NEW YORK | The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading intellectual of the Christian right who helped build a new coalition of conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics, and informally advised President George W. Bush, died Thursday. He was 72.
Neuhaus died from the side effects of cancer treatment, said Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, a journal of religion and public policy that Neuhaus founded.
Neuhaus, who received an honorary degree from Valparaiso University in 1987, is survived by his sister Johanna Speckhard, of Valparaiso.
Two years ago, Neuhaus delivered the Huegli Lecture on Church-Related Higher Education at VU, taking part in several events on campus before his talk, "The Church's Heart for Learning."
In 1987, Neuhaus delivered the VU commencement address and received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
His brother-in-law, Gerald Speckhard, is a professor emeritus of education at VU.
A one-time Lutheran minister, Neuhaus led a predominantly African-American congregation in New York in the 1960s, advocating for civil rights and protesting the Vietnam War. With Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic peace activist, Neuhaus led the anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam.
He later broke with the left, partly over the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling legalizing abortion. He converted to Catholicism in 1990, and a year later was ordained a priest.
He then worked to break down the historic mistrust between evangelicals and Catholics over their theological differences, helping build the coalition of churchgoers across faith traditions who became key to Republican electoral victories in recent years.
Neuhaus laid out his argument in the influential book, "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission," which he edited with Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure turned born-again Christian. Neuhaus later was an informal adviser to Bush, who praised the priest for helping shape his own outlook on abortion.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, the Canadian-born Neuhaus said he became Catholic because he no longer believed the Protestant argument for separation from the Catholic Church.
"After 30 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.
