DEATH OF A HERO

...It was a characteristic which seemed almost shocking, so absent had it become on the religious horizon...

...When allies adopted tactics that were questionable, Cogley said so...

...but Cogley, known to me only through his columns in Commonweal, I wasted to be tike...

...Nevertheless there was a confidence and a certainty and a comfortableness in his generalizations about the faith and the church which I can only envy...

...There may be valid reasons why many of us now feel we dwell almost entirely on that bridge without ever comfortably touching ground at either end...

...For me he was a hero, now a fallen one, someday a risen one...

...yes, the Catholic bishops do have a case in their opposition to American family planning programs overseas...

...the point was to get to the real point There is another aspect of those columns which doubtless did not strike me when I first read them but which leaps out at me now...

...The object, in fact, was often the opposite: to discourage a pretense to monolithic Catholicism, to recognize the special and complex reality of secular and political events against the tendency toward instant moralizing...

...In the very (Continued on page 319) Steinfell (Cont...

...Whether the topics were small or large, the columns were inevitably exercises in general ideas, general ideas brought forward, examined, locked together or unlocked, all in a fashion so easy and so scrupulous that it could only be the achievement of an intelligence to which this was second-nature...

...To write a column like Cogley's in Commonweal was one of them...

...He wanted to serve the whole truth, and he was always aware how difficult a task this is, how many temptations there are to cut corners...

...He acted as I had been told he would shyly, glancing down and stepping back as though to make plenty of room for whatever conversational leads I might wish to offer...

...There is much to be written about him mat others who knew him well will have to write...

...yes, there are legitimate questions about religion that a Catholic candidate for President, more than another candidate, might be asked...

...Sometime during high school I wrote a letter listing my lifetime ambitions...

...Cogley represented an effort to build a bridge to all that the "in-tegralist" mentality had refused to recognize in the modern world...

...His writings, I should recall, were not at all heavy or abstract but particular, personal, relaxed...

...act of becoming an Episcopalian John Cogley seemed like the last example of a passing and noble Catholicism...

...That is the naturalness, the unselfconscious-ness with which he always placed his subjects in the context of Christianity or Catholicism...

...He never wrote as though he possessed those realities, never as though he spoke for them in some authoritative way...

...I cannot write of him as a close friend would...

...still, clarity and consistency were terribly important...

...It is nonetheless precise...

...The New York Times obituary quoted Cogley as saying of his reasons for this change that "they were of such an old-fashioned doctrinal nature that it is hard to get them taken seriously in these days of ecumenical theology...

...The columns I vaguely recall had to do with the defining issues of liberal Catholicism in those years: intellectuals and the Church, the dangers of obsessive anti-Communism, the morality of war and nuclear deterrence, the relations between church and state above all, church and state, which was actually the point of departure for a wider analysis of the American experience of pluralism and its lesson for Catholicism...

...When the logic of an argument is compelling but inconvenient, it is admitted nonetheless...

...What was it, I was asking, that so attracted me in those short pieces, that conveyed so much more than a position on a passing controversy, that exhibited a cast of mind I hoped to assimilate...

...I think that another was to be President of the United States...

...but there was no doubt from which end of the bridge he was operating...

...Paging back reminded me of how many other things caught Cogley's attention the quiz show scandals, the conditions of the press, the texture of particular places from Spanish Harlem and Brooklyn Heights to Rome...

...When John Cogley announced, as quietly as he properly could, that he was transferring membership to the Episcopal Church, I was surprised...

...Those encounters were perfectly uneventful...

...The personal pronouns I, we, you are used familiarly but without false intimacy...

...I know the word sounds strange, rhetorical, at odds with the modest person to whom it is applied...

...That I do write a column in this journal must be at least partly his fault But it is not a column like his, as I sadly realized when I turned back to old volumes of the magazine...

...but the loss of the direct and explicit attitude I find in Cogley's columns is exactly that a loss...

...But if John Cogley was not my friend, he was something eke for me a hero...

...The point, it always seemed, was to pare away the diversions...

...Indeed, because this is a friend's prerogative, I hesitate to write about him at all...

...he once even regretted that columns could not have footnotes in which to note all one's inevitable qualifications and exceptions...

...I was also deeply moved, because it seemed so clear that his reasons, no doubt more complex than any but his closest associates could know, had so much to do with that respect for principles, that scrupulosity of thought which had drawn me to his columns...

...No posturing or glitter but simple sentences...

...As an adolescent I admired many people...