Romantic theopolitical testament – Richard J. Neuhaus and the american city of man

Abstract

"Richard J. Neuhaus was a fascinating phenomenon. A first-rate public intellectual, in the 1960s he was a civil rights Lutheran activist for the equality of black Americans within the circle of Martin Luther King. He was a socially active priestintellectual. Neuhaus's life was a life of an incessant burning passion, a Christian acutely aware that the times in which he lived were not ordinary times. He was at ease with the world and with people of all walks of life because he knew where the anchor was, a living embodiment of a truth found in the old maps of Christian antiquity, where Jerusalem was always at the center, the axis mundi – a blatant cartographical error, but a theological truth. At a time of ubiquitous disenchantment, Neuhaus was one of the greatest apologists of Christendom of today, a spectacular feast when Christendom was consigned by the majority of modern Western cognoscenti either to the ash heap of history or, at best, to a psychotherapeutic spirituality. His apology for Christendom, and the Catholic Church in that, stemmed from his understanding that Christianity, with all its sins, created and has been a defender of human freedom in the most fundamental, anthropological, but also political sense. A possible demise of Christianity would thus constitute in his judgment a menace to freedom even for those who battled it."(.)