New York, USA - 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.
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 church has lost a great warrior," said Kevin Hasson, founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington legal group that Neuhaus advised.
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit writer whose order Neuhaus frequently criticized, said Neuhaus was "an intelligent, impassioned and articulate defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and arguably the leading conservative Catholic voice in this country."
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 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.