Native of Johnstown made a religious case for capitalism
By age 14, Michael Novak had left his native Western Pennsylvania for a high school seminary at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
But he never forgot his roots in a Johnstown immigrant Slovak family amid the Great Depression — even as he made a career as an internationally influential Roman Catholic social philosopher. Along the way, he made a dramatic shift from a 1960s liberal, opposing the Vietnam War and championing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, to a 1980s conservative, where he mounted a theological defense for capitalism that gave a moral cover to Reagan-era budget cuts and influenced those on both sides of the Iron Curtain in Europe.
“It was great to be brought up in poverty,” Mr. Novak said in a 2012 video-recorded interview by the Michigan-based Acton Institute, which shares his embrace of a Catholic theology of free-market capitalism.
“In the Depression, not only did you learn to pinch pennies, but you learned to live on very little,” Mr. Novak said. He added that it’s a “great asset in a marriage” to someone whose father chided him as a “celestial philosopher.”
Mr. Novak died Friday at age 83 of colon cancer, according to Catholic University of America, where he was a professor.
The prolific author recalled growing up in a family where his grandparents spoke little English but made a deep impression on him with their piety.
“My parents decided not to teach us Slovak,” Mr. Novak recalled, hoping the children would “jump a generation over our peers.”
“I think we did, but I’ve always regretted not knowing Slovak and the other languages of Europe,” he said.
Mr. Novak ultimately decided not to enter the priesthood and ended up covering the Second Vatican Council for American publications and authoring a book about it. He opposed the Vietnam War in a book co-written by two famous clergymen of the time, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Presbyterian Rev. Robert McAfee Brown.
But Mr. Novak eventually came to “a powerful intellectual conviction that the left was wrong about virtually every big issue of our time: the Soviet Union, the North Vietnamese regime, economics, welfare, race, and moral questions such as abortion, amnesty, acid and the sexual revolution.”
In “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism” ( 1982), he mounted a defense of capitalism as a morally superior system based on liberty, individual worth and Judeo-Christian principles. It was, he insisted, the only economic system capable of lifting the poor from misery and of encouraging moral growth. Samuel McCracken, in Commentary magazine, called the book “a stunning achievement” and “perhaps the first serious attempt to construct a theology of capitalism.”
In 1986, when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops published a pastoral letter arguing — in the midst of Reagan-era cuts in social spending programs — that economic policies need to be tempered with a preference for the poor, Mr. Novak joined other neo-conservatives in arguing for an emphasis on the creation of wealth rather than its distribution.
During the 1980s, Mr. Novak’s influence extended to Europe. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was implementing Reaganlike economic policies, was an admirer. So were anti-communist dissidents in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Post-communist Czech and Slovak leaders were among those giving him high honors.
He was the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize, which carries a $1 million award and honors makers of an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”
In a measure of Mr. Novak’s influence within the Catholic Church, he was received by two 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 also had his critics over the years. A review of his memoir in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent journal, assailed Mr. Novak for sharing a “slavish idolatry of markets” with other neo-conservatives.
Born Sept. 9, 1933, he was the oldest of five children. Between 1943 and 1947, the family lived in McKeesport and Indiana, Pa., as his father pursued new jobs. A brother, Richard Novak, did become a priest and was killed amid political upheaval in Bangladesh in 1964.
Less than three years ago, Mr. Novak was back in his hometown to give the keynote address for the 125th anniversary commemoration of the 1889 Johnstown Flood, which killed more than 2,000 people after the failure of a poorly maintained dam at an artificial lake resort operated by Pittsburgh’s industrial elite.
“Right to the point: I love this city,” Mr. Novak began. “I am very grateful to it. Johnstown breeds a certain kind of people.”
After the flood, he said: “We came back. We always came back.”
Mr. Novak is survived by his children, Richard, Tanya and Jana; and four grandchildren. His wife, artist Karen Laub, died in 2009.