Farewell
Faithful Ferryman
Joseph Cunneen, a longtime contributor to Commonweal, passed away in his sleep on July 29. He was eighty-nine years old. The son of an attorney and a teacher, Joe...
Movement Man
G.K. Chesterton was GKC. William F. Buckley Jr. was WFB. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus—priest, writer, and public intellectual—was RJN. When, in the summer of 2003, I...
A Bond of Blood
When William P. Ford died last month at the age of seventy-two, after a battle with esophageal cancer, the New York Times called him a “rights advocate.” That he...
Fellow Traveler
She called herself a “merchant princess and trafficker in crucifixes.” And so she was, entrepreneur extraordinaire, friend of Dorothy Day, social...
John Deedy, R.I.P.
On March 28, John Deedy, managing editor of Commonweal from 1967 to 1978, died at age eighty-two. Jack came to Commonweal at a tense moment and in delicate...
Daria Donnelly, R.I.P.
Daria Donnelly, Commonweal’s associate editor (at large), died September 21 at the age of forty-five. She was the mother of Leo and Josephine, two...
A quiet heroism
It was gratifying that both the Washington Post (October 27) and the New York Times (November 1) published significant obituaries taking note of the death, on...
Philip J. Murnion,R.I.P.
The death, on August 19, of Monsignor Philip J. Murnion at age sixty-five was a great loss to the Catholic Church in the United States. He was not only a...
Robert G. Hoyt, R.I.P.
Bob Hoyt, who died April 10 at eighty-one, was a distinctive writer and a brilliant editor. Distinctive because he had a voice of his own-succinct, witty, and...
George G. Higgins, R.I.P.
Monsignor George G. Higgins, who died on May 1, 2002, at age eighty-six, was a leading public figure in U.S. Catholicism for almost sixty years. Known as "the...
John J. Egan, R.I.P.
Studs Terkel once said of Monsignor John J. Egan, for over forty years a field commander in battles for social justice: "He never met a picket line he didn...
Abigail McCarthy 1915-2001
Abigail Quigley McCarthy died on February 1 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was eighty-five. Mrs. McCarthy wrote a column in these pages from 1974 to 1999. She...
