[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 7 (Tuesday, January 13, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E78-E79]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                IN MEMORY OF FATHER RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 13, 2009

  Mr. WOLF. Madam Speaker, I rise today in memory of Father Richard 
John Neuhaus who passed away on January 7, 2009. Father Neuhaus was a 
man of great intellect and a prolific writer who defined the terms of 
the modern debate regarding the role of religion in public life. His 
work inspired a countless number of individuals and his legacy which is 
grounded in his deep faith in God will live on for years to come. The 
following piece which appeared in the January 19 edition of Newsweek is 
a fitting tribute to the life and work of Father Neuhaus.

                     [From Newsweek, Jan. 19, 2009]

    Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009--An Honorable Christian Soldier

                           (By George Weigel)

       Father Richard John Neuhaus's work will be remembered and 
     debated for decades. As a Lutheran pastor, he was one of the 
     first civil-rights activists to identify the pro-life cause 
     with the moral truths for which he and others had marched in 
     Selma; he set the terms of the contemporary American church-
     state debate and added a new phrase to our public vocabulary 
     with his 1984 bestseller, ``The Naked Public Square.'' As a 
     Catholic priest, he helped define new patterns of theological 
     dialogue between Catholics and evangelicals, and between 
     Christians and Jews. The journal he launched in the early 
     1990s, First Things, quickly became, under his leadership and 
     inspiration, the most important vehicle for exploring the 
     tangled web of religion and society in the English-speaking 
     world. All of this suggests that Richard Neuhaus was, 
     arguably, the most consequential public theologian in America 
     since the days of Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray, 
     S.J.
       He was also a marvelous human being, with the convictions 
     of a true Christian disciple and the heart of a spiritually 
     insightful pastor. In the retrospect of the death of my 
     closest professional friend on Jan. 8, his living room--in 
     which we prayed, argued,

[[Page E79]]

     laughed and planned for more than 30 years--strikes me as a 
     concise summary of the man.
       Over the fireplace hung an old etching of Jerusalem, 
     identical to that which once adorned the office of Teddy 
     Kollek, the city's longtime mayor: for Neuhaus lived, thought 
     and wrote within a thoroughly biblical cast of mind, in which 
     the earthly Jerusalem represents the New Jerusalem of the 
     Book of Revelation--the fulfillment of humanity's deepest 
     spiritual longings. On one wall was an abstract, modernistic 
     print of a boy riding a Chagall-like bird: ``That's little 
     Dickie Neuhaus,'' he once told me, ``riding the Holy 
     Spirit.'' A Byzantine icon of his patron, the apostle John, 
     marked another wall, with a vigil light burning before it; 
     Richard used to joke that his Lutheran pastorate, the church 
     of St. John the Evangelist in the then desperately poor 
     Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, was ``St. John the 
     Mundane,'' as distinguished from the Episcopalian Cathedral 
     of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights. There was a 
     colossal sound system, for he loved music, especially Bach; 
     there were bookcases containing the Lutheran Book of Worship, 
     from which he and the ecumenical Community of Christ in the 
     City, with whom he lived, prayed vespers every evening, 
     before and after his reception into the Catholic Church; and 
     there were ample supplies of bourbon and cigars, both of 
     which Richard regarded as essential complements to the 
     ongoing, boisterous conversation that was his intellectual 
     and spiritual lifeblood.
       For a man of sharply expressed opinions, he was also a 
     skilled listener and a gentle counselor, with a particular 
     care for helping young men and women figure out what God had 
     in mind for their lives. In the Catholic phase of his 
     ministry, which began after his ordination by Cardinal John 
     O'Connor in 1991, an act which he regarded as completing his 
     commitment to Lutheranism as a reform movement within the one 
     Church of Christ, he served a working-class parish, as he had 
     done as a Lutheran; in both cases, he declined to preach 
     ``down'' to his congregations, such that his challenging 
     sermons deepened many people's faith. He was generous in 
     supporting the poor throughout the world, giving away a 
     significant portion of his lecture fees and book royalties.
       Richard Neuhaus was also an American patriot with a 
     critical love for the country to which he moved, permanently, 
     at age 15, after a rambunctious childhood and adolescence in 
     Pembroke, Ontario, where his father was a Lutheran pastor. As 
     a teenager, he ran a filling station in Cisco, Texas--likely 
     the only counselor of two popes and several presidents who 
     ever joined the Texas Chamber of Commerce at age 16. His 
     distinguished career as a public intellectual led some to 
     think that he was embroidering things a bit when he claimed 
     he had never graduated from high school; but he hadn't.
       He had the remarkable, and mathematically counterintuitive, 
     ability to multiply his enthusiasm and energy while dividing 
     it with others. That was a grace. And that is one of the many 
     reasons why so many of us will miss him as we shall miss few 
     others.

                          ____________________