AND SOMETIMES LAST THINGS:

Richard John Neuhaus, 1936–2009 (Joseph Bottum, January 8, 2009, First Things)

Our great, good friend is gone.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus slipped away today, January 8, shortly before 10 o’clock, at the age of seventy-two. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering. He lost consciousness Tuesday evening after a collapse in his heart rate, and soon after, in the company of friends, he died.

My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted.

I weep, rather for all the rest of us. As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place. The fabric of life has been torn by his death, and it will not be repaired, for those of us who knew him, until that time when everything is mended and all our tears are wiped away.

Funeral arrangements are still being planned; information about the funeral will be made public shortly. Please accept our thanks for all your prayers and good wishes.

In Deepest Sorrow,

Joseph Bottum
Editor
First Things

Born Toward Dying (Richard John Neuhaus, February 2000, First Things)

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.

Such is the generality, the warp and woof of everyday existence with which the wise have learned to live. But then our wisdom is shattered, not by a sudden awareness of the generality but by the singularity of a death—by the death of someone we love with a love inseparable from life. Or it is shattered by the imminent prospect of our own dying. With the cultivated complacency of the mass murderer that he was, Josef Stalin observed, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The generality is a buffer against both guilt and sorrow. It is death in the singular that shatters all we thought we knew about death. It is death in the singular that turns the problem of death into the catastrophe of death. Thus the lamentation of Dietrich von Hildebrand: “I am filled with disgust and emptiness over the rhythm of everyday life that goes relentlessly on—as though nothing had changed, as though I had not lost my precious beloved!” [...]

A measure of reticence and silence is in order. There is a time simply to be present to death—whether one’s own or that of others—without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it. The Preacher had it right: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” The time of mourning should be given its due. One may be permitted to wonder about the wisdom of contemporary funeral rites that hurry to the dancing, displacing sorrow with the determined affirmation of resurrection hope, supplying a ready answer to a question that has not been given time to understand itself. One may even long for the Dies Irae, the sequence at the old Requiem Mass. Dies irae, dies illa / Solvet saeclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla: “Day of wrath and terror looming / Heaven and earth to ash consuming / Seer’s and Psalmist’s true foredooming.”

The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter.

It was always odd to hear him classed with the neocons, because his theology clearly differentiated him (Thus the break because they didn't believe abortion mattered much and he that it mattered utterly). Indeed, he was one of the pivotal figures in theoconservatism. Significantly, George W. Bush is of the latter, not the former.

His Death on a Friday Afternoon is a particularly generous and profound book. Likewise, his essay, “Salvation Is from the Jews” (Richard John Neuhaus, November 2001, First Things) should be read by all Christians and Jews, because it reconciles us so dispositively.

MORE:
-TRIBUTE: In Memoriam: Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) (George Weigel, 01/08/09, First Principles)

Theologian, author, editor, and activist, Richard John Neuhaus has been a central figure in debates about religion and American public life for more than a generation. Neuhaus’s 1984 study, The Naked Public Square, recast the argument about the proper relationship of church and state, warned against the advance of a judicially imposed secularism in America, and assessed the new activism of evangelicals and fundamentalists in national politics. In The Catholic Moment (1987), Neuhaus proposed that this ought to be the time in which “the Roman Catholic Church in the United States assumes its rightful [leading] role in the culture-forming task of constructing a religiously informed public philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty.” Neuhaus has also made important contributions to the dialogue between Jews and Christians in America.

-OBIT: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus dead at age 72 (JOHN L. ALLEN JR., Jan. 8, 2009, National Catholic Reporter)
-TRIBUTE: A Tribute to Father Neuhaus (Peter Wehner, 1/08/09, National Review)
-TRIBUTE: Pro-Life Catholic Luminary Father Richard John Neuhaus Dies After Cancer Battle (Steven Ertelt, 1/08/09, LifeNews.com)
-TRIBUTE: The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus dies at 72 (Michael Paulson, January 8, 2009, Boston Globe: Articles of Faith)
-OBIT: Richard John Neuhaus dies of cancer (Victor Morton and Julia Duin, 1/08/09, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
-OBIT: Editor of First Things, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus passes away (Catholic News Agency, 1/08/09)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 8, 2009 2:10 PM