The Glamour of Good: Remembering Kate O’Beirne

W.B. Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things” – a posthumous love letter of sorts to some outsized figures who shaped the poet’s life – ends with wistful longing for “All the Olympians, a thing never known again.” With those eight words, the bard summons a haunting constant of our existence: the knowledge that some human lives are so colossal and rich that they impoverish the whole earth upon their leaving it.

Kate O’Beirne, who died this week and whose funeral was yesterday at the Arlington Diocese’s St. Thomas More Cathedral, was just such a visitor from the Pantheon. She was a massive one-woman media presence, variously, the Washington editor of National Review; a deputy assistant secretary in the Reagan administration; a daunting conservative presence on the CNN show “Capital Gang”; author of a popular column called “Bread and Circuses,” also for National Review; a vice-president of the Heritage Foundation; and president of National Review Institute.

And those were just some day jobs. She was married to James O’Beirne, an officer in the U.S. Army whose career likewise defies short summary; and mother of Philip O’Beirne and John O’Beirne, ditto. Nothing about her was common; everything about her was rare.

There was, for starters, her striking physical presence – the regal height, the lovely visage all but demanding portraiture, the effervescent fashion sense that made encounters with her into mini-adventures in elegance. Unforgettable though they were and are, though, these were mere outward and material symbols of what was immaterial and extraordinary within.

She was a wife and mother who was also a mentor to hundreds, and a sister to untold numbers, especially in the clergy. She was an unapologetic, happy daughter of Rome during years when apologies and unhappiness were thick on the cobblestones. Kate loved the Church, and the Church loved Kate. Her conviction of the truth of the faith tied her every bon mot to bedrock.

Irreverence in the service of reverence: as Chesterton could have explained, the paradox that was Kate’s work in the world was really no paradox at all.

As the multiplication of tributes since her death have illustrated, including this one at her former home, National Review. The lady could also be a scamp. She reveled in tweaking her many friends in religious life – as well as in life, period. And to great effect; Kate could make Cardinals laugh in church.

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