Time Toward Home: Richard John Neuhaus for Our Time
By Nathaniel Peters, Public Discourse.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus loved to say that “when we get to heaven, there will be a sign over the pearly gates that reads: ‘The New Jerusalem—From the Wonderful People Who Brought You New York City.’” “And if you didn’t like New York City,” he would impishly add, “there will be another place to go.”
Fifteen years ago today, Fr. Neuhaus left the earthly New York for the heavenly city to which it pointed, leaving in his wake a hole in America’s public discourse. A sui generis activist-turned-intellectual, Neuhaus was, above all, a spiritual father, first as a Lutheran pastor and later as a Catholic priest. It was his ministry—beginning with an inner-city congregation in Brooklyn—that drove his political advocacy and incessant writing on religion and public life. When it came to those matters, President George W. Bush famously said that “Fr. Richard helps me articulate these things.” No Catholic thinker since could claim such praise from a president.
In the intervening years, the political and ecclesiastical landscape has deteriorated in ways Neuhaus could not have fully imagined. And yet his final book, whose publication he did not live to see, offers fitting counsel for us today. American Babylon reminds us what politics is and how Christians should think about their citizenship in this world and the next—about living as a people who are not at home but live in “time toward home.”
In American Babylon and his other works, Neuhaus defined politics as the process by which we deliberate “how we ought to order our life together.” This is more than a paraphrase of Aristotle. First, it teaches that politics is not a matter of philosophical speculation but practical reason. It is not about reaching the right metaphysical conclusions and building a perfect program from them. Rather, politics consists of acting for the good that is possible now, with all the messiness and compromise that might entail.
Despite their disagreements over particular political matters, Neuhaus would have agreed with then-Cardinal Ratzinger when he urged:
The continued existence of pluralistic democracy (that is, the continued existence and development of a humanly possible standard of justice) urgently requires that we have the courage to accept imperfection and learn again to recognize the perpetual endangerment of human affairs. Only those political programs are moral which arouse this courage.
Politics does not require the constant refinement of intellectual diagnoses and ideals, but how best to put our common life in order as it is, warts and all.
Therefore, politics pertains to our life together, here and now, not in the life to come. “The first thing to say about politics,” Neuhaus liked to remind us, “is that politics is not the first thing.” This should chasten our aspirations for politics and clarify its aims. Politics cannot replace our hunger for God, and the perfection for which we long can only be attained in union with him, not through the implementation of a political program. Ratzinger writes that from the beginning, Christianity sets its messianic hopes on Christ, not political action, which belongs to the realm of rationality and ethics. The New Testament’s teachings can lead to political ethics, but not political theology.
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