Fr. Neuhaus, RIP

From Lutheran civil-rights activist to pro-life Catholic convert and priest -- always seeing each step as a fulfillment of the one before it.

Should a priest have spent so much time in specifically intellectual leadership, as distinct from pastoral, as Father did with the magazine he founded, First Things? Does First Things fulfill a worthwhile role by being broadly "traditional religious" rather than specifically Catholic?

Questions that have been asked. But no one who watched him unload a sharp and profound anti-abortion cannonade on a mostly secular-libertarian audience, as I once did, could doubt that he was an asset in the "culture wars." As for First Things, it is lonely testimony to the proposition that religious conservatives can produce a high-level intellectual review. That alone is a valuable life's work, and Father did more than that.