I learned today that Richard John Neuhaus died Thursday. Here, for my convenience, are links to WSJ articles about him in Friday’s paper:

• Rev. Neuhaus, an Influential Catholic Conservative, Dies (AP article)
• Restless Intellectual Yoked Catholics and Evangelicals by Stephen Miller
• Father Richard John Neuhaus: A Man Animated by His Faith by Raymond Arroyo
• The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s by Richard John Neuhaus

Before I go to read these articles, I’ll mention that I had not paid a lot of attention to him until he turned conservative (sort of) though I had known of him before that. I started paying more attention to him after I had pretty well recovered from my own bout of left-liberalism during the McGovern-Nixon days.

He was a pastor in the same church organization where I got my undergraduate education. Some of the more liberal pastors who had known him in seminary days and during the civil rights conflicts, and who had thought of him as a kindred spirit, were puzzled and dismayed when they found him serving as religion editor at National Review. Then he was no longer at National Review, but had become a Roman Catholic priest, which puzzled some of the more conservative pastors.

When I asked one pastor just what his pastoral duties were that they would allow him to keep the kind of schedule he did, I was told that in the negotations by which he entered the Catholic Church that he was given carte blanche to do almost anything he wanted.

Yes, I know. You don’t enter the church through negotiations. So that’s probably a crass way of putting it. And I don’t know if this was true or not, or how the teller knew about this, but he was in more of a position to know than I was.

I occasionally looked at Neuhaus’s First Things magazine, and even wanted to blog about one article that appeared there recently. Never got around to it, and never got around to learning a lot of things about Father Neuhaus, though I have a feeling it would have been better if I had. Maybe it’s not too late.