Colman McCarthy in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“Your homework,” the writer, teacher and peace activist Colman McCarthy used to tell his students, “is to tell someone you love them today. And if you can’t find someone to tell that you love them, look a little harder. And if you still can’t find them, call me up. I know where all the unloved people are—they’re everywhere.”

McCarthy, who died on Feb. 27 at the age of 87, had a well-deserved reputation for seeking out such underdogs in life—as well as for his determined lifelong stands against war, capital punishment, homelessness and the other seamy sides of contemporary capitalism. His dedication to these and related social causes was of a piece with his Catholic faith, one expressed through decades of writing, teaching and witnessing to an alternative way of living life as a Christian and an American.

“Students come into my classes already well educated, often overeducated, in the ethic of violence. The educators? The nation’s long-tenured cultural faculty: political leaders who fund wars and send the young to fight them, judges and juries who dispatch people to death row, filmmakers who script gunplay movies and cartoons,” he wrote in the preface to his 2002 book I’d Rather Teach Peace. “Toy manufacturers marketing ‘action games,’ parents in war-zone homes where verbal or physical abuse is common, high-school history texts that tell about Calamity Jane but not Jane Addams, Daniel Boone, but not Daniel Berrigan.”

Colman McCarthy (no relation to Cormac) was born in Glen Head, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island, in 1938. His father, wrote Michael Bamberger in Golf Magazine, “was a golf-and-baseball loving immigration lawyer, an attorney out of the do-gooder Atticus Finch tradition, except the elder McCarthy was an Irish-Catholic New Yorker.” McCarthy attended Spring Hill College, a small Jesuit school in Mobile, Ala. “I went there for 18 reasons,” he later told the writer Mo Rocca. “It had a golf course on the campus.” McCarthy was such a promising golfer that he considered joining the PGA Tour. 

His interest in the writings of Thomas Merton led him to visit the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Ga., on his way home to New York after graduation from Spring Hill. Intending a short visit, he instead stayed for five years. A lay brother under temporary vows, he worked alongside the other monks and lived a mostly silent monastic life.

He left the monastery in 1965 and returned to New York, where he worked for United Press International (there’s a blast from the past!) as a sportswriter and wrote freelance articles for religious publications. One such article in the National Catholic Reporter attracted the interest of Sargent Shriver, then the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Truth be told, the article was mostly critical of Shriver, who nevertheless hired him as a speechwriter and brought him to Washington, D.C. The two became lifelong friends. 

“Once at work, I learned that I wasn’t the only one with a background in religion,” McCarthy wrote after Shriver’s death in 2011. “He was hiring so many former nuns and priests that OEO could have stood for Office of Ecclesiastical Outcasts.”

In 1969, the Washington Post hired McCarthy, who eventually began writing a syndicated column that continued for decades. Two years earlier, he had married Mavourneen Deegan, whom he had met through Shriver. “Colman’s wife, who went by Mav, was a nurse, a Scotch drinker, a meat-eater, a conservative,” wrote Bamberger. It made for quite the contrast with McCarthy, who was a vegan, didn’t drink and was an avowed pacifist and an outspoken critic of America’s economic, political and social establishments: “As a couple they were further proof that opposites can and do attract.”

McCarthy also began teaching in Washington-area schools in 1982, having created his own course on nonviolence. He eventually taught that course and others for decades at both high schools and universities, including the University of Maryland, American University, Georgetown University and local high schools. He had a reputation as a demanding teacher who nonetheless didn’t really give grades; he once brought a live turkey to class to talk about ethical eating; guest speakers included Joan Baez (😍), Nobel Prize nominees, paroled criminals and more. 

When American University dropped him as a guest professor in 1986, the New York Times (which described McCarthy as “something of a political arsonist”) reported that 18 members of Congress wrote to the university’s president in support of McCarthy.

In 1985, he founded the Center for Teaching Peace, where he also served as director. In his final column for the Post in 1996, he wrote:

What should be the moral purpose of writing if not to embrace ideals that can help fulfill the one possibility we all yearn for, the peaceable society? Peace is the result of love and if love were easy, we’d all be good at it.

Though McCarthy’s byline also regularly appeared in journals like the National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and Sojourners—and his name appeared often over the years in America in commentaries, analysis and reviews of his books, he only wrote for America once: a 1977 report on catastrophic floods in Appalachia and the government indifference that compounded the human suffering there. 

“The question now is whether it makes sense for the citizens to look on their homeland as anything but a national sacrifice area,” he wrote of the impoverished region that was a locus of strip-mining and other invasive coal extraction methods. “They can yearn for permanent and safe housing, and they can beg for protection against strip mining and floods, but nothing is likely to change until the feverish quest for coal is tempered by assertions from the powerful that the human needs and rights of the mountaineers come first.”

He was also the author or co-author of numerous books, including the aforementioned I’d Rather Teach Peace, Disturbers of the Peace: Profiles in Non-Adjustment, Teaching Peace, At Rest With The Animals and All of One Peace. (He also wrote a book about golf, and another about baseball.)

McCarthy died of complications from pneumonia in La Romana, a city in the Dominican Republic, where he had moved after his wife died in 2021. Among those quoted in his obituary in the New York Times was the aforementioned Ms. Baez, his friend of many years: “From his personal choices to political ones, he was a steady and relentless force for good. He never veered from the path of nonviolence.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “St. Paul Reflects,” by Daniel Luttrull. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.