Say what you will about the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, the intellectual Catholic combatant who died Thursday, but the man loved his adopted homeland. Born in Ontario to a Lutheran clergyman, Neuhaus eventually became and American and a Catholic, and though he could be an acerbic critic of both church and country, he held fast to the promises cradled by each, as this 1975 Time article shows.

Back then, Neuhaus was a left Lutheran minister in New York City.

Money quote: “When I meet God, I expect to meet him as an American.” Though that may sound like a boast by Babbitt, it comes from the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam War and America’s indifference to the poor. But Neuhaus, 39, a white pastor of a largely black Lutheran church in Brooklyn, has always kept everyone off balance. When he led his parish in an antiwar protest service in 1967, he insisted that the youths who were turning in their draft cards join in a lusty chorus of America the Beautiful.”