Farewell To A Dupe

Father Richard John Neuhaus, someone who this USA Today post called, “a ‘key architect’ in aligning conservative Catholics with Protestant evangelicals, and ‘free market neo-conservatives’ with ‘faith and values’ social conservatives,” has died.

I have to admit that I did not pay a lot of attention to this man because I’ve spent so much of my time trying in my way to undo the damage he has done by providing a fig leaf of ideological cover for the gross misdeeds of our ruling cabal, who were only too happy to use the alliances Neuhaus helped forge to elect like-minded, corporatist neocons into public office and appoint them in courts across our country.

But as I read more, I realize that the following excerpts from here are fairly typical…

Neuhaus…became an outspoken advocate of "democratic capitalism," in which corporations are considered to have a virtuous role in public life. Neuhaus is perhaps best known for his thesis that the secular New Class and big government have crowded religion out of "the public square." Since the late 1970s, Neuhaus has argued that Judeo-Christianity should be reasserted back into this public square. He was an early proponent of faith-based policy initiatives and government intervention to promote Judeo-Christian values. During the 1980s, Neuhaus operated the Center on Religion and Society, which was a project of the Rockford Institute and which produced the quarterly journal This World. The Rockford Institute is firmly entrenched in the right's Old Guard, which from the mid-1970s through the 1980s was locked in an uneasy political alliance with the neoconservatives.

…

Neuhaus, the erstwhile antiwar activist who opposed the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam as an unjust war, has since the 1980s routinely provided theological backing for U.S. militarist ventures. Weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Neuhaus published an op-ed in the conservative National Catholic Register that cast the war on terrorism as part of the "clash of civilizations." According to Neuhaus: "The West is now being compelled to recognize itself more clearly for what most Muslims perceive it to be—the Christian West, or Christendom." Neuhaus, a self-declared "moralist" and "theologian," asserted: "Just war, aimed at establishing just peace, is the mandatory course of charity."

On March 10, 2003, just prior to the Iraq invasion, Neuhaus gave his blessing to the preventive war. Invoking the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Neuhaus said that the planned invasion would be a "just war" because "war is sometimes a moral duty in order to overturn injustice and protect the innocent."

As you ponder how the Iraq war has “protected the innocent,” please recall once more that it has resulted in approximately 2 million refugees from that country, as noted here.

Continuing…

After elaborating the theological foundations that he said makes preventive war "justified and necessary," Neuhaus gave his imprimatur to the Bush administration's attacks on the credibility and value of the United Nations, while taking antiwar Catholics to task for unduly backing the flawed multilateral institution. "In view of the UN's frequent hostility to the Church on family policy, population, the sacredness of human life, and related matters," advised Neuhaus, "some Catholic leaders may come to regret their exaggerated and, I believe, ill-considered statements about the moral authority of the UN" (ZENIT, March 10, 2003, cited in First Things, October 2005).

Am I to understand that this man criticized Catholics such as myself who have opposed Dubya’s Iraq war from its inception merely because we favored UN mediation instead, particularly given that those in our executive branch failed so miserably to make their case that Saddam Hussein was a threat to us (with Neuhaus disapproving of the UN because it was “(frequently hostile) to the Church on family policy, population, the sacredness of human life, and related matters”)?

The ideological landscape of this country is strewn with those who, for legitimate or disingenuous reasons, once stood with individuals referred to in as sneering a way as possible by neocons as “the left” prior to the conservative ascendancy. However, at that moment, they “jumped ship” because they could see how much of this country was turning to “the right” because of the easy answers that side offered to the daunting questions of war, peace, prosperity, security, and whether or not this country would continue to reward success while still providing for its most disadvantaged citizens.

And from what I can determine, Father Neuhaus gave ideological cover to the individuals who benefitted enormously from that shift, at our great, eternal expense.

I really can’t think of a word to describe how depressing it is that an individual who took Holy Orders to minister to those of my faith could do such a thing. I would only add that, though he imagined God smiling upon him, Neuhaus truly did the work of the devil.