McInerny: Thomist, Thinker, Friend

One of the good guys, from the sound of it. A former student and friend of Ralph McInerny tells the story. Excerpts follow:

Ralph McInerny’s middle name was Matthew, but it might as well have been Magis, Latin for “more.” The beloved Notre Dame professor taught for more than 50 years, wrote more than 50 books in philosophy and other disciplines, penned more than a thousand essays, short stories, columns and poems, authored more than 90 fiction books, and directed more dissertations than anyone in the history of Notre Dame, 47 to be exact.

When I mentioned to my mother that his funeral included 28 priests and a military color guard playing taps because he was also a Marine, she responded, “Is there anything that man didn’t do?”

His academic achievements are well known — eight honorary doctorates, presidential and pontifical appointments, Gifford Lectures and teaching stints from Argentina to Oxford. His man was, of course, Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not only Thomas. The New York Times obituary noted that Ralph “wrote on the sixth century philosopher Boethius, the 12th-century Spanish Arabic scholar Averroes and later thinkers and theologians, including Cardinal Newman, Kierkegaard, Pascal and Descartes.”

The Los Angeles Times obituary focused on him as “the prolific author of approximately 100 novels. Beginning with Her Death of Cold in 1977, he wrote more than two dozen mysteries featuring Father Dowling, which led to the 1989–91 Father Dowling Mysteries TV series starring Tom Bosley."

Indeed, The Times of London was not the first place to note Ralph’s extraordinary productivity. “George Orwell, who famously, and wrongly, concluded that the Billy Bunter oeuvre was too vast to have been written by one man (Frank Richards), would have had a similar problem with the output of Ralph McInerny, the American Catholic scholar and writer of detective fiction.” But Ralph was much more than a prolific author.

Part of the “more” — unquantifiable but no less real — was how Ralph treated people and how they responded to him. Among his students, he commanded universal respect...