Since that time [Vatican II in the 1960s] there have continued to be differences between Catholics and Protestants, as well as internal divisions on both sides. What has been remarkable has been the mutual respect among Catholics and Protestants and their ability to work together on many matters. We believe that the sustained attempt by one segment of the leadership of the Catholic Church to undermine the leadership of mainstream Protestantism is a unique breach of ecumenical relations. How other Catholic leaders deal with the debates internal to the Catholic Church introduced by its Neocons is a matter with which Protestants have no business interfering. But Protestants have the right to expect that those Roman Catholic leaders who wish to maintain ecumenical relations with Protestants will publicly disown and reject the activities of the IRD.

Six of the 17 current members of IRD's board of directors, a full 35 percent, are prominent conservative Catholics. They include founders Father Richard John Neuhaus of the Institute on Religion and Public Life and Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, along with George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University, Mary Ellen Bork (wife of Judge Robert Bork), and board chair, Professor J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, four other conservative Catholics sit on the IRD advisory board: Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard University School of Law; Opus Dei evangelist and Catholic priest, Rev. John McCloskey; Russell Hittinger, Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, as well as Jesuit priest and professor, Rev. James Schall at Georgetown University.

While Father Neuhaus and his Catholic cohorts have built and sustained an organization that has consistently labored to generate suspicion and hostility about mainstream Protestant leaders, not a penny has been spent nor staff member assigned to attempt to change anything about the Catholic Church. This conduct constitutes the single greatest breach in ecumenical good will between Roman Catholics and Protestants since Vatican II.

Indeed.  Few mainline protestant leaders are aware of the IRD and the signficance of its activities over the past few decades. Fewer still, have demonstrated the kind of leadership that aquires and makes use of the knowledge and carefully documented analysis compiled by scholars like Weaver, and before him, Leon Howell, and others of us who have written about this from time to time. Nevertheless, the IRD has organized disgruntled rump factions into "renewal" groups, claiming to speak for an orthodoxy from which the churches have supposedly deviated.  In turn, these groups have organized towards schism in the major denominations -- the Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA).

It is not just the Protestant targets of the IRD or the author of this article who are concerned about Father Neuhaus's behavior in the Christian community. Recently the New Republic published an article by Damon Linker, a Catholic former editor at Neuhaus's own journal, First Things. Linder expressed deep misgivings about the conduct and motives of his former colleague in a critique entitled "The Christianizing of America":  the one [Catholic writer] who has exercised the greatest influence on the ideological agenda of the religious right is Richard John Neuhaus... Any attempt to come to terms with the religious challenge to secular politics in contemporary America must confront Neuhaus's enormously ambitious and increasingly influential enterprise.

Linker concludes his piece by describing the Neuhaus vision: The America toward which Richard John Neuhaus wishes to lead us -- [is] an America...in which moral and theological absolutists demonize the country's political institutions and make nonnegotiable public demands under the threat of sacralized revolutionary violence, in which citizens flee from the inner obligations of freedom and long to subordinate themselves to ecclesiastical authority, and in which traditionalist Christianity thoroughly dominates the nation's public life.

Father Neuhaus wrote the founding document for IRD and has been the central figure at IRD from its inception in 1981. He is also the founder of a second Neoconservative think tank called the Institute on Religion and Public Life (IRPL) whose principal function is to publish First Things magazine. Eight key officials at IRD are also on boards at First Things: Mary Ann Glendon, David Novak, Michael Novak, George Weigel, Hadley Arkes, Timothy George, Russell Hittinger, and Robert P. George. As a leading architect of the Neocon movement, Neuhaus and his IRPL have benefited from funding by the same[conservative foundation]  benefactors who bankrolled IRD to the tune of $8,387,500 from 1989 through 2005.

These prominent Catholics confer their prestige and considerable power to encourage right-wing donors to finance IRD. They are key links to the patrons of IRD which include Richard Mellon Scaife, Howard Ahmanson and the Bradley, Coors, Smith-Richardson, Randolph, and Olin foundations with whom these Neoconservative Catholics have had a long working relationship.

Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ has spoken out the most clearly and prominently of any mainline Protestant leader.  A few months ago, I wrote about his stance:  

An historic battle is unfolding for the future of mainstream Protestantism in the U.S. and in the world. You might have read press reports about the battles over gay ordination and the threats of walk-outs by hard line conservatives. But that is only a small part of one of the biggest, and most underreported, religion stories in American history.

But the see-no-evil press coverage may be about to change. While this has been building for some time, the increasingly forceful and public stands of Rev. John H. Thomas, president of the 1.3 million member United Church of Christ may be the story that can no longer go untold. Thomas is standing-up for his church. He is speaking-up. He is speaking-out. He is making it clear that he won't back-off; and he won't back-down.

Speaking recently at Gettysburg College, Thomas blasted the 20-year war of attrition aimed at the mainline churches by a key grantee of neo-conservative foundations. The Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy is the hub of a national network of conservative factions operating inside mainline churches -- and seeking to bend them to their will or break them apart.

The IRD represents a coalition of interests that have set out to neutralize and dismember the churches that have been at the center of American culture and religious life for 300 years.  A signficant part of that coalition 's leadership comprises top neoconservative Catholic thinkers and activists in the United States -- including the official biographer of Pope John Paul II.

Check out Weaver's story on Media Transparency -- and look for it to appear in its entirety at Talk to Action, soon.

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