Feature
The Publishing Preacher
The Life of Richard John Neuhaus
by Ian Hunter
One man in his time plays many parts, Shakespeare tells us, and of few men is this saying more apt than of Richard John Neuhaus, the subject of a fascinating biography by Randy Boyagoda, a professor of American Studies at Ryerson University (Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square, Random House, 2015).
Neuhaus was a Lutheran pastor, a civil rights activist, a Roman Catholic priest, an intellectual, critic, and educator, a confidant of two presidents and two popes, and the founding editor of the influential magazine First Things, which, under his guidance, was distinguished by substance and style. One purpose undergirded all Neuhaus's frenetic and diverse activities: his biographer tells us he wanted above all to do "something beautiful for God."
Early Years
Richard John Neuhaus was born in 1936 in Pembroke, Ontario, one of eight children. His father, Clemens, was pastor of the local Lutheran Church. Neuhaus was baptized as a baby by his father in the kitchen sink at the manse. As a young boy, his favorite game was playing church. When he was five, he would preach to (or at) his three-year-old sister Johanna, or to any other siblings who could be persuaded to sit still and listen. Failing that, household pets or inanimate objects would serve. He specialized in funeral services for pets.
By ten, Richard was sufficiently versed in Lutheran theology that his dour and demanding father sometimes pressed him into service to teach the weekly catechism class. An acquaintance recalled, "He was impressive, he was a professor even at that point, already three, four times better than Pastor Neuhaus." This must have been a bittersweet recognition for his father.
After a few indifferent, often interrupted, years of what passed for public education (his parents and some early teachers pronounced him "uneducable"), Richard was sent to a Lutheran boarding school in Nebraska. After one year he was asked not to return. He spent the next year with rather distant relatives in Cisco, Texas, not attending school but learning to fish and hunt. Neuhaus began serious study in 1955 at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. One thing he seems never to have doubted was his vocation to the ministry. Although it is never required in the Lutheran pastorate, early on he took a self-imposed vow of celibacy.
Boyagoda, who throughout his carefully researched and nuanced biography evinces a shrewd, sympathetic, but by no means hagiographic view of his subject, sums up Neuhaus's sense of vocation this way: "to be a bold Christian, and a bold intellectual, and a bold cosmopolitan, and a bold operator, all at once, all in one."
First Pastorates
Neuhaus graduated from Concordia in 1960 and returned to Pembroke to be ordained by his father. There is a picture of father and son in clerical regalia, standing together at the ceremony in the church and glaring sternly, almost suspiciously, at each other. Given the theological divisions that were soon apparent between them, they did not again share a pulpit.
Neuhaus's first pastoral charge was St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York, from which after a year he transferred to a poor, downtown, predominantly black parish, St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn. The church was too poor to pay a salary, so its pastor moonlighted as a part-time hospital chaplain at King's County Hospital, a few miles away. He described the hospital's emergency ward as "a bedlam filled with the victims of shootings, knifings, brawls, beatings, and accidents labeled 'cause unknown.'" Here he came face to face with human suffering and death. One day the 26-year-old Neuhaus wrote to his friend, Robert Wilken,
Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of biographies of Robert Burns, Hesketh Pearson, and Malcolm Muggeridge.
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