"America" And "First Things"

Fr. James Martin, S.J. recently had this to say about Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

Here at America, our editorial meeting opened today with a prayer for Father Neuhaus, arguably the leading voice in conservative Catholic circles in this country, as well as our colleague in the Catholic publishing world, longtime friend of several editors (and occasional critic of the magazine) and faithful Catholic.

Link (here)

What were some of Fr. John Neuhaus' criticisms of America?

America insists that it does not dissent from the Church’s teaching on abortion, and we have no reason to doubt that. It simply seems that that teaching is not very important.

When it comes to abortion, those who are fearful of being criticized as one-issue thinkers tend to turn it into a nonissue. What really matters, we are told, is “to accelerate a basic change in the way both women and men look at the traditional division of labor between the sexes.

” And of that basic change Mrs. Clinton, who made the smart decision to marry a man who was going places, thus freeing her to volunteer for general do-goodism, is presumably the avatar. And if from a Jesuit viewpoint she does not quite grasp all the complexities regarding, er, reproductive rights, well, nobody’s perfect.

Link (here).


From America in an article entitled, Public-Religious Partnerships by Fr.Fred Kammer, S.J.

A frequently reappearing attack article relished by conservative commentators like the Rev. Robert Sirico, Joseph Fessio, S.J., and the

Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, as well as the columnists Michael Novak and George Will, was written in 1999 by The City Journal’s Brian Anderson. Anderson visited two of 1,400 local Catholic Charities sites, then carefully wove together myths and half-truths garnered from many of the same archconservative sources and declared that we in Catholic Charities had lost our soul to government.

Why? Because we had supported increasing the minimum wage, confronting racism, community organizing, parish social ministry and so forth. Furthermore—horrors!—we opposed welfare reform in its 1996 form.

Link (here)

This what Fr. Richard John Neuhaus had to say about Catholic Charities.

Mention nervousness about government funding for faith-based social services and, almost inevitably, Catholic Charities will be mentioned as a cautionary example. Catholic Charities is a huge enterprise predominantly supported by and tailored for government funding, and is therefore not very Catholic. That is the generalization that must be quickly qualified by noting that Catholic Charities can be very different from diocese to diocese. In a few places, it accepts no government money and the generalization does not hold at all; in other dioceses, leaders strive earnestly against letting government grants call all the plays, and the generalization holds only in part. But Catholic Charities is still thrown up as the example to be avoided.

That is in part because the national voice is Catholic Charities USA, a Washington-based coordinating office, and its president, FatherFred Kammer, S.J. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Fr. Kammer offers a painfully qualified endorsement for the Bush faith-based policy. One sentence says it all: “Catholic Charities’ experience is that poverty has many and complex causes and that effective solutions come in many packages, including personal and social responsibility, individual and community empowerment, religious and secular social services, and attention to physical, mental, emotional, familial, systemic, and, at times, spiritual factors.”

There, in the jargon of social service policy wonkery, is the reason why seriously religious folk are nervous about their programs becoming, through dependence upon government, indistinguishable from secular enterprises for which “spiritual factors” are, or so it would seem, an afterthought..

Link (here)

From an article in America entitled, Left Behind by John A Coleman, S.J.

It is mainly fierce opponents of the religious left (like Deal Hudson, the Bush administration’s former point man to conservative Catholics) who brand their opponents as such, implying by the epithet that such groups are not doctrinally orthodox or that they serve as Trojan horses for a dissent that undermines the faith. Such tropes and strategies to discredit the religious left can be found in material from the Morley Institute or in the writings of the Catholic neoconservative Rev. Richard John Neuhaus.

Link (here)

Paul Snatchko has written a beautiful discription of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus' funeral. You can read Paul's post entitled Convivium at his blog, Between The Burgh and The City.