Some people still look askance at Catholic intellectuals. It doesn’t seem to matter to most British philosophers, for instance, that many of their greatest peers have been Catholics – from Anselm to Anscombe, from More to MacIntyre. They are still liable to sneer. Half a century ago Leonard Woolf tried to stop my father becoming editor of the New Statesman merely because he was a Catholic. Little has changed since.
There is one country, however, where the Catholic intelligentsia really matters: the United States. The death last month of the theologian and philosopher Michael Novak, at the age of 83, was treated as a major event on the other side of the Atlantic. Tributes poured in not only from Catholic institutions and individuals, but from Protestant and especially Jewish ones too. Why?
