J.P. McFadden (1930-1998)

The world lost and Heaven gained a great soul when Jim McFadden died, after a protracted struggle with cancer, on October 17. All grit and grumble on the surface, James Patrick McFadden was, beneath, as tender a man as I have ever known. After his Savior and his family, the most conspicuous object of his affections was unborn children, to whose loving defense he devoted three decades of selfless labor. His capacious soul was composed, in more or less equal parts, of martial courage, Franciscan humility, and irrepressible mirth, which he balanced in felicitous harmony. He began and ended his days on his knees, at Mass in the morning and at bedside in the evening. The space between was filled with good conversation, prodigious work, and the pleasurable duty of caring for his adored and adoring family. He was warm, witty, and unexcelled in friendship. There was no one who wore better of an evening with cigars and whiskey, no one you'd rather have had in your foxhole when the enemy came over the top.

The pro-life cause has had many heroes, but none wiser than Jim, whose focused political insight and editorial genius brought disciplined sophistication to a movement that in its infancy consisted largely of well-intended amateurs. He transformed that ubiquitously pedestrian editorial confection, the newsletter, into a work of art. Bach at his console in Leipzig found his match in McFadden sitting before the keyboard of his battered Royal upright. Jim's Lifeletter was for many years the marrow of pro-lifers throughout the country. In four pages of pungent observation and mordant wit, delivered every month in inimitable McFaddenesque staccato, Jim directed the order of battle, rallying loyalists and confusing the opposition. Filled with brilliant political analysis and tactical advice, Lifeletter became a force to be reckoned with by friend and foe alike. He added strategic weaponry to the pro-life arsenal when he founded the Human Life Review, the distinguished quarterly that for nearly 25 years has provided a continuing stream of intellectual enlightenment on the intersection of law, morals, and medicine. It has been, and remains, an indispensable compendium of wise and eloquent reflection, a veritable university-in-print.

For most men, such accomplishments would have been enough for a memorably worthy life. But the full flowering of Jim's genius appeared some twenty years ago with the launching of catholic eye, the newsletter of the National Committee of Catholic Laymen. Eye was, quite simply, Jim McFadden reembodied in print: at once gingery and philosophical, grave and hilarious, irascible and charitable, grumpy and hopeful, importunate and humble, but informed always by his devotion to the sacraments and his unshakable faith in the promise of redemption.

It was, on one level, a monthly encyclical to the faithful, teaching them about the depositum fidei and assuring them that it would endure despite the spirit of the age. On another level, it was a detailed Syllabus of Errors, that, with devastating accuracy and wit, called to task wayward clerics who had stayed too long and drunk too deeply at the Vatican II party. On yet a third, it it was Jim's personal lamentation for the passing of the old order within the Church and in the world at large. He could not forgive the mindless trashing of the ancient rituals or the ritual trashing of traditional doctrine by fatuous bishops and effete theologians. He celebrated the papacy of John Paul II as a providential gift to a demoralized Church, and prayed fervently that, through precept and example, that great man would inspire a new generation of Catholics to rediscover the truth that had fired Jim's soul and inspired all his works.

Jim's last years were difficult, and would have broken many another man. He began his mortal combat with cancer in 1993, and in the following year lost his beloved son, Robert, to the same dread disease. He was deprived of his ability to swallow and, eventually, of his ability to speak. He suffered the indecency of repeated hospitalizations, surgeries, and radiation-and, perhaps more painfully, the loss of the sociability he treasured and was so good at prompting in others. He endured it all, confident that his Creator had a special purpose in mind the mysteries of which would be revealed in the fullness of time. In the ordeal of his death no less than in the course of his life, Jim did not hesitate to put on Christ. He soldiered through his torment, praying that the transforming grace of the imitatio Christi would bring the peace and love that surpass all understanding. Jim would scoff at the notion, but what was said of Cardinal Newman could have been said of him too: "There is a saint in that man."

Michael M. Uhlmann is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. This obituary appeared in Crisis (December 1998) and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Winter 1999
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