THEO, NOT NEO:

By the mid-1970s, like many of the former liberals who formed the core of the neoconservative movement, he had become disillusioned with campus politics. He was unhappy with the continuing changes generated by the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II. He was gripped, he said in a talk at the University of Notre Dame in 1998, by "a powerful intellectual conviction that the left was wrong about virtually every big issue of our time: the Soviet Union, the North Vietnamese regime, economics, welfare, race, and moral questions such as abortion, amnesty, acid and the sexual revolution."

In "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" (1982) he mounted a defense of capitalism as a morally superior system based on liberty, individual worth and Judeo-Christian principles. It was, he insisted, the only economic system capable of lifting the poor from misery and of encouraging moral growth. Samuel McCracken, in Commentary magazine, called the book "a stunning achievement" and "perhaps the first serious attempt to construct a theology of capitalism."

Mr. Novak elaborated and extended this argument in several books, notably "The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1993). It argued that capitalism's most powerful underlying forces were not self-denial and discipline, as Max Weber had maintained in his classic 1905 work "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," but the "social dimensions of the free economy" and the free play of creativity -- both rooted, as Mr. Novak saw it, in Catholic ethics.

"Capitalism forms morally better people than socialism does," Mr. Novak said in a 2007 interview with Crisis, a magazine he and the scholar Ralph McInerny founded in 1982. "Capitalism teaches people to show initiative and imagination, to work cooperatively in teams, to love and to cherish the law; what is more, it forces persons not only to rely on themselves and their own moral qualities, but also to recognize those moral qualities in others and to cooperate with others freely."

His ideas found a receptive ear among free-market devotees and conservative politicians around the world, as well as Eastern European leaders emerging from the former Soviet empire, like Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia.

Among his most fervent admirers was Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister. Mr. Novak, she wrote in "The Downing Street Years," "put into new and striking language what I had always believed about individuals and communities." His description of capitalism as a moral and social system as well as an economic one, she wrote, "provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as 'the quality of life.'"

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