, as though it were
yesterday, looking out the next Sunday morning
at the congregation of St. John the Evangelist
and seeing all those older faces creased by
hardship endured and injustice afflicted, and
yet radiating hope undimmed and love
unconquered. And I saw that day the younger
faces of children deprived of most, if not all,
of those qualifications on Prof. Montagu's
list. And it struck me then, like a bolt of
lightning, a bolt of lightning that illuminated
our moral and cultural moment, that Prof.
Montagu and those of like mind believed that the
people of St. John the Evangelist--people whom I
knew and had come to love as people of faith and
kindness and endurance and, by the grace of God,
hope unvanquished--it struck me then that, by
the criteria of the privileged and enlightened,
none of these my people had a life worth living.
In that moment, I knew that a great evil was
afoot.
Fr.
Neuhaus fought that evil until the day he died.
As we recall and remember a life of service
lived well, let us follow his example.
Part One
Part Three |
