A native of Canada and the son of a Lutheran pastor, Neuhaus began his own work as a Lutheran minister at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in a predominantly African-American Brooklyn neighborhood. He was active in the civil rights movement and other liberal causes. In 1964, he joined the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan as the first co-chairmen of the anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam.
But he eventually broke with the left, partly over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. In 1990, he converted to Catholicism and a year later was ordained by New York Cardinal John O’Connor.
“I was thirty years a Lutheran pastor, and after thirty years of asking myself why I was not a Roman Catholic I finally ran out of answers that were convincing either to me or to others,” he wrote.
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AP: Influential Catholic conservative Richard John Neuhaus dies at 72
A native of Canada and the son of a Lutheran pastor, Neuhaus began his own work as a Lutheran minister at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in a predominantly African-American Brooklyn neighborhood. He was active in the civil rights movement and other liberal causes. In 1964, he joined the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan as the first co-chairmen of the anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam.
But he eventually broke with the left, partly over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. In 1990, he converted to Catholicism and a year later was ordained by New York Cardinal John O’Connor.
“I was thirty years a Lutheran pastor, and after thirty years of asking myself why I was not a Roman Catholic I finally ran out of answers that were convincing either to me or to others,” he wrote.
Read it all.