Lutheran Scholar to Join Catholic Church

The Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, a prominent Lutheran scholar and writer known for his critique of liberal Christianity, will become a Roman Catholic today in ceremonies led by Cardinal John O’Connor in the prelate’s chapel near New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Neuhaus, 54, who never married, said he would seek to enter the priesthood. In a statement issued Saturday, he confirmed his decision after weeks of rumors had stirred Protestant circles.

Neuhaus was considered one of the 20 most influential Lutherans in the mid-1980s because of his newsletter, “Forum Letter,” and other writings on religion and politics. Ordained in the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Neuhaus later joined what became the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, formed in 1987 in a three-way merger.

But in his 1987 book, “The Catholic Moment,” Neuhaus praised the conservative direction taken by the Roman Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II and the Vatican’s chief theologian, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

In the last five years, Neuhaus said in his statement, “I have resisted with great difficulty the recognition that I could no longer give an answer convincing to others or to me as to why I was not a Roman Catholic.”

Neuhaus noted that he has “repeatedly and publicly urged” that the structural separation of Lutheranism from Rome, dating from the 16th Century Reformation, was no longer necessary and, as such, no longer justified.

He contended that the Lutheran church views itself more in terms of “American denominationalism” than as an “evangelical catholic movement of Gospel reform.”