2025-10-10
The late Father Richard John Neuhaus had a love/hate relationship with the New York Times.
Richard was a passionate partisan of New York City, which he sometimes described as a preview of the New Jerusalem, but the Grey Lady's parochialism nonetheless led him to occasionally dismiss New York's most prestigious daily as a "parish newsletter." He regularly castigated the Times' editorials for their air of smug infallibility. And then there was RJN's annoyance (and more) with the Times' knee-jerk liberalism, which, by its embrace of every imaginable left-of-center cause, accelerated the decay of liberal politics into the promotion of lifestyle libertinism. Richard was thus years ahead of Joseph Ratzinger in issuing warnings about a dictatorship of relativism, the unavoidable political outcome of the Times' cultural lurch leftward.
On the other hand, Richard Neuhaus could no more imagine skipping the New York Times in the morning than he could imagine beginning the day without numerous cups of coffee, a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and a smoke.
That love/hate relationship was crystallized in an incident during Richard's days as a Lutheran pastor in the then-impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, when the Times declined to refer to a local black pastor (from Christendom's entrepreneurial Protestant subdivision) as "Bishop" so-and-so. In high dudgeon, RJN wrote A.M. Rosenthal, then the Times' managing editor, and asked what was going on. The man referred to himself as "Bishop." His people called him "Bishop." The sign on the front of his ecclesiastical establishment identified him as "Bishop." Who did the Times think it was, and what did the Times think it was doing, denying this man the title he and his people used?