Love Quote by Richard John Neuhaus

Neuhaus lands the punch by twisting Christianitys best-known softening clause into a cudgel: not "love the sinner, hate the sin", but the inverse, weaponized against the person doing the naming. The parenthetical "Catholic" is doing extra work here. It signals an internal dispute, not a drive-by from outside the walls: a church intellectual scolding fellow Catholics (and gay Catholics) for, in his view, importing a permissive moral psychology while still demanding the churchs emotional labor and social approval.

The intent is less pastoral than prosecutorial. By framing the gay Catholic community as enforcing an unwritten "maxim", he suggests a regime of social sanctions: you may be welcome only if you agree not to describe certain acts as sinful. That is a familiar conservative complaint from the late-20th-century culture wars, when therapeutic language and identity politics were perceived to be replacing doctrinal moral categories. Neuhaus is arguing that the taboo has shifted from the act to the judgment; the new heresy is moral discernment itself.

The subtext is about power over vocabulary. "Sin" and "sinner" are not neutral descriptors in Catholicism; they are claims about reality that imply authority to teach, correct, and exclude. Neuhaus implies that gay Catholics want the benefits of belonging while vetoing the churchs right to define the terms of belonging.

As rhetoric, it works because it compresses a whole argument about tolerance into a paradox: a community that preaches acceptance becomes, in this telling, intolerant of dissent. The cynicism is deliberate: he recasts calls for dignity as an attempt to silence moral speech, turning the language of compassion into a test of ideological compliance.