Journalist Colman McCarthy died in the Dominican Republic on February 27, 2026. We already miss him He was erudite, outspoken and indefatigable.
Footnote: Once upon a time, I disagreed with a Colman McCarthy column; in which he jjoined with Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia in urging Congress to re-establish the dysfunctional, corporate-dominated Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), which was rightly de-funded by Congress..
Dysfunctional government agencies can be reformed or abolished, just as Thomas Jefferson believed. Thanks to two remarkable United States Department of Labor Administrative Law Judges, Chief Judge Nahum Litt and Judge Charles P. Rippey, we did it. ACUS ceased to exist from 1995 to 2010. I exposed ACUS's malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance in a January 1989 Common Cause Magazine article, "Business As Usual" in the "No Sacred Cows" section
Other than his full-throated defense of dysfunctional ACUS, I found that Colman McCarthy was a scholar, a gentleman, and a remarkably good and decent columnist.
From National Catholic Reporter:
Colman McCarthy, NCR columnist, author and peace activist, dies at 87
Colman McCarthy, Dec. 13, 2016, at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Md., where he teaches two morning classes five days a week on peace studies. (Rick Reinhard)
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Colman McCarthy, columnist, author, educator and peace activist, died Feb. 27 in the Dominican Republic, where he has lived with one of his sons since 2022. He was 87.
A member of the family said the cause of death was complications from pneumonia.
Colman, from a perch on the op-ed page of The Washington Post from 1969 to 1997, became, in the estimation of the Washingtonian Magazine, the "liberal conscience" of the paper. Alternately witty, iconoclastic, deeply principled and at times self-effacing, his writing covered politics, religion and even sports, always through the lens of social justice imperatives. From 1999 to 2021, he wrote regular columns for the National Catholic Reporter.
In a recent conversation, his son, James, recounted that what often gets lost in the attention to Colman's exhaustive career as a writer, teacher and peace advocate is his considerable athletic accomplishments. Colman was a scratch golfer who had a PGA tour card back in the 1950s. He detailed his association with some of the big names of the day in a 2014 NCR column. In that piece he recounts that he played as an amateur in the 1959 Mobile Open and "finished 10 strokes behind [Arnold] Palmer, managing to win low amateur."
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