On Friday, February 17, the world lost one of its great lights, and the Hildebrand Project lost a dear friend.
It is hard to overstate the decades-long impact that Michael Novak had on the world; his ideas have challenged, changed, and informed myriads of people, from high school students to Pope St. John Paul II. His ideas literally saved lives, playing a vital role in ending communism in central Europe.
Read MoreMichael Novak loved the Catholic Church and the United States passionately. And with his death at 83, both Church and nation have lost one of their most imaginative and accomplished sons: a groundbreaking theorist in philosophy, social ethics, religious studies, ethnic studies, and economics; a brilliant teacher; a winsome journalist and apologist; a great defender of freedom, as both ambassador and polemicist; a man of striking energy and creativity, some of whose books will be read for a very long time to come, and in multiple languages.
Read MoreBy Jack Fowler
Originally posted on February 17, 2017 on The National Review
Our dear friend and the former religion editor of National Review died today, aged 83, after a battle with cancer. There will be a symposium on this happy warrior and apostle of belief and faith and the morality of markets forthcoming on NRO. In the meanwhile, George Weigel has a reflection on the homepage, and the Washington Post has published a worthwhile obituary, as has Catholic University, where Michael ended a long and wonderful career as a professor and theologian. His smile and words kind and smart touched many millions of lives. I love that Michael’s Facebook profile picture was taken at one of the most wonderful moments ever on an NR Cruise: He was sitting, beaming, with his wife Karen (quite ill, she would pass away weeks later), daughter Jana, and son Rich. It was taken at the Basilica of St. John the Divine in Ephesus. Moments before, an aggressive guy selling weird tchotchke barged into the Novak scrum, trying to hawk bogus ancient coins and somewhat perverse statues. I needed to go to Confession after what I yelled. The entrepreneur left them in peace. Which is where Michael now rests, with Karen. Oremus.
By Arthur C. Brooks
Originally published on February 17, 2017 on AEI
The American Enterprise Institute mourns the loss of our colleague, Michael Novak, who passed away this morning at the age of 83. Michael was an AEI scholar for three decades until his retirement in 2010, and remained a close friend of the Institute.
Michael arrived at AEI in 1978. In a remembrance of the AEI president who hired him, William J. Baroody, Sr., Michael once wrote that Baroody was the “first leader of a public policy think tank to grasp the importance of religion in public affairs.” Baroody’s perspective was AEI’s great fortune. It brought Michael into our organization. And once here, he built a hugely distinguished career as our George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy.
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), likely Michael’s most important book, advanced a bold and important thesis: America’s system of democratic capitalism represents a fusion of our political, economic, and moral-cultural systems. No facet can exist apart from the others. This thread ran through Michael’s whole career, including his most recent book, a co-authored work entitled Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is (2015). That topic was also the subject of one of several Bradley Lectures that Michael delivered at AEI, stretching back to the series’ inception in 1989, when he spoke on Thomas Aquinas.
Learn more: A Tribute to Michael Novak
Michael also convened one of the most consequential policy seminars in AEI’s history. In the mid-1980s, he assembled a diverse group of scholars to form the Working Seminar on the Family and American Welfare Policy. Their conclusions were published in 1987 as A New Consensus on Family and Welfare and were presented to President Reagan. It represented the first major policy statement to suggest a work requirement for welfare, and became the foundation of the successful 1996 welfare reform law.
Michael’s legacy stretches even beyond his great contributions to both philosophy and practical policy. One of his first published volumes was a novel, The Tiber Runs Silver. At the time of his passing, he was finishing another novel, set around the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania in 1889. And in between, a profusion of spirited social commentary, pamphlets, and longer works poured from his pen. He wrote more than 35 books in his lifetime. Michael truly relished the competition of ideas. Both his curiosity and his brilliance seemed inexhaustible.
This counselor of popes and politicians never ceased to inspire his colleagues here at AEI.
This work earned numerous recognitions. A few highlights include the 26 honorary degrees Michael received from colleges and universities, the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (1994), and the prestigious Lincoln Literary Award (2016). And during the Reagan years, Michael was asked to join AEI’s Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations as a diplomat, serving as the US Representative to the Helsinki Commission.
This counselor of popes and politicians never ceased to inspire his colleagues here at AEI. His gentle and warm personality made him a beloved figure at the Institute.
Michael and his wife, the late Karen Laub-Novak, were valued members of the AEI family. We grieve today with their three children, Richard, Jana, and Tanya. And we extend our condolences to all who knew and loved this brilliant man.
By Emily Langer
Originally published on February 17, 2017 on The Washington Post
Michael Novak, a Catholic philosopher who helped carve a space for religion in modern politics, diplomacy and economics, arguing that capitalism is the economic system most likely to achieve the spiritual goods of defeating poverty and encouraging human creativity, died Feb. 17 at his home in Washington. He was 83.
The cause was complications from colon cancer, said his daughter Jana Novak.
Mr. Novak, who spent his formative years in the seminary, was widely recognized as one of the most influential Catholic theologians of his generation. He was the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize, which honors makers of an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension” and is accompanied by a monetary award exceeding that of the Nobel Prize.
In a measure of Mr. Novak's influence within the Catholic Church, he was received and consulted by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He was at times a professor, a columnist, chief U.S. delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission and, for several decades, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank in Washington.
Mr. Novak was among several scholars who “brought serious religious thought to Washington in a way that it had not been present before,” George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, said in an interview.
He credited Mr. Novak with demonstrating to an “audience of insiders” a “way of thinking that was not merely statistical or ideological but was perhaps more deeply reflective of enduring human questions and problems.”
Mr. Novak wrote a shelf full of books on topics ranging from nuclear weapons to atheism to social justice to sports. But he was best known for his economic writings, particularly the book "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" (1982).
“Democratic capitalism,” he wrote, is “neither the Kingdom of God nor without sin. Yet all other known systems of political economy are worse. Such hope as we have for alleviating poverty and for removing oppressive tyranny — perhaps our last, best hope — lies in this much despised system.”
Mr. Novak's book found resonance around the world. It was illegally distributed in Poland, where the Solidarity movement helped defeat communism. His writings were credited with influencing Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the first president of Czechoslovakia after communism, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain.
In affairs across the Atlantic, Mr. Novak was a forceful critic of liberation theology as it was espoused in Latin America, where many adherents argued that the church should provide economic deliverance for the poor through leftist political ideologies.
Critics of Mr. Novak charged that he overlooked the severe inequalities often wrought by capitalism: “Michael Novak preaches capitalism’s virtues to Christians,” Arthur Jones, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, once wrote. “The breakthrough will come when he simultaneously preaches Christian virtues to his capitalist backers.”
Mr. Novak acknowledged that "Judaism and Christianity do not require democratic capitalism." But, he continued, "it is only that without it they would be poorer and less free."
In the sphere of international affairs, Mr. Novak tussled with church leaders over Catholic teaching on “just war.” He regarded the nuclear deterrent as a moral means of prevailing over the Soviet Union in the Cold War and defeating what Weigel said they and like-minded thinkers considered Communism’s “defective” and “downgraded view of the human person.”
It was under President Ronald Reagan that Mr. Novak served on the U.N.’s human rights body. Communism, Weigel said, explaining his and Mr. Novak’s position, “denied that the human person was made in the image and likeness of God, and it’s that image in us that is the root, we would argue, of the human dignity from which spring human rights.”
In the cultural arena, Mr. Novak wrote frankly of "radical feminism, gay liberation, utopian socialism and geopolitical neutralism" and "the cheaply radical young graduates of . . . Catholic universities." But he also drew praise for the openness with which he approached religious dialogue, such as in his book "No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers" (2008).
“The line of belief and unbelief,” he wrote, “is not drawn between one person and another, normally, but rather down the inner souls of all of us.”
Michael John Novak Jr. was born to a Slovak American family in Johnstown, Pa., on Sept. 9, 1933. His father was an insurance salesman, and his mother was a homemaker. A brother, Richard Novak, became a priest and was killed amid political upheaval in Bangladesh in 1964.
Mr. Novak joined the Congregation of Holy Cross at 14 and studied for the priesthood but ultimately left the order.
“It was not untypical of bright idealistic Catholic boys to want to enter the priesthood, though your immediate circle of friends thought you were faintly crazy,” Mr. Novak told the New York Times in 1982. He said that he aspired to be a novelist, but “didn’t see how I could do the independent thinking and traveling I wanted to do, and do it in community and under obedience.”
His first book, a novel titled "The Tiber Was Silver" (1961), centered on an American seminarian who ventures to Rome and wrestles with the question of whether he can pursue his religious vocation as well as his love of painting.
Mr. Novak received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., in 1956, a bachelor of sacred theology degree from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1958 and a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of religion from Harvard University in 1966.
He positioned himself initially on what he described as the "anticapitalist left." In the early years of his career, he taught at schools including Stanford University, the State University of New York and Syracuse University and did political work for Democrats including Sen. George S. McGovern (S.D.), a torchbearer for liberalism despite his landslide loss to President Richard M. Nixon (R) in 1972.
Mr. Novak supported the liberalization of the Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s — a position he later recanted — and opposed such church teachings as its prohibition on contraception. His early liberal writings included the book “The Open Church” (1964), about the effects of Vatican II, and “A Theology for Radical Politics” (1969).
Over the next several years, Mr. Novak shifted rightward, economically and culturally — an evolution detailed in the memoir "Writing From Left to Right: My Journey From Liberal to Conservative" (2013).
Contributing to his growing disillusionment with the left was the unsympathetic reception of his book "The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics" (1972). In that volume, he railed against what he regarded as the marginalization of working-class Eastern European and other ethnic groups by the elite, largely Protestant establishment.
In 1978, Mr. Novak joined AEI, where he retired in 2010. He served at the time of his death on the faculty of Catholic University.
Mr. Novak's wife of 46 years, the former Karen Laub, died in 2009. Survivors include three children, Richard L. Novak of San Antonio, Tanya Holton of Boston and Jana Novak of Oklahoma City; a sister, Mary Ann Novak of Washington; a brother, Benjamin Novak of Ave Maria, Fla.; and four grandchildren.
With his daughter Jana, Mr. Novak wrote "Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God" (1998). In that volume, he articulated his idea of what God is — and is not.
“He is not ‘the Big Guy upstairs,’ nor the loud booming voice that Hollywood films affect for God. . . . There are hosts of bogus pictures for God: the Watchmaker beyond the skies, the puppeteer of history,” he wrote. “If you wish to find him, watch for him in quiet and humility — perhaps among the poor and broken things of earth.
“There are people,” he continued, “who looked into the eyes of the most abandoned of the poor and saw infinite treasure there, treasure without price, and there found God dwelling.”
Originally published on February 15, 2017
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